Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Not only had they taken the master bedroom—one would think that they would’ve left the master bedroom for the person whose brother had paid for the whole house—they’d tested out all of the rooms. Each of the upstairs bedrooms looked like they’d been slept in.
Or other things that I wasn’t really willing to think about.
After seeing the master and all of the others dirty, I’d taken all the sheets downstairs to wash. Luckily, the rental was freakin’ awesome and had detergent for me to use to do that with.
While the sheets were washing, I tackled the kitchen while listening to an audiobook that I’d intended to listen to tomorrow during my run.
About halfway through that audiobook was when I’d finished cleaning the entire house.
Artur took two bags of trash out for me, and he looked angry.
As in, angry enough that I was worried he’d go searching for Hazel’s boyfriend and break his ankles for having to sit there and watch me clean for the last couple of hours.
The last task of the night was putting sheets on the beds and trying to get enough sleep.
When I went toward my room, I gave Cutter a call, and didn’t lead on that anything was wrong.
I didn’t want him to feel bad, and sadly, he couldn’t always bail me out of terrible situations. He was a man with a business, and it’d been my decision to fly twenty-nine hours away to Glacier National Park where it was way harder for him to get to me.
After hanging up with Cutter, I fell into a fitful sleep.
The entire night I’d woken up with a feeling of impending doom.
I didn’t know if that feeling was because I’d kicked who I’d once considered my best friend out of a house we were supposed to be sharing, or the fact that I was about to run twenty-six miles on a trail that I knew would be excruciatingly hard on me—and not just because of the mileage.
By the end of tomorrow, I fully expected my entire self—body and soul—to be exhausted.
“You were made to do hard things,” I said to myself as I slipped into my trail shoes.
I sent a photo of myself to Cutter with the caption ‘fit check’ on it.
He probably wouldn’t care what I was wearing, but I wanted to calm myself down, and I knew Cutter would be able to do that for me.
His immediate response made me giggle.
Cutter:
That bra does wonderful things for your boobs.
Smiling, I put my contacts in, washed and brushed, then applied deodorant to every single inch of my body that had a crease to it.
I then checked out my boobs and realized that it did appear that I had some cleavage in the shirt that I was wearing with my Nike bra.
Turning around, I gave him a photo of the back, then hit send before heading downstairs.
I found Artur already up and eating a muffin.
“Where’d those come from?” I asked.
“Uber,” he answered. “Want one?”
I was already shaking my head.
“Normally, I’m all about muffins. But I’m not taking the chance to mess up my stomach before I’m about to run a trail marathon,” I admitted.
He shrugged but didn’t argue.
That was the thing about Artur.
He was a great bodyguard. Professional.
When he was with my brother and not on duty, he was a hoot. But when he was working it was like he slipped into this personality that was impenetrable.
Though, today, he was a very unhappy bodyguard.
Before we’d left, we had a discussion with Shasha, Dima, and Cutter about Artur’s ability to guard me during the race. In the end, we decided that though he’d be there, he wouldn’t be participating in the race and wouldn’t always have active eyes on me.
It was a risk, according to them, but it was one I was willing to make.
I wanted to finish this race.
I wanted to run it without having to worry about Artur, who’d assured me that he would be able to keep up.
And maybe he might have.
But I didn’t care.
This was something that I wanted to do by myself, and he was still slightly salty about it.
The drive took ten minutes, which was the whole point in renting the cabin that we did.
Thankfully, all we had to do was drive out of the cabin’s road, then onto the main road, cutting off hundreds and hundreds of cars because we had right of way.
We parked, I drank some more water, and we waited patiently for the race to start.
Sadly, where they had us walk to was the side of the road. It was cold, there was nowhere to sit, and even worse, they only had eight porta-potties.
It was awful.
We stood there for a solid hour while the rest of the race participants slowly started to trickle in.
Artur stood next to me, offering his body as a shield to the cutting wind that felt like it was ripping through me.