Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 97409 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 487(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97409 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 487(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
I can’t help but laugh as I pull out of her driveway.
“Wait!” She yells, laughing. “I need my car, I have to get to work.”
“I’ll drive you.” I pull away before she even has a chance to object.
“That makes no sense. It’ll be 3:00 a.m.”
“I’ll take you and then go back home to sleep,” I tell her. “Then I’ll pick you up, we’ll go eat, and I’ll take you back to my house so you can nap. If your house has power, we can head there after dinner.”
“You just have the answers for everything.”
“Not everything,” I admit, “but I try.”
She shakes her head.
It’s almost seven when we get to my house. “We have two hours before you need to be in bed.”
“Yes, so we have to eat fast.”
“I like the way you think,” I tease her. “I’ll bring in the stuff. You get the food situated, and then we’ll eat, and I’ll get my dessert.”
“You brought donuts?” She points at the white box I picked up after my meeting at the office. “So you can have that.”
“Your pussy tastes so much better than these donuts.” She shivers. “You know . . . we can have dessert before our meal. We are adults, we can do what we want.”
“What was the last thing you ate?” she asks me, and I look up to think. “So you don’t even have the energy to fuck me before we eat.”
“I have pent-up energy,” I retort, making her laugh as I walk up the five steps to my front door. I open the door for her to walk in. “Go straight down the hall, and you’ll see the kitchen on your left.” She glances curiously to the side, where there is the home office, before heading down the hallway and into the big family room, which has the dining room and kitchen.
Her mouth opens, and she looks back at me. “This room is as big as my whole house.”
“It’s just a house.” I walk past the oak dining room table that seats eight and set the bags on the big island. “Get the things in the fridge,” I urge her as she takes in my kitchen.
“This is so”—she runs her hand over the white marble countertop—“this makes your other house look like . . .”
“If it makes anything better, Caleb was the one who did all of this. I bought the house from him.”
“It doesn’t,” she huffs, head hanging.
“The only thing that I actually put in this house is the frame next to my bed of the baby,” I tell her, and her face goes soft. “I’m going to get the rest of the bags.”
As I walk back to the truck, my phone rings in my pocket. It’s Caleb.
“What the fuck? You can’t just message me that and then disappear.”
“I don’t have a lot of time.” I glance toward the front door to make sure she isn’t there. “Someone cut Collins’s electricity.”
“What do you mean?” His voice is low, so I know he’s trying not to let Sierra in on this either.
“We were at her house and, all of a sudden, the lights went out. I went to check, and someone cut the wires right through.”
“Does she know?” he asks, and I just close my eyes. “You didn’t tell her.”
“What am I supposed to tell her? Someone I hooked up with before you is batshit crazy and is now going to target you?”
“Um, yeah,” he says. “Okay, we’ll go over tomorrow and check out the wires. Maybe it was an animal that bit through them.”
“It didn’t look like an animal. They were cut too evenly, straight across.”
A car pulls abruptly out of a parking space across the street. It catches my attention as it speeds off, running through a stop sign. It’s too far and moving too fast for me to tell what kind of car it is before it turns the corner.
My heart hammers in my chest. “Someone was just watching the house.”
“Fuck,” Caleb exhales.
“I think it’s her, man.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I think I need to tell Burke. And I need to get cameras on my house and on hers. But I don’t want to scare her with this shit. She has enough on her plate.”
“I can help with the cameras,” he says.
“Thanks. I’m also going to have to ask her to move in with me. But I don’t know what she’s going to say.”
“Probably no. I don’t think she likes you.” There’s a pause. But then he can’t hold it without bursting out laughing.
I roll my eyes. “I have to go. We just got to my house, and she’s waiting for me. Don’t text me or call me back.” He’s still laughing as I hang up. “Time to wine and dine the mother of my child.”
I walk into the house with zero plans beyond keeping her here.