Total pages in book: 133
Estimated words: 124341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
Now infection was their worry. But Bill had brought her antibiotics, and she’d monitor his vitals for any sign that infection was setting in.
Autumn moved away from the fire, going to Sam and checking his pulse. Stronger. Better. She put her hand on his forehead. It was warm but not overly so, and his breathing was even and steady. She’d wait an hour and then give him another dose of pain meds to keep him sleeping. It was best for him. Sleep healed.
She positioned her chair so that she could lay her head against the wall and also watch him. She still couldn’t believe he was there, right in front of her. Part of her felt as if she’d fallen down a rabbit hole. It had been just that morning that she’d woken and showered and headed to New York City, yet it felt like a lifetime ago. It was, something inside whispered. That was a different lifetime. This is a new one. Don’t you feel it? The intangible divider that separated that Autumn from this one?
Yes, she did. The same way she’d felt when she’d been declared healed and been driven away from the hospital toward a life she couldn’t picture nor prepare for. Maybe all lives were separated into sections, the crossing of some lines jolting, others barely a blip on the radar, each only fully discernible later, when the bigger picture could be seen, when questions became answers, when turmoil became clarity.
The last rays of sunlight wavered, mixing with the coming night, casting a milky glow on his face. “Sam,” she murmured, still disbelieving that she knew his name after all this time, all these years. The sun shifted, brightening, fighting to stay for just a moment longer. Sam. She’d only ever seen him in moonlight. I made a boy of moonlight. Those long-ago words wove through her mind. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he was a strange combination of both the sun and the moon. Dark and light. Reality and fantasy. She’d thought him a dream once, only he was very real. Despite her fear and the precarious situation at hand, a wash of something akin to joy trickled through her. Effervescent. Glittery. He’s here, right within my reach. How? How?
Her eyes moved over his features. He was as she remembered: strangely beautiful. Under the filtered sunlight, she could see that his unusual hair was a thousand different shades of white, pale yellow, and a bare scattering of gold. She reached over and felt it under her fingertips. Coarse and silken, an odd contrast, just like the silvery shade in relation to his skin tone. She’d never seen anything like it. Like him.
His skin was bronze and smooth, except for the scars on his temples, another one traveling from his ear to his chin, and several marring his throat. Then there was the one she’d remembered that went from his neck to his navel and several more on his abdomen. His legs were littered with scars as well, matching ones on his knees and thighs. She frowned, wondering why he’d been operated on again and again. Someone—or many someones—had taken a knife to him so many times. And they’d replaced whole parts of him. She’d gotten a glimpse of it when she’d been digging for those embedded bullets. It hurt her to know he’d felt so much pain. That he’d had to heal, over and over and over. Yet he had. And she prayed that he would again.
He was obviously strong. Mighty was probably a better word.
His jaw was square, but his cheeks were thin, hollows beneath his bones, and though his frame was large and muscular, his ribs could be seen easily above his bandages. It appeared he hadn’t been eating much recently.
Where have you been?
She kept watching him, cataloguing his features, committing him to memory in a way that felt almost desperate, a secret fear that her time was limited, her fight to hold on to him as hopeless as that of the waning light.
His brow was heavy, but his lips. Ah, his lips were full and lush, the only softness to his otherwise inordinately masculine face, even if they were set in what appeared to be a perpetual frown. Broody. Suspicious. Something about it made tenderness rise inside like a wave. Something about those lips was a challenge to Autumn. Make me smile, they said. I dare you to try.
At that moment, she made it her goal. How beautiful those lips would be curved in joy.
His eyelashes were long, in the darker shade of gold randomly flecked through his hair. And she could see the same pale speckles under his dusky skin. Not only unusual but unnatural. Almost fantastical. But what does that mean exactly? In a way, it was as though he glowed from the inside.