Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
“Damn,” I grumbled, kicking the spark off my shoe with a flip of my foot.
The damage was left behind, though.
“Bummer,” I said as I stared at the shoelace. “I just got these laces.”
And I had.
The shoes had come with boring black laces. But, since I liked pops of color with my black wardrobe, I purchased some neon yellow ones online to switch them out.
When I looked up at him again, it was to see him with his book folded closed, and his eyes completely and solely focused on me.
It was a completely unnerving feeling.
As in, it made the butterflies in my stomach explode with surprise and excitement.
“You’re an odd duck,” he said as he tucked his book underneath his arm and stood up.
My eyes, already eye level with the same piece of his body that I’d tried overly hard not to stare at earlier, came right to the same place again.
The way he’d been sitting had hiked his jeans up in such a way that it left very little to the imagination on what the man had packing.
And, let’s just say, it was a lot.
He reached for that special place my eyes couldn’t peel away from and did a slight jumping shimmy, pulling the fabric down out of the area and smoothing it to where you couldn’t see it as well.
I licked my lips and tried to go back to my book.
The only problem was, the man at my side had different ideas.
“You want to come inside?” he asked.
Inside?
There was an inside?
I looked around, wondering if he was nuts, or if it was just me who hadn’t seen anything when we’d arrived.
“Umm,” I said, taking a second and third glance. “Where is ‘inside?’”
He chuckled and gestured toward more woods.
“There’s a building past all of those trees,” he answered.
I hesitated, wanting to go inside because, hello, warmth. But also not wanting to follow some stranger I didn’t know into the woods. Because that was how girls became statistics.
“Umm,” I hesitated again.
“I’m not a serial killer,” he said, likely reading my very obvious thoughts. “I own the power company in town. Let’s just say, if you want to, you can look up ‘Ally Electric’ and you’ll know me and everything there is to know about me in about two milliseconds.”
Shock tore through me.
Ally Electric serviced the entire lower half of Texas and the majority of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
“Jesus,” I said as I stood up. “You must be rich as fuck.”
He snorted. “Not as rich as you would think. I just recently went through a divorce, and my riches are about half, if not a quarter, of what they used to be.”
I grimaced. “Bummer.”
“Bummer indeed,” he agreed. “Needless to say, I truly hate going to work every day and having the chance of possibly encountering my ex-wife.”
I could imagine that would suck quite a bit.
“Why’d y’all divorce?” I asked curiously. “You had to be together a long time to get that kind of business off the ground.”
He mumbled something under his breath, and I followed closely behind him so as not to lose him in the darkness.
And, sure enough, there was a building past the trees.
“This would’ve been nice to know about an hour ago,” I grumbled.
He snorted. “To answer your question, I got a divorce because my ex-wife is a psycho. I’d known it for a while, but when you have a business like we did together, it’s hard to separate it out unless you really, really want to. And trust me, by the end of our twelve-year marriage, I really, really wanted to.”
“Define psycho,” I suggested as we made it up the porch steps and started walking inside.
There were more people inside, but the majority of these people were hanging out on the couches and drinking beer in a relaxed state. A state that the people outside didn’t have because they were ‘partying’ and not ‘hanging out.’
“Psycho is she tried to cut my hair off with garden shears one night because she thought that I was cheating on her,” he answered as he walked into the kitchen and moved to the stove.
I stopped just inside the kitchen, leaned my hip up against the countertop that looked to have seen better days, and waited for him to say more.
He did.
“She also caught me napping at work one day and tried to get me fired.” He chuckled. “That didn’t work out so well since I was half owner. She tried to go to the board. That board laughed in her face, and she only got more and more mad.”
“She wanted you fired from your own place of employment?” I wondered curiously. “Like, employment that you co-owned?”
He shrugged. “By that point, we were already going through a pretty nasty divorce. She was grasping at straws because she didn’t want to work with me the rest of her life. Which was what her lawyer, my lawyer, and our business attorney was suggesting so we didn’t disrupt a whole shit ton of stuff.”