Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 58987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
They start over. Shiny, and new, and utterly unrecognizable.
Which is bad enough on its own—especially since she hasn't taken a single fucking opportunity to call me. To reach out. To acknowledge my existence. Does she have any concept, any remote understanding, of how many women would literally kill to have my card pressed into their palm with a no-strings offer to come find me whenever they wanted?
Not that I'd ever bring one of those corporate vultures back to my cabin—Christ, no. This is a hard line in the sand for me, drawn in permanent fucking marker. No professional women. Not the lawyers, not the executives, not the consultants who circle me at networking events like sharks scenting blood in the water.
They're catty, and ruthless, and emotional in all the wrong ways—three traits that aren't so much dangerous as they are utterly psychotic. The kind of psychotic that ends with restraining orders, leaked tabloid stories, and property damage.
The point is—because apparently I need to keep circling back to 'the point'—the card itself was never meant to be casual. It wasn't some throwaway business gesture, some LinkedIn connection request made flesh.
That little rectangle of embossed cardstock with my private number and address, for fucks sake, represented something I don't offer. Something I've spent the better part of a decade not offering, to anyone, under any circumstances.
It was an admission. A crack in the armor. A fucking invitation written in a language I don't speak with anyone else, to come out to my secret Batcave where I go to unwind after balancing the scales and dispose of evidence.
And what did she do with it?
She tossed it in whatever mental garbage bin holds all the other mistakes she's trying to erase from her life. Shoved it into that desktop folder called 'Do not Open' right alongside being raped by Derek and stories that cross all the lines.
She probably really has been lusting over Ryan all these months. Building him up in her head as the safe alternative, the normal choice, which in that case means...
I sigh and just allow myself to think it. To sit with the discomfort of the thought like pressing on a bruise to confirm it still hurts.
Go ahead, Caleb. Say the words. If not out loud, at least in the privacy of your own goddamn head.
She really has moved on.
The sight of me coming all over a dead body was her limit. Her actual, genuine, non-negotiable hard limit.
I'm her hard limit.
Should I feel good about this? Like some perverse achievement unlocked? Hey, congratulations, you're so fundamentally fucked up that you're the actual hard limit for the woman who wrote Call of the Labyrinth—a book where every single scene is a rape fantasy minus the fantasy part, where the heroine gets hunted, and captured, and violated three separate times by literal animals before accepting captivity as the better option.
The descriptions of their cocks included the word 'fur'.
Fur, for fucks sake.
The woman who dreamed that up, who lived inside that narrative for months while writing it, looked at me and thought: Nope. This is too much. He is too much.
I sigh, and the sound that comes out is something closer to defeat than I've allowed myself in years.
Why am I doing this?
That's the actual question, isn't it? Not what I'm doing—because what I'm doing is abundantly fucking clear. I'm sitting in a vehicle across from a gym, tracking a woman who doesn't want to be tracked, inserting myself into her life in increasingly unhinged ways while pretending I'm respecting her boundaries.
The why is the part I keep avoiding.
Why Idaho Falls? Why this parking spot? Why am I watching Iron River Fitness like it holds answers I don't want to hear?
Why did I give her the card in the first place?
Why does the thought of her with Ryan Adamson—a perfectly decent man who owns a gym and probably has a golden retriever and uses phrases like "let's grab coffee sometime"—make me want to burn the entire building to the ground?
I could be anywhere. I have three homes, multiple offshore accounts, enough resources to disappear completely if I wanted. I run a billion-dollar investment firm from my laptop. I coordinate international operations for The Scales without ever leaving Jackson Hole.
I don't need to be here.
But I drove two hours to sit in this parking lot for the third time this week, waiting for a glimpse of platinum blonde hair and combat boots.
Waiting for her.
My throat tightens around something I don't have a name for.
Or rather—I do have a name for it. I just don't want to say it. Don't want to acknowledge what it means, what it implies about the carefully constructed architecture of my entire fucking life.
Because if I say it, it becomes real.
If I say it, then everything I've told myself about control, and ownership, and possession gets reframed into something infinitely more dangerous.