Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 76647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
There was plenty of wood stacked inside next to the fireplace, but it couldn’t hurt to cut some more. Zeus explored nearby while I split logs. It was a skill I’d learned as a boy. We’d spent a few weeks every summer at a family home up in the woods.
It felt good to stretch my muscles. I worked out every day in the cabin—we all did—but it wasn’t the same as being out of doors, feeling the fresh air as I pulled it deep into my lungs. It was where I did my best thinking, but right now, I was focused on the wrong thing.
Sierra.
She didn’t make sense, and that gnawed at me. While Tristan was Mr. Business, I was the ideas man in our venture, and usually the main problem solver. While Sierra wasn’t exactly a problem—at the moment—she was a mystery that needed solving.
The first question was what the hell she was doing up here in the first place. These cabins weren’t cheap, not by a long shot. What kind of young woman, especially one who claimed to be a writer, had that kind of cash? Most writers I knew didn’t make very much.
Plus, she was young. Really young. She told Drew she was twenty-three, but she looked barely out of her teens. I’d half suspected she was a runaway who’d happened onto the cabin by accident, except that Winston had mentioned her, so she had to be a paying guest.
Still, she didn’t seem like the type to spend so much time alone in a place like this. Though maybe it made a certain kind of sense. She was one of the shyest women I’d ever met. Well, except for her one-eighty when she thanked me for the laptop. It was like she’d completely changed her persona.
I slammed the axe down extra hard and the log split, the pieces shooting out in different directions. Probably not the smartest way to treat our only axe. But I was frustrated.
I wasn’t up here to think about women. This was our time to finalize the plan we’d been working toward for years. Wondering about Sierra was a waste of time—something that had always bothered me.
Tristan was in this endeavor for the environment. He was right, too. Building shoddy housing with cheap-ass materials that flooded people’s lungs with toxic chemicals and ended up in a landfill decades later was horrible for our planet.
But it was also inefficient. Why build if you’re just going to have to build again later? Inefficiency was laziness personified, and I hated it.
That was one of the reasons I’d gotten some work done after lunch when Drew was fawning all over Sierra, providing her with toiletries and clothes and whatever he could think of. It was kind, of course. Drew was kind—he was sort of the human version of my dog. Far too excitable at times, but overall endearing.
Like Tristan, he didn’t seem to question Sierra’s presence up here on the mountain. It was obvious he thought she was pretty, but he didn’t view her as a mystery, even though the first clue was right there, literally in front of his face.
Because Sierra wasn’t just pretty. She wasn’t just beautiful. She was fucking stunning. The kind of woman who could make a fortune as a model. With no makeup on, her hair in a haphazard ponytail, and Drew’s oversized clothes on her, she was one of the most perfect women I’d ever seen, and that was saying a lot.
Back home, I had no shortage of female company. Redheads, blondes, brunettes… all were beautiful, and Sierra blew them all away. What the fuck was a goddess like her doing out in the middle of nowhere?
It just didn’t add up, and it was going to bother me until I figured out what was going on. Our time up here was too important to waste on distractions—even one as tempting as Sierra.
9
SIERRA
After days of working on my screenplay in total isolation at my cabin, it felt weird to be working side by side with Drew and Tristan at the long table under the skylight. They were both quietly typing on their laptops, but I couldn’t tune them out entirely. The sound of their large hands on the keyboard, the way their clothes rustled when they moved… hell, even their breathing tugged at my attention. I was used to total silence, and there was no way I was going to get that here.
Still, at least the men seemed to take their work seriously. At lunch, I’d seen all the beer in the fridge and half wondered if they’d come up here just to drink and party. But Tristan and Drew seemed focused—far more so than I was, at the moment. And Carter had excused himself fifteen minutes ago to make a call upstairs. I still didn’t know what they were working on, but they seemed to take it seriously.