Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 74875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
He started to chuckle. The chuckle made my toes curl. I felt those dark swirls of his laugh deep in my gut—a heat that made my womb clench with need.
“You want to know for real?” he teased.
I nodded.
This was a safe topic. One that seriously couldn’t go wrong, right?
Wrong.
But it didn’t start bad.
It started easy enough.
“Well, you get up at 0430 on your first day of boot camp…” he started. “Then you run six miles…maybe more. Depends on how your CO feels that day. Then follow that up with several hundred push-ups…and not those ones that girls do. Real ones. Ones that are perfect, or you’ll do a couple hundred more. Then, when you’re done with that, you do the same amount of jumping jacks, squats, shit like that.”
My brows rose at hearing all that.
“Then you get to eat. Get some shit done after lunch. Possibly run two more miles,” he continued. “Then you do a hike that can range from ten to twenty miles in full gear.”
“How much does your gear weigh?” I interrupted him.
He shrugged. “Eighty pounds or so.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He looked at me, saw the surprise on my face, then promptly laughed in it.
“Wish I was,” he said. “But that’s not even half of it. And that was every day of boot camp, no joking.”
I shook my head. There would be no way in hell I’d make it through that. Hell, I couldn’t even tell you the last time I’d run a mile, let alone six. Twice, at that.
“By the time your head hits the bed that first day, you’re out. And when you get up, still tired from the day before, there’s no way not to go to sleep that fast any more. You’re exhausted times two. It only gets easier from there,” he finished.
I laughed incredulously. “I tried to run a mile a few weeks ago when I first got the office set up. I got about a quarter of a lap around the track and stopped. I don’t think running is for me. Or the military.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Most women can’t hack it.”
I felt my back stiffen.
“You going to leave anytime soon?” he asked, not aware of what his comment has done to me.
I put the car into drive and slowly nosed my way into the intersection, and accelerated out of the South Side.
“Once we get back onto Main Street, I want you to go to the vet clinic on the right,” he said. “I’ll run him in there, and then we can be on our way.”
I didn’t reply.
My mind was elsewhere.
When I was twelve, my father told me that girls couldn’t play baseball because it was a man’s sport.
When I was thirteen, my father told me that I had to learn how to do ‘women things’ so I could make some man a good wife someday.
When I was fourteen, he told me that I needed to slim down because men didn’t like fat women.
When I was sixteen, my father told me to dress conservatively because girls that dressed like sluts were asking for men to treat them as such.
And that wasn’t even the half of it.
I could probably recite hundreds of edicts that my father had spouted off during a conversation we’d had, and none of them were good.
In fact, I would venture to say that all of them were bad, and that the majority of them were about how women were the inferior race.
“Here’s the turn,” Tate, the asshole, said.
I gritted my teeth and pulled into the parking lot, pulling up to the first spot that was nearest to the door.
“Be right back,” he said, pushing the door open and getting out.
I waited for him to get the dog, and walk into the building before I backed out of the parking spot and headed home.
Fuck him.
Doing this—making sure he was taken care of and out of my life—was for the best. I couldn’t live with another man that was exactly like the man that had made my younger years unbearable.
I just couldn’t.
Chapter 19
If only sarcasm burned calories.
-T-shirt
Tate
I was angry.
Very, very angry.
Today had been shit.
First learning about Ariya and her daughter. Then going into a situation that nearly had me getting killed. Then, I’d taken the dog to the vet and heard that it was likely he wouldn’t survive because not only was he malnourished, but he also had heartworms. It was so severe that if he’d been left there like he had been, he would’ve died in a matter of days.
After paying the vet and making sure they did what they could, I walked out and found that I’d been left.
Which wasn’t even that bad, to be honest. I’d been in the vet for an hour. I’d expected to find her in the waiting room, but she hadn’t been. Then, I’d decided that it was unfair to ask her to wait when she’d already taken me all the way over there.