Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 75450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Hell, one of his aunts—a business owner herself—had taken over my business temporarily. And improved upon it.
But I had a little extra recovery time on Rune, so I’d been antsy to get back to the duplex and get some packing done.
Temporarily, I would be moving into the clubhouse. Until we both decided it was an appropriate time to start discussing something that was just ours. Even if, in our hearts, we’d clearly already made up our minds. I caught him twice looking at properties when he thought I was sleeping. Which was funny because I’d been doing the exact same thing when he was passed out.
My world had been so small for so long—work, my sister, the duplex, revenge—that I don’t think I even realized how cramped I’d been feeling, how pinched at the edges. Until I started seeing Rune and dreaming again. Suddenly, the world had burst wide open. Anything was possible. I could expand my cleaning business. Hell, I could hire someone else to run it so all I had to do was collect my paycheck. I could do whatever I wanted. Sleep in late. Take midday naps. Plan a future with a man I never could have seen myself with a year ago.
“I just want you to be extra careful. We have lots of plans coming up. I don’t want to have them derailed because you just had to help me carry a box that I am perfectly capable of carrying myself.”
Aside from visiting my sister, most of those ‘plans’ of ours just involved being able to actually leave the clubhouse. Go to the beach. Take a walk. Have dinner at Famiglia. Get drinks at Chaz’s so I could meet more of Navesink Bank’s finest criminals.
But still, I wanted to do them. There was still so much for me to learn about this new town I was going to be calling home. I was eager to get started. Hence, packing up the duplex, even though I had months to go on my lease.
Chip was packing up too.
He’d taken some convincing (mostly from Sofia, who I’d tapped to help me), but he’d eventually been talked in to moving into the general area of Navesink Bank too.
“I’ve always thought about retiring at the beach,” was what he’d told Sofia after insisting he planned to die in the duplex for almost an hour.
We’d found a really nice retirement village a short ride from the beach that he’d found ‘acceptable enough.’ Maybe he was about as cuddly as a cactus, but he’d saved my life and had been something like a grumpy grandfather to my sister and me the whole time we’d lived next door.
So once we were back from California, we were taking another trip up to move him down and get him settled.
Then that would basically be it for my life in northern New Jersey. I’d be more of a central shore person from that point on.
I couldn’t wait.
“Put that down right now,” I snapped when I caught Rune trying to grab a box off my nightstand to bring downstairs.
His smile was slow and cocky.
“I’m kind of liking this bossy thing. You know,” he said, reaching for my hip and pulling me close, “we really should break this place in before we say goodbye to it. It’s only right.”
“You’re not supposed to be taxing yourself.”
“I won’t be,” he said, a smirk stretching wider as he stepped backward until he was sitting off the bed and pulled me onto his lap. “I’m gonna let you do all the work.”
Rune - 3 weeks
It was almost as if Sofia glitched once I was done telling her the whole story.
Carmen had started to freeze up when trying to explain it. So I, who had less emotional stock in what Sofia felt about it, chugged on. I told her everything from my time in Puerto Rico and witnessing a murder to her sister trying to kill me, to her cousin shooting me. I just left out any bits that might incriminate me or the club.
“Sof, I know you’re a soap star now,” Carmen said. “And those long, dramatic pauses are your bread and butter, but come on.”
“Wait, so they’re just… on the run now?” Sofia asked after what felt like a whole minute of being frozen in place, mouth agape, eyes wide.
“We have no idea where they are,” I confirmed. It wasn’t a lie. The club had handled the bodies. We were in the dark about where, geographically, their cousins were.
“But you guys are, you know, safe?”
“Yeah. We’re good. And you’re safe too,” I assured her.
Sofia exhaled hard and nodded. “Okay then. Well, thanks for stopping lying to me. I know you guys could have just kept it going. I appreciate you not doing that.”
“I’m sorry I kept it from you for so long,” Carmen said.