Read Online Big Sky by Kitty Thomas - Free Book Online

supply store a couple of cities over, but my old man got sick and asked me to take over here. I reasoned that it was a business, so I could still use the degree. And he wanted to keep it in the family.”
    Veronica picked over her burger, suddenly sullen. She shouldn’t be making polite conversation with him and getting to know him like she’d been hooked up by an internet dating site. What had happened to her women are people, too philosophy? It seemed to have floated away with the clouds.
    By dinner time, she’d worked up the nerve to hold a frog—out of curiosity more than anything— a nd had checked on the chickens in the hen house. It was hard to fight fresh air, a big sky, good, clean food, animals, and a cozy house. It was too contradictory to where her life had been just forty-eight hours ago when she hadn’t known if she’d be eating in a month or where she’d sleep or if she’d be safe.
    “Ronnie, in the end, everybody’s a slave.”
    “Don’t.”
    “I mean it. Do you really think anyone in this world is free? Everything is a hierarchy. Were you free when you worked for the ad agency?”
    “Yes.” But somewhere deep down she knew it was a lie, and that Luke was about to explain why.
    He shook his head and took another bite of his burger. “You did good on the burgers. Eat yours before it gets cold.”
    “I’m going to get fat.”
    He laughed. “Not with all the work you’ll be doing here.”
    She picked up the burger and took a small bite. He gave her a disappointed look, not impressed with the effort.
    “You weren’t free there,” he said. “You had to work for money to pay your bills to live. Working wasn’t an option you did just because you liked it. You were a wage slave. Just because it’s packaged up like free will doesn’t mean it’s the recipe for happiness. What about your debt?”
    “What about it?”
    “How much do you owe?”
    “Close to two hundred thousand,” she mumbled.
    He let out a low whistle. “Damn, woman. In some parts of the country, that’s a house.”
    “I know.”
    “Well, you’re free of that for now. I mean, I’m not about to call them up and say I have you.”
    Veronica looked up slowly from her plate as the realization that the crushing debt that had weighed on her couldn’t be collected if they couldn’t find her. Freedom. Or freedom after a fashion, yet somehow this seemed like a robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul scenario.
    “You don’t have bills here. I’m not going to fire you. If you disobey me or I’m dissatisfied with your work, I’ll just punish you, but you’ll have a place to sleep and you won’t ever go hungry.”
    She hated the nonchalant way he spoke of punishing her, the way he continually reiterated the dynamics and power structure of their relationship. But it wasn’t enough for him to stop there.
    “I rescued you. And very soon you’re going to show me how grateful you are for it.”
    She crossed her legs, trying to push away the arousal his words created, spoken in that rumbling, gravelly tone. She’d meant to fight him more, but it had been so much easier to distract herself with the list of things he’d given her to do. But she’d pushed that out of her mind almost as soon as she’d seen it, as if she were forcing her brain to reboot. It was less scary to just cook the meals and do the laundry so when he came back to the house he didn’t take his belt off.
    That thinking made her sound like a battered wife, but so far he hadn’t lashed out for no reason. Maybe he wasn’t that crazy. She startled when his hand moved under her skirt, stroking her thigh. The words he’d spoken still hung in her mind. She’d wanted to be the girl who fought and clawed and screamed, the girl she’d thought she was that day in the diner when she’d acted as if he were some country bumpkin beneath her notice.
    If things had been different, if she were still that Big Deal ad executive with a penthouse without a drop of debt, she would