Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 119158 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 596(@200wpm)___ 477(@250wpm)___ 397(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119158 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 596(@200wpm)___ 477(@250wpm)___ 397(@300wpm)
What the fuck!
But…pain…pain meant I was still alive, right?
I didn’t know the ins and outs of dying. Honestly, I’d always thought death was pretty final, and there would be no more pain. Yet, right now, for being a corpse, I was feeling a fucking lot of it.
The last thing I remembered was the SUV roaring at me as though it meant to crush me against the stone railing of the bridge.
And I’d gone over.
Falling…into the water.
But I wasn’t dead as far as I could tell.
I wasn’t even wet.
“Are you okay?”
A firm but gentle voice had my eyes snapping open to find a ridiculously handsome man kneeling over me, his enormous green eyes peering into mine as if he were trying to see something written on my soul.
“Who? What? I—” I stammered, which only sent his sharply angled eyebrows shooting toward his lush blond hair. After blinking away the tears to clear my vision, I stared at the stranger. God, he was fucking gorgeous. Was he even real? Who had high, sharp cheekbones like that? And that mouth. Only supermodels possessed such full lips tilted into an adorable, bemused smile.
My brain wasn’t operating at full capacity yet. Nothing was making sense. I needed to be logical about things. Was I okay?
“No, my face hurts.” But even as I spoke, the pain in my nose and head were already fading. Why was this stranger at my side? Unless… “Did you hit me? Is that why my nose hurts? Did you fucking punch me?”
With his deep chuckle, the man scattered the few scraps of thought I’d gathered into a pile.
This was all wrong.
Hello, world. Someone needs to check the script. Women. Hetero. I dug women. Particularly the short, spunky ones who liked to read.
The point was, I was not gay. Not into guys. I should not have had my stomach flipping like a pancake because some strange man was laughing at me.
“No, I didn’t hit you,” the stranger stated. He tipped his pointed chin up. “You took one look at me and ran into that tree.”
“What?” I squawked.
Lovely. I was the king of first impressions. If I gave up writing, I was going to give seminars on how to make a memorable first impression, because this was going swimmingly.
“Mn. You walked right into that tree, turned, and fell,” my new “friend” explained, the last tendrils of his smile disappearing. “I came over to make sure you hadn’t killed yourself.”
“No, not dead yet,” I muttered. With extreme care, I inspected my nose with my fingertips. It was still tender as hell, but it didn’t feel broken. There didn’t even seem to be any blood gushing out, as I would have expected. Maybe I’d only knocked myself silly. I lowered my hands and turned my attention to the man. “Does it look broken to you?”
He extended a long, pale finger and slid it along the bridge of my nose, sending sparks and tingles through every nerve ending in my body. “Looks perfect to me.”
That was enough nonsense. I planted both hands on the ground, shoved into an upright position, and wished I hadn’t. My head swam, but it was nothing compared to the confusion and panic threatening to swamp me.
Where the fuck was I?
Trees…as far as the eye could see.
Trees everywhere.
No roads. No buildings. Not even a single freaking car. Definitely no sign of the car that had tried to run me down or the bridge I thought I’d fallen off.
How did I get into the middle of a forest when I was supposed to be drowning?
There was even a saddled horse nosing its way through a patch of green grass a short distance away.
“Where am I?” Those three words slipped past my trembling lips, sounding like the last utterance of a ghost. “How did I get here?” My eyes jerked up to the man, who was now standing beside me. For the first time, I took in his appearance.
Oh God. The people at the Renaissance festival couldn’t achieve this level of authenticity.
My companion wore a pair of dark-green pants that were almost molded to his powerful legs only to end in black, knee-high leather boots. His tunic was a deep red, like the color of maple leaves in the fall, with exquisite gold stitching along the hem. A long cloak the same shade of green as his pants was draped across his shoulders and held in place by a gold pin in the shape of a flower.
His eyes narrowed on me in silent question, the man seemed to weigh my strange behavior. Not that I could blame him. He’d already said I’d taken one look at him and run into a tree. Now I was claiming to not know how I’d ended up in the middle of a forest. If I were him, I’d be backing away.