Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 73398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 294(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 294(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Absinthe, or ‘Sin’ as Ale had just addressed him, grunted. “The dimples are cool and all, but it gets seriously old after a while. It gets tiring for women to be falling at my feet as much as they do.”
Ale, Coke, and Jim all snorted in derision. “Keep dreaming, fucker,” Coke drawled. “You may have the pretty dimples, but you scare the girls away. They don’t like when you glare and grunt at them instead of talking.”
I wasn’t sure about that.
Sin was definitely pretty. I knew quite a few ladies who wouldn’t care if he was mean as long as he was good doing other things.
Coke placed a cup of coffee down on the counter and gestured at it with his head. “Cream is in the fridge. Sugar is right there in that jar. Are you hungry?”
I moved to the fridge, and Coke hissed out a breath…as did his brothers.
I turned with the cream in my hand and stared at all of them.
They were looking down at my legs— or at least where the backs of my thighs had been when I’d been looking in the fridge moments prior.
“It doesn’t hurt that bad,” I lied.
It hurt.
It hurt pretty bad.
In my struggle to get away from the men and slam my door closed in their faces, I’d ended up falling when they’d grabbed me. When they caught me, they pulled me out by my arms as I was kicking and screaming.
The back of my thigh had caught on a wire rack that I’d bought for my shower that’d been resting on the carport. The bottom of the rack had some jagged edges, meaning that when my thigh grazed past it, seven angry red lines that’d been oozing blood the night before were now prominent.
I’d looked at them in the bathroom mirror before coming out here, because they hurt so bad.
It’d also been why I’d decided to forgo the sweatpants. Seeing the angry scratches, I’d dug through Coke’s medicine drawer until I found some antibacterial ointment and had caked it on as best as I could due to the awkward angle.
Not wanting to get his pants dirty or stained, I’d decided the shirt was long enough, and it didn’t rub roughly against the scratches.
But now, with all the men staring at me, I could see the error in my ways.
Most men didn’t like when women were hurt. The Solomon men? Yeah, they didn’t like it more than most.
“It might get infected,” Jim murmured. “You’ll need to keep an eye on that, Coke.”
Coke. Not me.
Coke needed to keep an eye on that.
“Yeah, I’ll be doing that now that I know that it’s there.” Coke sounded kind of pissed.
I winced.
He’d asked me if I was okay last night, and I’d told him that I was.
But, I’d been kind of vague about my injuries.
And now, with the light of day, my injuries were making themselves known in the brightness—at least to everyone around me.
Something that I couldn’t hide anymore.
Shit.
“Anyway, you killed them, right?” Sin asked, sounding quite hopeful.
I found my lips twitching as I tried to control the grin that was threatening to overtake my face.
“I stabbed one with a screwdriver,” I paused. “And slammed another one’s head in the door. But from what my father’s text said from about an hour ago, they’re all going to make complete recoveries. Though they’re going to jail for a really long time, and my father has a long list of acquaintances in high places. I highly doubt that they’ll enjoy it wherever they end up residing.”
The men shared a look, and I knew it well.
They wanted to talk about me without me around.
Rolling my eyes, I turned with coffee in hand and leveled Coke with a look.
“I’ll be ready in about twenty minutes…is that okay?”
He winked. “Anything under a half hour I count as a win.”
They waited until they thought they heard the door shut before they started talking.
“So…they think that she was kidnapped because they thought she was Frankie?”
I waited for them to continue, bringing my finger up to my lips and nervously biting one nail.
“How could they mistake the two of them?” the brother who I thought sounded like Ale pushed.
Coke grunted. “She was on her way to my place. Back behind the shop, on my property, and that’s where I think they made the mistake.”
“She is quite young,” Jim said. “But…she doesn’t look anything like Frankie. And when she ran back to her house to try to escape them, that should’ve been their first clue that something was wrong. I don’t think your teenage daughter would’ve been running to the new neighbor’s house. If they’d done any kind of research at all, they would’ve known that Frankie was away at college, that you had a new neighbor, and that the person they grabbed looked absolutely nothing like Frankie.”