Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 121764 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121764 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“Those Five-Star penthouse suites have totally ruined your sense of adventure.”
I stifled a laugh at the jest. She wasn’t wrong. It’d been a long time since I’d slept in a tent — mostly because when you had access to the finest hotels, it wasn’t usually an option you considered.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to build a fire before we don’t have any light left.”
“Because it’s so cold,” I deadpanned as she swept out of the tent and past me.
“Because we need a fire to tell scary ghost stories and make s’mores,” she said, as if that was the most obvious choice of activities for the night, and I was a dumb prick for not realizing it.
When I didn’t budge, she grabbed me by the wrist and tugged with all her might — which wouldn’t have moved me even an inch if I hadn’t let her.
“Come on,” she grunted, tugging me toward the wooded area that surrounded our campsite. “It’ll be fun. I promise.”
We separated then — me in search of larger logs of wood while Grace focused on gathering smaller brush we could use for kindling. She promptly elbowed me out of the way when I tried to take over starting the fire, pointing the lighter at me and warning that she was an independent woman who could do it herself.
And she did.
I helped with setting up our campsite and gathering that firewood, but I had zero doubts that she could have done it all on her own if I wasn’t there. Still, I didn’t like the thought of it — her being alone in this situation. A tent was about the least secure shelter in the fucking world, and I didn’t care if there was a camper’s code and everyone looked out for one another.
All it took was one selfish, sick bastard to put her life at risk.
I laughed at myself, shaking my head and that thought from it. I was not her fucking father. She was about to travel the world like this, and I was the last person who was going to be able to stop her.
But fuck if I couldn’t halt the burning need to protect her while she did it.
“What are you laughing at?” Grace asked, watching where I was carefully rotating a marshmallow on one of the sticks she’d bought from REI. We’d eaten hot dogs for dinner — which I couldn’t recall having since I was a kid.
I looked around us in lieu of answering, taking in the canopy of trees above us and the faint stars I could make out through the leaves. It wasn’t quiet, but it was an interesting change from what I was used to. Instead of traffic and laughter and music as the soundtrack like it was in Tampa, it was the crackling of the fire, the occasional hoot from an owl, the wind rustling the leaves.
“Fine, keep your funny jokes to yourself,” Grace said, and then she pierced a marshmallow of her own and plopped it right into the middle of the fire. It caught in a second, burning like mad as she pulled it out and watched it. She waited until the whole marshmallow was a black, crispy thing before blowing out the flame.
I blinked at it, then at her. “You’re a monster.”
“No, I’m a genius,” she argued. “This is the only way to roast a mallow.”
“Hard disagree. Look at mine,” I said, nodding to where I was slowly rotating it just above the tips of the fire like it was a rotisserie chicken. “This thing is going to be perfectly browned.”
Grace made a face that said that didn’t impress her, and then she sandwiched her marshmallow and a piece of dark chocolate between two graham crackers and took the biggest bite known to man, making the marshmallow ooze out over her hands and stick to her lips.
She licked those lips in an attempt to get them clean, but all it did was draw my gaze to them, and I felt that spark of possession light between my ribs again.
I tore my eyes away and focused on the fire.
“I take it you never went camping as a kid?” Grace asked.
“What makes you think that?”
“Call it a hunch,” she said on a laugh.
I shifted, not chancing looking at her again with that sticky white sweetness just begging to be licked off her.
“I did a few times in high school,” I said. “Some friends and I would head out to Banff, spend the weekend there. Of course, we usually slept in our cars and drank beer more than we ate anything. But as a kid?” I sniffed. “No.”
“Surprising, given where you lived.”
“Camping isn’t really easy for someone in a wheelchair,” I said. “And the last thing Mom or I wanted was a situation that irritated Dad. I’m sure we went when I was younger, before the accident… I just don’t really remember.”