Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 125936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125936 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
“Oh, sorry. I still haven’t quite left military life behind. Luthor Hughes was a sergeant first class,” she explained. “He worked with my mom in intelligence.”
Hale snorted. “Then it’s definitely not the same guy. I can’t imagine this guy being in the military. Nice enough, but do not get him talking about aliens.”
“Aliens?”
“Yeah, like little green men, although he will tell you that is a myth put out by the aliens themselves,” he explained as he located the right screws. “The green part. According to him they’re more gray.”
“Huh. Well, I guess Hughes is a pretty common name,” she allowed. “Maybe this was all a big bust.”
That was a good place to leave it. He would be done in ten minutes flat and he would be on his way and she on hers. “Where did you come from?”
Who the fuck was this chatty guy?
“North Carolina. I’ve lived there since I was a kid,” she admitted. “My mom was in the Army and when the time came, I went in, too. So I’ve kind of lived a lot of places, but I always came back to Jacksonville, North Carolina.”
“You’re a soldier? I thought the haircut was from breast cancer.” Fuck him. Yep. He was just being Hale, and Hale was an idiot who couldn’t help what came out of his mouth, and he didn’t have Van to smooth things over. He faced her, and his gut tightened because her eyes had gone wide and there was a flush to her skin. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I noticed the meds. My aunt took them for years.”
“The hormone blocker.” She nodded. “Yeah, I started on them after my radiation course was over. That was after the chemo, which was after the surgery. The last year of my life has pretty much been all about cancer. Is your aunt okay?”
“She died when I was fourteen,” he admitted. “Despite all the meds, it had metastasized to her bones by the time they found it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, her gaze softening. “I’ve been told I’m lucky. I had an aggressive cancer but they caught it early. They threw everything they could at it and now we hope it doesn’t come back. As for the hair, I did lose it via chemo. It used to be super straight. It’s coming back curly.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “Chemo curls. Same thing happened to my aunt. She actually loved it.”
She reached up and touched the dark curls. “I’m getting used to it. My name is Elisa, by the way.”
“Hale,” he replied and remembered his manners—which were so easy for him to forget. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“So how long have you and your partner been together?” She seemed to relax all of the sudden, the sadness he’d seen replaced with ease. “Can I help you with that?”
It would be easier with another set of hands. The showerhead was big and bulky. “Can you hold this on while I screw it back in?”
Her lips curled up. “Sure.”
“And we’ve been together since we were kids,” he said, enjoying how comfortable he felt being around her. Something in the way she held herself made him relax, made him want to pay attention to her instead of the work he was doing. “I met him when we were eighteen. I’d recently aged out of foster care and I was living in a camper with four other kids who’d gotten the boot.”
“You lived in a camper?”
“Yeah, but not one that was attached to anything.” He started on the first screw and realized he would be done in five minutes flat and he didn’t want to be. “We rented a campsite but the one car we had among us would never have actually moved that sucker. It was nothing more than a place to sleep. Anyway, I met him when his family was coming through. They stayed at the campsite a couple of weeks because his dad was doing some seasonal work and the company paid for the site. He worked, too. He’d been saving money, and we got to be friends. When the job wound up, between the two of us we had enough for a used truck, and we were kind of nomads for a long time.”
“That’s funny because when you think about it, being military is kind of nomadic in a way,” she mused. “I say I’ve always lived in North Carolina, but that was just a base even when I was young. The house had been in my family for over fifty years, but my mom would rent it out when she was on assignment, and we went with her. My sister and I, that is. Just the three of us. I’ve been all over the world and yet I don’t feel like I saw much of it. I was either in school and my mom was working too hard to take us anywhere, or I was working and I was too serious to have any fun.”