Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 72822 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72822 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Where did I know him from?
Before I could so much as ask him why he was at my back door and where I knew him from, he reared forward. His arms went around my waist, and suddenly I was no longer alone in my house.
I opened my mouth to scream, but he was there, his hand over my face, shushing me. “Stop.”
I froze.
Terror was filling my veins, but a shiver of something else rushed through me, too.
This man, he was hot.
Let’s just get that out in the open.
However, hot or not, he was in my house, uninvited. I didn’t know him, and I wasn’t fucking stupid.
There wasn’t going to be any misconstrued feelings from me. No, sir. I was well and truly freakin’ the fuck out.
“Don’t scream.”
I nodded because who the hell wouldn’t agree when a big man, one who was over six-foot tall—and I say that number because my grandfather had been that size and I didn’t have to strain my neck to look up at him like I had to do with this man—and he was staring me straight in the eye. He didn’t have to say what he would do if I did scream, which I wouldn’t.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he rasped, letting go of my face, as well as me entirely.
I blinked, unsure what to do.
Did I ask him what he was doing there? Did I tell him that I wanted him to leave? Though, that one would be stupid to ask, because I damn well knew he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t be there if he didn’t have some sort of agenda.
“Call Drake and tell him you won’t be meeting him for lunch like you’d planned. You’re not feeling well.”
I blinked, opened my mouth to reply and tell him that there wouldn’t be lunch with him ever, but he shook his head. “Trust me.”
I laughed harshly at that. “I have much more reason to trust Drake than I do you. You’ve forced yourself into my home. There is no trusting you, moron.”
The man’s eye twitched.
“You got a computer?”
I blinked, then nodded, “If I show you where it’s at, you’ll take it and leave?”
He rolled his eyes as if I’d just asked him the stupidest question on earth.
“No, I’m gonna show you what your boyfriend Drake does.”
Brows furrowing, I watched as he walked to it, flipped it open, and glared at the background photo.
Yeah, I wasn’t really all that great looking in that one. It was the day that Marianne had come home. Marianne, who’d been kidnapped straight out of her home.
Her long hair was wispy, flying around her face like a freakin’ hair commercial. Her eyes were wide and smiling, and her lips were plump and pink.
She was beautiful…and then there was me.
Me? Well, I wasn’t much to look at. I was average, not tall but not short, either. Around five-foot-five or so. I had long brown hair—well, at one point in time I did. Now it fell to just barely below my chin now that it’d started growing back after my chemo and radiation treatments. I had muddy brown eyes the color of dirt, freckles all over my face that weren’t the kind that were considered ‘cute’ but were instead what I’d call ‘too much.’ I used to have a healthy-looking, somewhat muscular figure. Not fat, but not skinny, either. Then I got cancer, went through chemo, hadn’t able to keep a damn thing down for months and lost way too much weight.
I’d just started putting that weight back on when I got sick again and started having shortness of breath—which had prompted my visit to the emergency room. The ER had run some tests, and I now had a mammogram scheduled in two days thanks to my left breast being swollen and red.
I’d thought it was just the flu.
I should’ve known it wasn’t.
My life wasn’t all that great.
It’d been hard from the day I was born up until now.
My mom left me with my grandparents the day I was born. I never knew who my father was. When I was seven, I was run over by a car. When I was twelve, I tried to run away, but instead of actually running away, I instead managed to get myself stuck in a storm drain, nearly drowning when a torrential downpour began. At the age of sixteen, I got pregnant and almost died from an ectopic pregnancy, and in the process, I, of course, lost the baby. At nineteen, I lost my grandmother. At twenty-four, two days before my nursing graduation, my grandfather died.
Then, at twenty-eight, I’d found out that I had stage four gall bladder cancer.
Just when I thought I had it beaten, I found out that I now had breast cancer. Oh, and let’s not forget about the psycho standing in my room, doing something with my computer.