Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 79938 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79938 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
If he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too, he’d convince Galen to marry Meg. Galen was titled, but he had a shit ton more freedom than Theo did. It would tie her to them, would allow them to stay together…
Until Theo married.
He was a lot of things. A cheater wasn’t one of them. Any woman he married would expect him to be faithful, and rightfully so. A theoretical wife who didn’t mind that her husband snuck away to fuck his best friend and his wife… No, it was an impossible dream. One that would turn to ashes if he tried to force it. That way lay resentment and the fracturing of his and Galen’s relationship, to say nothing of bending Meg until she broke.
Theo could be selfish. Fuck, he was born that way. But this thing between the three of them was too precious to poison with his plans. It would hurt to let Meg go. It might even break something in him.
But he’d do it.
There was no other option.
The next two weeks passed in a blur that consisted of the hum of the car’s engine and the scenery sliding by too fast to really enjoy. They drove through countries that peppered Meg’s pin board, but the most she got to enjoy them was hitting gas stations and drive-thrus to keep them going. Galen was too paranoid to let them stay overnight in a hotel, so the only bed she got was an hour here and there when they’d make pitstops to shower. During those stops, he disappeared to do whatever it was Galen did to keep them safe. A direct route only should have taken them about twenty hours to make, but something happened between her falling asleep that first time and when she woke up. The plan changed. The easy camaraderie between them dissolved into tense silence and tenser conversations.
It wasn’t quite hell, but it was definitely hell-adjacent.
She woke to the realization that the car had stopped. When had she fallen asleep? Sometime after they crossed the border into Greece, the lull of Galen’s big body wrapped around her too comfortable to deny. He was gone now.
Meg opened her eyes. She lay across the backseat, her head pillowed on Galen’s jacket. She started to sit up, but stopped when the men’s voices reached her.
Theo cursed. “It doesn’t make any sense. The birth certificate is just a birth certificate. It’s not anything special. There’s no secret clue that’s revealing why Phillip didn’t include it. Maybe it really was that the clinic burned down and he couldn’t be bothered to search a copy out.”
“You’re wrong. It means something. We’ll figure it out.”
“We keep saying that, and we keep fucking up. Phillip is acting erratic and paranoid enough that he might just send someone with a rocket launcher after us if we don’t do him the favor of dying in a so-called accident.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“You aren’t a god, Galen. You can’t control everything, and if you throw yourself in front of a bullet for me, I swear to all that’s holy, I will bring you back to life so I can kill you myself.”
Galen was quiet for a beat. Two. “My life is yours, Theo. It has been since I was sixteen.”
She shouldn’t be listening to this. Eavesdropping when they were withholding information was one thing, but listening in on what was obviously a private conversation was something else altogether. The raw truth in Galen’s voice tolled through her. He wouldn’t want that vulnerability witnessed, and he wouldn’t thank her for having done it. Fuck. She couldn’t sit up now. It would ruin everything.
Theo’s voice moved closer, lower. “Knock that shit off. You don’t owe me shit.”
“Your father was going to send me into exile with them, and you stepped in. Fuck, Theo, that’s a debt I can never repay.”
Theo cursed. “And look where it took you—right into exile with me. Being mine hasn’t done you any favors, so you can climb right off that self-sacrificing cross of yours. My life isn’t worth more than yours. It never was.”
Galen’s parents had been exiled?
Meg obviously needed to up her research game. She knew about the fallout surrounding Theo’s parents’ marriage, but apparently the political upheaval went back further. She hadn’t been aware that exile was so commonly used in today’s world. She sighed. Damn it, what she needed was a week and a computer with good Wi-Fi just to catch up.
Above her head, the car door opened. She rolled carefully onto her back and stared up into Theo and Galen’s faces. “Oh. Hey.”
Galen shook his head. “What did we tell you about eavesdropping?”
She had no self-righteous anger to hold her steady this time. “I woke up and you were talking, and there didn’t seem to be a good time to interrupt.”