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)
They’d always done that for me.
They’d never once said a word about my lack of forethought, or how stupid I was to ever get involved with Beatrice.
“So…you have a much younger chick living with you, your daughter’s away at college, and your ex-wife has taken offense to that fact.”
I grinned at Ale. “Yeah. No, she was just scared last night. She doesn’t live here.”
“Either way, seems to me like you have a conundrum,” Sin drawled. “What are you going to do about it?”
“You mean in the form of the cute little thing in his bedroom?” Jim asked, leaning back in his chair.
He had a five o’clock shadow and looked downright rough. Though, that would be gone by tomorrow morning when he went back to work. There was no room for anything but perfection when it came to being a drill sergeant.
“I think you should take advantage of the young ass,” Ale offered his two cents.
I flipped him off. “I’m not taking advantage of anything. The woman is off limits.”
“Is she off limits because she said she was off limits, or because you said she was off limits?” Jim questioned.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “She’s off limits because she’s my neighbor, she was kidnapped because my ex-wife thought it’d be goddamn funny and because she’s too nice for me. She’s a good girl that doesn’t need to be mixed up with my business.”
***
Cora
“Too nice for me,” I murmured as I listened to the men talk.
Too nice my ass. And good girl I was not.
Chapter 17
Sharing is caring…unless it’s a cold. Keep your ass at home with your flu face.
-Cora to Janie
Cora
I, Cora Maldanado, was insanely attracted to Coke Solomon.
And there was something seriously wrong with me, other than the obvious.
I was practically salivating each time the man came close to me, and it was getting to the point where I was thinking this was going to get bad.
I’d gone to work with him all week, and I did my work from his desk, right in front of him.
It was getting harder to handle my attraction to him.
I was currently making a list in my head of things that shouldn’t be sexy, but they were.
One, watching the man pour himself a cup of coffee. All he was doing was something so mundane that almost every human on the planet does it at some point in their life. But watching him with his strong forearm muscles reach forward and lift the heavy industrial pot of coffee and pour himself a cup? Yeah…that had inspired more than a few clenches in my nether regions in the last week.
Then there was watching him read something with his usual, everyday black reading glasses—the kind that anybody could buy at the grocery store.
To anybody else, he likely just looked like a normal person. To my brain, though? Yeah, I wanted nothing more than to look at that man wearing his glasses while he was down between my legs, doing things to me that no man had ever done before.
Then there was that freakin’ way he bit his lip when he was concentrating…kinda like he was now.
He was staring at a list of some sort, periodically stopping to check things off for something he was buying at auction next week.
I’d lost interest in my work about thirty minutes ago. In all actuality, I was ahead. Surprisingly, considering I stopped every few minutes to ogle the man wherever he might happen to be in the yard.
Sometimes I’d go to the window and watch him crushing cars or growling at an employee for sleeping when he should be working.
That employee needed to be fired. He was the most useless employee I’d ever seen, and I honestly had no clue why Coke put up with it.
Kind of like now. With one glance in the direction of the yard, I could see the man looking at his phone instead of at the car that he was crushing.
“Ummm,” I hesitated. “Why exactly do you still employ him?”
Coke looked up, releasing his lip, and focused on me for a long, heart-stopping second, then looked out the window to see his employee on his phone. Again.
He sighed. “He’s my father-in-law’s nephew from his sister who passed away. He’s a complete fuck up, but he’s sort of kind of family. I’d feel terrible if I fired him.”
That made a whole lot of sense but…
“At what point is your obligation to that family over?” I asked. “I mean, honestly? It doesn’t make sense that you feel required to employ that kid. He’s awful. It doesn’t matter if he’s family or not. Which, technically, he’s not. Not anymore. Yes, your father-in-law did you a solid by making sure you had this business but…what about what he didn’t do?”
He sat back in his chair and waited for me to continue.