Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 149641 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 748(@200wpm)___ 599(@250wpm)___ 499(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149641 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 748(@200wpm)___ 599(@250wpm)___ 499(@300wpm)
“Excus…” She’d gone stiff but then laid back again. “I suppose I had forgotten that part. Sorry, but you’re making my point. We were about to die and I copped a feel, and I should get a real talking to about that. There should be some serious repercussions. That was completely unprofessional of…me.”
She was adorable when she was embarrassed. And he needed to consider the fact that after two seconds of her being affectionate with him, he was tossing out all the bad shit she’d done. But he wasn’t thinking that way tonight.
“Uhm, I think I’ll forgive you for that, too.” He liked cuddling her. He could absolutely get used to this. “If you go into your villain era, then be ready to have a boyfriend who helps you. Let’s keep it to the cool villainy though. Maybe we can assassinate a couple of tyrants and free some people.”
The smile on her face did things to his cock that she could probably feel. But she sobered and let her head drift to his shoulder. “Tell me what really happened.”
Guilt gnawed at him. “Manny… Our relationship is complex. We knew each other from a young age. He was so much smarter than everyone else. He was also slightly younger because his father pushed him so hard academically. I didn’t like how the other kids treated him, so I became his only friend. I liked him back then. He was kind and ridiculously smart. His father hated me. Said I was a waste of time, but Manny actually stood up to him when it came to me. And then his father was killed and he went to live with his grandfather. When we met again it was high school, and he was broken somehow. He’d gotten very dark.”
“From the profiles our team has been given, it’s highly likely there was a lot of abuse in his grandfather’s home, and the fact that his mother abandoned him probably led to his misogyny.”
“He truly loathes his mother. Loathed. She was killed during a robbery in Paris. I’ve often wondered if he arranged that,” Ben explained. “But I didn’t see that back then. I saw an old friend who could use some help. We got close again. Unlike his father, his grandfather did approve of our friendship. To the point that he constantly criticized Manny for not being more like me. I became the golden child of a family I didn’t belong to. To a brother who wasn’t mine. But he was excellent at hiding his darkness. He wrapped himself in this calm, peaceful doctor persona. Even in high school. He would cause trouble and then step in to fix it, and everyone looked up to him. Everyone except his grandfather.”
“Who died conveniently after Manny graduated. I was surprised he refused an autopsy.”
Ben had thought this through long ago. “Why would he? Anyone who held stock in the company was gone, and surprise, all of that stock found its way back to Manny. So no, he didn’t care why his grandfather died. He might have done it himself.”
“What happened with Deanna? You got together with her before college, right?”
“We started dating during our sophomore year of high school, and I was comfortable with her. She was smart and funny, and she and Manny got along. She wanted to be a doctor, so they had several classes together. I wasn’t surprised when she announced she was going to the same college that Manny had gotten into.”
“How did you feel about that?”
There was nothing to do but tell her the truth. “I was happy about it. Happy that she was getting what she wanted. Happy that she would have a friend there.”
“And you were also relieved.”
Well, no one said she wasn’t smart. “I was. I was never in love with her, and she’d started talking about us getting married. She wanted me to come with her, but I had a baseball scholarship. I wanted to see the world, to party and have fun. I tried to break up with her but she was so fragile. Her mother had recently died from cancer. There was never a good time to break things off, so we tried long distance.”
“She wasn’t your responsibility. You were a kid.”
“So was she, and we made some adult choices, so yeah, I felt she was my responsibility.”
She shifted. “So you took her virginity and felt responsible for her even though she made the same choice and didn’t think about what you would need when it came to college. She thought you would follow her because she was smarter than you. Because she needed it more than you did.”
That summed things up nicely. “She was smarter than me. It was pointed out on more than one occasion that she had more to give to the world than I did.”