Read Online Nobody Likes Fairytale Pirates by Elizabeth Gannon - Free Book Online Page B

had… and it wasn’t enough?
    Ransom was a confident woman… but
that didn’t mean she was willing to risk everything she had on the uncertain chance
of possibly getting more.
    Perhaps at some point in her life
she had been a gambler, but at the moment, she was content to leave things as
they were.  No matter how much she might long for the man to touch her or how
much everything in her wanted to blurt out what she’d always wanted to say to
him… she wasn’t going to do that.
    She couldn’t.
    She just couldn’t .
    She was too afraid.
    And yes, that fear was stupid and silly
and made no sense.
    But it was there all the same.
    It was the only thing in the world
she was afraid of.
    “I will go get us some sustenance
while we wait for our future client, yes?”  He informed her.  “Sadly, I’m
afraid due to your impoliteness, our waitress has decided not to return to our
table, so I shall have to deliver the order myself.”  He rose from the table. 
“I shall return momentarily with culinary delights which no sane woman has ever
sampled before.”  He promised, his voice filled with grandiosity and good
humor.  “Prepare thyself, Rance.  Prepare thyself.”
    She tried to suppress her smile
until his footsteps vanished into the background noise.
    The man was such fun to be around. 
Annoying at times, true, but in a fun way. 
    Well… most of the time, anyway.
    Ransom found him utterly charming,
for some reason.  Somewhere along the line, she had become totally smitten with
him, in spite of herself.
    She shifted in her chair, thinking
about how it felt to be in his arms…
    Then pushed the idea from her mind.
    She didn’t want to dwell on those
kind of thoughts.  It just made things harder.  It just made it hurt more to
keep her distance from him.  Not that it was a great deal of distance, but it
was a distance all the same.  And any distance at all felt… wrong.  Everything
inside her was telling her to pull the man as close as she possibly could.
    But Ransom had walled off one tiny
little piece of herself from him and she fully intended to guard it at all
costs.  And as long as she held onto it, she was safe.  She didn’t have to
worry about putting herself out there or being hurt.  She wasn’t risking
anything.
    And no matter how much she trusted
the man, she still worried about that.
    She ran her hands over her face, feeling
the scars which marred her skin and took away her sight.
    And then there was that.
    Ransom genuinely didn’t care about
the scars.  Not at all.  She neither loved nor hated them, because they simply
were.  They didn’t bother her because they’d always been there.  They were who
she was, and like Uriah, they’d been there every moment of her life.
    Sometimes though… just sometimes…
she worried that what Uriah felt was pity, rather than friendship or… whatever
else he might feel for her.
    She couldn’t see her own
reflection, obviously, but she could feel the raised lines and she could
imagine the horrific sight they probably presented to him.
    Appearances meant very little to
her, but sometimes she was glad she was blind, just so she didn’t have to see
the scars every time she looked in a mirror.
    She had no real idea if she was
pretty before, but she was certainly not pretty now.
    Again, Ransom was a confident
woman… about most things.  But every now and then, she felt self-conscious
about her face.  Not that “being pretty” was really her biggest concern in
life, because that was completely stupid, only that she sometimes wished that the
scars weren’t there.  She wanted Uriah to be able to look at her and not feel
nauseous.  She couldn’t actually see the people staring at her marred face, but
she knew that they did.  She could feel them watching her.
    It wasn’t really the scars themselves
which bothered her or even people’s disgust.
    She simply hated being
pitied.
    Being blind was bad enough, but
having such grotesque scars too?  It