Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 75240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 376(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 376(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Then I’d met Angie and had watched her like a hawk. Begged her to go out with me, and was shot down a million and one times.
After each subsequent refusal on Angie’s part, I realized that maybe finding a woman wasn’t in the cards for me.
Maybe I was meant to be alone.
Chapter 2
In alcohol’s defense, I’ve done some dumb shit completely sober, too.
-Angie’s secret thoughts
Angie
“Are you all right?” I asked the woman who was my newest patient.
I was a patient care tech at the one and only hospital in Kilgore, and had been for going on two years now. I was nearly twenty-three years old, and couldn’t make my decision about what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I worked for my brother as an office assistant at his automotive shop, and I also worked for one of my good friends as her assistant—or had before she’d started working more with her husband, PD.
Now, I just focused on the other two jobs and helped July when she needed it, which, sadly, wasn’t nearly as often as I would have liked.
I missed her.
Not that I would tell her that.
I didn’t share my feelings. Not with anyone. Not even with my brother or sister.
I’d been taught at a young age that sharing feelings led to emotions, and emotions were unstable.
“Yes, Dear,” the older lady said. “I was just trying to get comfortable. My grandson will be here any minute, and he’s going to have a cow if I look like crap.”
I tried to hold my tongue, really, I did, but a smile overtook my face.
“Nothing you do is going to hide the fact that you had a stroke,” I told her. “Your face droops all on one side and, likely, you’ll have permanent paralysis on your left side.”
She grimaced, and my belly jolted at seeing only one half of her face show the emotion.
“I know,” she said. “I should’ve called the ambulance.”
She should have.
Instead, she’d driven.
Fucking driven while she was having a stroke!
I nodded my head. “If it ever happens again, you need to.”
She sighed. “I get nauseous in the back of the ambulance. Then I throw up. It’s so embarrassing,” she hesitated. “The last time I was in one, I threw up all over my grandson’s boss!”
My eyes lit with humor. “That’s too bad. Although, they’re used to stuff like that.”
She huffed out a laugh.
“I know.” She lifted her mirror—a real handheld one that was sterling silver on the back and looked fit for any princess—and looked at her face again. “He’s going to have a conniption.”
Pounding boots outside in the hallway had me turning just in time to see a blur of navy blue come darting into the room, and then stop once he reached the foot of the bed.
“Grams!” the blur cried. “Oh, dammit.”
Ruth, aka Grams, narrowed her one good eye at her grandson.
“Bowen Race Tannenbaum,” she pointed her finger at him. “Language!”
This was her grandson? My heart started to flutter at seeing Mr. Bowen Race Tannenbaum.
Bowe’s hair was a brown so dark it looked black in certain light, and cut so close to his scalp that it made me wonder if he shaved it off every morning. I’d never seen his hair any longer than it was right then.
Today, instead of on his head, his KFD hat was in his hands as he nervously rolled the bill between them as he looked at his grandmother with concern.
He was wearing his usual firefighter uniform of blue tactical pants with pockets up and down the side. There was a thick white strip that likely was reflective down each side as well, skipping over the huge ass pockets that had the tools of his trade filling them.
His shirt was an extremely tight navy blue Kilgore Fire Department t-shirt with KFD on the breast pocket. That t-shirt was stretched tautly over his impressive chest and loose over his belly, which I knew for a fact hid an impressive abdomen.
It wasn’t an eight pack, but it was pretty darn close.
And oh, God. The chest hair on him was delicious. I’d seen Bowe without his shirt while he was working on his house flips. I wasn’t normally one to go for a hairy guy, but Bowe wasn’t so much hairy as he was manly. He had hair where he was supposed to have hair. On his chest, and a thin trail of hair that ran in a straight line down his belly.
“You had a stroke?” he asked, raising one hand to his face and rubbing his fingers down them as he tried to wipe away whatever horror he saw in front of his eyes.
His chiseled cheekbones and dark brown eyes looked absolutely devastated.
“What happened?” he asked.
The squawk of his radio had him absentmindedly reaching up to turn the radio off at his shoulder before looking at his grandmother with an impatient look.