Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70004 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70004 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“You’re late.” I shrugged.
“Snow’s fuckin’ awful right now,” Gentry grumbled. “I’m hoping it gets bad enough overnight that people stay the fuck home.”
Funny enough, in his second lease on life, Gentry had decided to do the exact opposite of what most of us had done. He’d gone ahead and applied at the police department in Sawtooth. With his new identity, that would be the last place that anyone ever thought to look for him.
Courtland decided to go the trucker route and worked at the mill with me. In the winter months, he became the ice road trucker you saw on the TV doing those dangerous jobs. When that road wasn’t frozen over, he drove regular roads.
“Where are King, Creed, and Odin?” Weaver asked.
“Not coming,” I answered. “They said they were too busy with work.”
We met up like this once a month to get the lay of the land.
We hadn’t been friends in prison. Several of us had been at different prisons across the country and hadn’t met before we’d all ended up here.
The first time we’d been introduced was when Apollo chose this city as our meeting place and gave us all of our new life details.
I pretty much liked everyone except for Odin, though not because he was a bad person. He just didn’t care enough about anyone or anything to make any friends. Neither did he go out of his way to make any meetups, so I hadn’t had the chance to get to know him all that well.
“Understandable.” Court took a healthy swallow of the beer the bartender had just placed in front of him. “What do you think’s going to happen tonight?”
“I think it’s going to snow like a motherfucker and close all the roads,” I admitted. “Some of the guys that’ve been doing this for their entire lives swear that they can tell when it’s going to be a bad one. And every last one of them said that it was going to knock us on our ass.”
“Should’ve gotten groceries,” Court muttered.
“Too late now.” I laughed.
“You’re not lying.” He shook his head. “That’s why I was late. I tried to hit up a few of the grocery stores, but they were all closed. It’s only seven o’clock.”
One thing we’d found out about in this small-ass town was that everything closed down around six. The only thing that stayed open past that time was Hopps—because they lived within a couple hundred feet of their restaurant, and the bar we were currently in.
“Wonder why they all close down so early?” Gentry wondered. “Hell, even the crime seems to shut down.”
“No one out there wants to go involve themselves in a crime when it’s this cold outside.” Weaver chuckled.
Agreed.
It was fucking cold.
I was a Texas boy to my bones, and I only thought that I could handle any kind of weather.
That was before I’d come to Montana and experienced my first ever Montana winter.
Give me a hundred and ten degrees any day over this negative six bullshit.
“Any word from Apollo?” Weaver asked, changing the subject.
“Not much,” I said. “No news is good news.”
“May be cold as fuck out here, but at least I feel like I can breathe,” Gentry admitted.
“Whoa, check them out.”
I turned to “check them out” and found myself staring into baby blue eyes that had a chokehold on my every thought.
Mable
“So, I’m highly attracted to him.”
My best friend, Cordelia, otherwise known as Cody, stared at me with a look of expectation on her face.
“What’s his name?” I wondered.
We were at Hopps, out on the back deck under a blanket and heaters, nursing our chips and hot sauce while we waited for the rest of our food to be done.
She was on her fourth Pepsi, and I was on my fourth sweet tea.
Which was hilarious because two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have thought to ask for a sweet tea. Now I had the owner making sweet tea for everyone. I had it on good authority that one of those people that was happy with the addition of the sweet tea was none other than the man I couldn’t stop thinking about.
“It starts with a J, and rhymes with a spice.”
My mind blanked for a moment as I racked my brain and tried to come up with a name that would match those two descriptors.
“Jarlic?” I teased.
She scoffed.
“Uhhh,” I hesitated as I truly tried and failed to come up with a name. “Jepper?”
Cody put her hands over her face. “You’re not taking this seriously!”
“Oh, I got it!” I teased her. “Jallspice!”
Cody glared.
“Justard!”
“It’s Jacob,” she grumbled.
Jacob? Which spice was that?
Jacob.
Jacob!
“The guy that works at the bank? The one with the really soft hands?”
Cody crossed her arms over her chest and glared.
I looked away just in time to see a familiar old truck pull into the bar’s parking lot.
The man I couldn’t stop thinking about shrugged his worn Carhartt over his shoulders and zipped it closed.