Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 131651 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 658(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131651 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 658(@200wpm)___ 527(@250wpm)___ 439(@300wpm)
Well.
These things matter in my very fickle, very confused, still grieving brain.
So, fine.
Instead of marching out there with a brave face and telling Moody McMiserable we’re behaving like grown-ups, I hide in my room. I grab my pad again and start drawing a tinman-like Holden clutching the Hera Egg over his empty chest.
It’s just a cartoony sketch, hardly serious and not my best effort, but it makes some part of me feel better.
After I’ve drawn a few stormy feelings out, I set my stuff on the table and close my eyes. Old habit.
I used to do this when I was a little girl and Dad would stumble home drunk. He’d barge in late and yell at me the second my sitter left, after another critic called his stuff juvenile, derivative, uninspired.
I’d get my feelings out on paper before they chewed me to pieces from the inside out. Spiders under the skin.
I couldn’t escape in that house.
I couldn’t stand up to him.
I was too young to grasp his malfunctions or even my own feelings.
The art was always there. My one lovely constant, my shelter against the storm.
It saved me then and it’ll save me now.
If Holden’s grumpy, bitter ass wants to tiptoe around heartache, I’ll cut myself open. I’ll bleed sharp lines on paper he’ll never see.
Self-directed therapy.
If I can push him out of my system like snake venom just tonight, we might rediscover old boundaries without uttering a word.
I just have to keep him from following me into my dreams and haunting me forever.
12
NICKEL AND DIMED (HOLDEN)
I’ve never been this restless on duty before.
Every time I stop moving, I can’t stand still for more than a few seconds before there’s hellfire in my knees. Ironically, the only fix is to keep going.
Press the fuck on.
Round and round this big old house I know like the back of my hand.
It’s not the hint of arthritic damage or whatever the fuck that’s bothering me. It’s something deeper, not rooted in flesh and bone.
I scrub under my eyes, trying to bleach Cleo’s kiss from my brain.
She’s lodged there like a splinter, a thorn no amount of rubbing will ever get out.
I head downstairs to the basement to check the vault. Everything’s in order.
I glance at the camera system on my phone before heading back upstairs. No disturbances whatsoever.
Aside from us, the lawyer, Fairfax, and a few of his overseas contacts, no one else knows this thing exists.
I wish we could keep it that way. It’s starting to feel like a fucking curse in gold and jewels that can fit in your hands.
Without it, none of this shit would be happening. We never would’ve had to share a bed or find out how my tongue chases hers.
I could’ve walked away from this job a sane man, saved up for Kit’s college, and looked after my parents.
Fuck this complication. Fuck everything about it.
Even now, I can feel Cleo’s pliant softness against me.
The mesmerizing heat of her tongue.
The way she whimpered in my mouth.
My cock jerks, remembering how it felt to wake up beside her and how I reacted when she threw herself at me like a sexy little cannonball.
I didn’t know she thought of me in that way.
In another life, it might be flattering. In this one, it’s agony, and it makes this situation vastly harder to navigate.
Nothing’s ever fucking simple.
I make another round through the house because I can’t do anything else to quiet the itching burn that runs to my bones.
Especially when I stop and stare at her bedroom door. Inside, it’s silent, the door too thick to hear her snoring.
Surely, she’s asleep now. Hell, I should be, too.
It’s late after a full day embarrassing ourselves. Almost early morning and I need to get back to Kit as soon as I can.
Only, if I turn in now, I’ll just resign myself to a different torture. The dungeon where I lie there thinking of all the dark, twisted ways I could’ve ruined Cleo Blackthorn.
My cock would remind me how long it’s been since I tasted a woman.
Months. Years.
Fucking years since I’ve repressed my animal instincts in exchange for an everyday life as a dad and a professional.
And, of course, the first person to kiss me in who knows how damn long just had to be the barely legal granddaughter of my dead boss.
No, not barely legal, I remind myself.
She’s twenty-three years old.
An adult in every sense.
Old enough to know what she wants and to look out for herself. It’s not like she isn’t old enough to drink. She’s old enough to do everything, including fixate on an older man with too many problems.
Old enough to blow me to kingdom come.
Snarling, I turn around and stomp back downstairs before I give in to my temptation to peek inside her room and see if she still snores when she’s comfortable in a familiar bed.