Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 89093 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89093 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
“Bucket. I n-need a bucket,” I stammer out through the gap between my fingers. “Sick.”
One word and the stranger leaps to his feet, startling me with his large size. After swinging his head to the left, he drags it to the right. He’s not as prepared this time around, and his need to improvise sees the chips falling in my favor for a change.
As he races into the bathroom, I slip off the bed and hobble to the kitchen. “No,” I breathe out in frustration when my stretch for the knife comes up half an inch short. I reach with all my might, but my fingertips only brace the butt. “Come on…”
The vine curled around my wrists digs into my skin when I give it one last shot. “Yes!” I almost shout when my efforts pay off. I have the knife in my hand, but regretfully, I also have the angry eyes of a stranger glaring at me. “Stay back!” I warn when his eyes flick to the door where his gun is resting. “If you move for it, I’ll cut you up into little pieces.”
He smirks at me. Not a dainty little I’d-like-to-see-you-try smirk, but full-blown you’re- not-brave-enough-to-give-me-a-papercut smirk.
I’ll show him.
After strengthening my stance, I say without the slightest quiver to my words, “I just want to go home, back to my fiancé. You can’t keep me from him—”
He charges for me before all my false statement leaves my mouth and, just as quickly, I slice the knife across his chest. It skips across the hairy skin firm enough to mark, but the paper-thin cut barely slows him down.
With the bowl he fetched from the bathroom, he knocks the knife out of my hand before pushing me back with the same amount of aggression. I land on the bed with a thud, but I don’t go down without a fight. I kick out my leg so harshly, the bloody mess my headbutt caused his nose last night returns stronger than ever.
Blood gushes from his nose at the same time a roar rips from his mouth. It freezes me in an instant. However, not all my stiffness is in fear. The rumbles of his deep voice cluster in an area of my body much lower than my head, and it’s usually responsible for every stupid decision I make. It was the reason I was engaged to Cedric. He was handsome, and I thought he’d be a knockout in bed.
I learned otherwise remarkably fast, but since real-life men rarely stack up to their fictional counterparts, I tried not to hold it against him. Besides, five minutes of heat is better than the none I was getting the two years before we met.
After stepping out of the firing zone of my still wildly flinging legs, the stranger drags his hand under his nose. Even though I shouldn’t, I feel bad about the amount of blood that smears onto his calloused hand, but any chance of acting remorseful is lost when he snatches up the bundle of rope he didn’t use last night.
He loops it around my uninjured ankle, then flips me over so I’m on my stomach. When he pulls my unrestrained hand behind my back, my eyes pop out of my head. “You can’t hog-tie me! I’m not an animal.” He continues tying my hands and feet together like a word didn’t spill from my lips, forcing me to blurt out, “I need to use the bathroom.”
When he huffs at me, I snap out, “Huff all you like, but when I ruin the bedding, and you can’t get it dry-cleaned since we’re snowed in, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
I should have kept my mouth shut. The lack of trust in the stranger’s eyes exposes there’s no way he will let me use the bathroom alone, so instead of unearthing a way to free myself from a dangerous situation, I thrust myself headfirst into one.
“I don’t need to use the facilities. It’s fine…”
My reply is left dangling with the rope on the bedpost when the unnamed man uses the knife to cut me free, tugs me across the mattress by my good ankle, tosses me onto his shoulder like I don’t weigh a thing, then stomps us outside.
I don’t whack into him for the third time. Not only am I exhausted, but I’m also shocked to learn where he’s taking me. He is walking us down an icy patch of grass that looks like it was recently shoveled. It leads to a rectangular box in the far back corner of the cabin’s ‘house yard.’
“That isn’t what I think it is, is it?” I ask before plugging my nose to protect it from the stench. “You can’t have an outhouse. We’re not in Australia!”
The wooden box nestled between two massive trees looks like the ‘toilets’ my Uncle Kevin has dotted across his ten-thousand-hectare ranch near Dubbo, Australia. There’s no plumbed water on his cattle property, so the ranchers were forced to get inventive. They built over half a dozen long drop toilets on the drought-ravaged cattle station.