Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
I lick his hand to see if his boyish grin will make an appearance, forgiving me long enough for him to release me.
He doesn’t smile.
His body tenses and his lips tug into a frown. Something hardens between us. My eyes widen as crimson floods his cheeks.
“Fuck,” he snarls, pushing away from me as though I’m diseased.
I sit up on my elbows, amused by the way his penis makes his jeans bulge. Just wait until I tell Ronan about this.
“You got hard,” I say with a laugh. “What’s wrong with your penis?”
He winces, turning his back to me. “Shut up, Rae.”
“Why is it hard?” I demand, amused at his unusual behavior. “Is it broken?”
“I said be quiet!” His angrily spat out words echo in the forest.
“Does Dad know your penis is broken? Maybe he’ll take you into town to a penis doctor!” I crack up laughing, enjoying the way he shudders in horror. “Is it contagious?”
“Stop being a bitch.”
His words are a punch to the gut. Usually, he waits around to see my response whenever he says something mean, because he obviously enjoys taunting me. Not today. He storms through the thick brush away from me as though I’m the one carrying the broken penis disease.
“Come on, Ryder,” I call after him. “I was kidding. Don’t be a baby.”
He doesn’t respond. I sit up and turn the elk bone knife over in my hand. If he left his knife without any more fight, it means I won this battle. For some reason, I don’t feel like it was a fair fight, though. Like my teasing words had more of an impact than I realized.
Maybe his penis is broken.
What if he really is sick?
My stomach tightens. Once, Mom got sick with pneumonia when she was pregnant with Destiny. I thought she was going to die. Where we live, there aren’t any doctors. Luckily, both she and Destiny pulled through.
What if Ryder doesn’t?
He may annoy me every day, all day, but the thought of losing him forever makes my blood run cold in my veins. A ball of emotion forms in my throat. It takes a lot to make me cry. I especially never cry when it comes to Ryder. So why do I feel like I might burst into tears any second.
Ugh.
Screw Ryder. He’s probably fine and I’m worrying over nothing. Tomorrow he’ll be back to bothering me like usual. In the meantime, I’ll do what I always do when I need cheering up.
I’ll go see Ronan.
The gate to our three-acre homestead stands wide open, which means Ryder’s around here somewhere. I quickly scan our fenced-in land, pausing to admire our home. Everyone, over the years, has pitched in to make this place pretty spectacular.
Straight forward, the circular firepit is the focal point. Dad and Ryder spend a lot of time handcrafting the wood bench seating into two C shapes with the pit in the center. The details they put on the woodwork are intricate and impressive.
To the right, the massive equipment barn looms as the largest structure aside from the big house. Dad stores in it all the machinery he needs for building and keeping this place going. He also keeps the riding mower and extra gasoline there. The large garage bay is closed, which means no one’s using any of the machines today.
In front of the equipment barn is a small smokehouse where Dad smokes any fish or game we kill. Beside that is his workshop where he welds or builds furniture. Out in front of the workshop is a play area for the kids, including a treehouse that me, Ronan, and Ryder hung out in a lot of time up until they got their own cabins. Dad spends a lot of time in the workshop as the little kids love playing on the swing set or in the treehouse while he works.
At the far-right corner, there’s a goat house with a chicken coup to its left, both complete with their own pens, and a small man-made pond behind them. The ponds on our property have been here for as long as I remember. Uncle Atticus and Dad made them not long after they built the big house.
The big house runs from near the chickens all the way along the south fence to the orchard that sits on the west end of the homestead. Behind the house is a root cellar and kitchen greenhouse, the big playground for the kids, and several clotheslines where Mom can do laundry while keeping an eye on the littles.
Our orchard is one of the best places to disappear to when avoiding chores. You can sit under the shade of an apple tree and eat your belly full until you’re bursting.
On the northeast corner is the food jungle. Really, it’s just two large sections of grains with several thinner rows of small fruits and another section for all the vegetables. There are small ponds near both the orchard and the food jungle that allow us to easily water the vegetation.