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- Herausgeber: December Drake
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
When Willow breaks into a stranger’s remote, mountain home, she’s only hoping for a temporary shelter. To steal a bite of food and tend her wounds, as she hides from those who want her dead. If it goes her way, she’ll be back out the door before the house’s owner ever knew she was there.
Not only does the gruff, intimidating owner find her, but Owen insists that she stays, until she’s healed up, and safe. Determined to earn her keep, Willow ensures that Owen has a hot, homemade dinner each night. But soon, food isn’t all that’s steaming between them, as he tastes her cooking every day. And it doesn’t take long for his heat to boil over, and for him to claim Willow as his, forever.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Copyright © 2024 December Drake
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Claimed & Bred in the Mountains
December Drake
Contents
Willow knocked on the heavy door for the third time and tried the doorbell once more. She waited, her ears straining for sounds of life within.
Only the birds in the surrounding trees answered her.
She blew into her cold hands and rubbed them together as she glanced back at the fog-shrouded forest. There was nothing else, and nowhere else, to go.
Her arms and face were scraped up from trekking through the damp forest, and her body was screaming. Especially her injured left foot.
No one was home, and she didn’t know if the owner would return today, next week, or never. She wasn’t waiting outside to find out.
She slid the cheap charm bracelet off her wrist. Concealed in the battered bronze charms was a bobby pin. She pulled it free as she stood back to assess the door’s lock, the way her grandpa had taught her.
With a quick look around, she knelt on her aching legs. She tried to imagine Gramps’ voice in her ear, coaching her while she straightened out the bobby pin.
It’d been a long time since she’d picked a lock. It might be better to just find a rock, and—
Willow gaped as the door handle turned easily in her hand, and the door drifted open. She scrambled to her feet.
She’d thought it was an urban myth. Apparently there really were magical people who left their houses unlocked. Up here in the mountains, most of the dangers probably came from nature, anyway.
“Hello?” she called cautiously as she stepped inside, just to be sure.
Silence greeted her. She shut the door and stepped out of her muddy, ruined slippers, so she wouldn’t dirty the floor.
It was a beautiful hardwood floor, warm beneath her cold toes as she walked further into the house with a slight limp. An oversized couch draped with cozy blankets beckoned her in the living room just left of the door. The drapes were drawn wide around the windows, bathing the furniture in the dreary, mid-morning light.
As the warmth of the house seeped into her, she felt her adrenaline crash. Her body’s needs immediately blared at her like a cranked-up stereo.
She made a dash for the kitchen. She washed her hands and face in the sink, slurping up water in her cupped hands before she turned to the fridge and yanked it open.
Sandwich bread. Deli meat. Mayonnaise. She dumped them on the kitchen table, pulled open drawers until she found a butter knife, then all but collapsed in a chair.
Willow was halfway through her third, sloppily-made sandwich when she sat back and slowed down, waiting for her limbs to stop trembling.
The small book tucked into her waistband against her skin was no longer bearable. With a grimace, she pried it loose, gasping at how her ribs twinged. Hopefully, they weren’t broken.
She smoothed the leather cover of the small journal. Recipes, the faded, gilt letters announced.
Willow opened it and thumbed through a few handwritten pages. She lifted the journal to her nose to smell its comforting paper. Her mother’s scent had long ago faded, but it was all she had left of her.
And now, all she had left of her own, rather sorry life.
It was only because she kept the journal on the nightstand, where she could look at it as she fell asleep, that she’d been able to grab it before leaping out of the burning house.
At the thought of the fire, she tensed and sucked in a sharp breath. Her smoke-abused lungs spasmed.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think. Don’t.
Willow forced her mind back to safer subjects. She’d broken into a stranger’s home and helped herself to their food. It wasn’t all she would do. She’d be damned if she left here without at least showering off the sweat, dirt, and the acrid smell of smoke on her skin.
The car that she’d stolen had run out of gas overnight, but she’d managed to guide it onto the shoulder of the narrow, mountain road before it completely died.
Then she’d curled up to get some sleep in the passenger seat, since there was no way she’d risk the mountain at night on foot. She was a city girl and no expert on wildlife, and hadn’t wanted to meet whatever was making the sounds drifting from the trees.
The rattling roar of a semi speeding by had Willow gasping awake after dawn. She’d stumbled out of the car in the pajamas she’d been wearing when she escaped the fire, and begun to walk.
Her suede moccasin slippers had been equally unsuitable for a long walk down the highway, but there was no helping that. At least it had stopped raining, though a thick fog covered the landscape.
