Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
To the point that I hadn’t felt all that comfortable with Sophia staying in the same house as him, with him drunk off his ass when he wasn’t on shift.
Except, she’d never come back over for me to tell that to, so I was lost at what to do.
Torn between doing the right thing and doing what felt right.
Two very different places that could lead me into two separate kinds of heartbreaks.
One that would cause me to lose a childhood friend, and one that would cause me to lose the one woman I hadn’t stopped thinking about in years—even when I’d been a married man.
“Dad,” Clem said, surprising me out of my morose thoughts. “What, exactly, do you want to accomplish here?”
I blinked, surprised by the sound of her voice. “Um, what?”
“What’s your endgame?” she asked. “Because I can tell you now, Sophia’s worth more than any of the other ladies you’ve been seeing lately.”
I nearly swallowed my tongue.
“What?” I choked.
Did my voice just break? Jesus Christ, I hadn’t done that since I was a freshman in high school.
“Dad.” Clem turned and looked at me, crossing her legs one over the other, then her arms across her chest.
In that moment, she looked exactly like her mother, it wasn’t even funny.
Trista had always been a beautiful woman—still was, in fact—but Clem? Clem was breathtaking with her mother’s features and my blue eyes and dark hair.
“Dad,” Clem snapped. “Let’s cut the bullshit for once. You want Sophia. Sophia wants you. What’s the problem?”
My kid, always the blunt one.
Even from the time that she could talk, she’d always told it like it was.
“She’s right, Dad,” Boston said from his perch against the other counter, similar to how I was standing. “We both know that you want her. Now, tell us why you can’t have her.”
The order made my lips twitch.
“Because she’s my best friend’s kid. Because she’s my daughter’s best friend. Because she’s twenty-fucking-two. Because she’s going to want kids, and I’m not going to want any more. Because there are a hundred different reasons why,” I put it bluntly.
Clem snorted. “Dad, nobody would judge you on who you love.”
I didn’t think she understood what that meant.
Of course, people would judge me for dating a twenty-two-year-old.
I was an old man. There was no way they wouldn’t judge.
But that wasn’t my main worry.
Madden was already on a downward spiral. If he broke, I didn’t know how many pieces he would land in.
I…
My phone rang, and I frowned at the foreign number.
“Hello?” I answered without thinking.
I had a lot of people calling me at random numbers. Hell, I didn’t even balk at an out of country number.
“Mr. Crow?” a man’s shaky voice said.
“Yes,” I answered, instantly suspicious.
“This is Mark Cane at Certified Motors in Intercourse,” Mark croaked.
“Yes,” I said. “Sophia’s boss?”
Mark cleared his throat. “That’s actually why I was calling. I wasn’t able to reach her first emergency contact. A Taos was her second, and he didn’t answer either. You are her next. Umm…”
“What happened to her?” I barked, instantly worried sick.
“She was hit by a car.”
I never knew that rage could be all-consuming.
I’d thought I’d understood when it was my sister.
But when it was the woman that I loved? The woman that I felt the need to protect above all else?
That rage was different. That rage was the type of rage that a man like me burned the world up for and didn’t give a single fuck as to the repercussions.
At first, the phone call seemed innocuous.
“I’m sorry, but what?” I asked for a repeat of what the man said, unsure if I’d heard him correctly.
“You’re listed as the emergency contact for Sophia Madden,” the man repeated. “She was hit by a car in our parking lot today, and I wanted to call and let you know that she was airlifted to the hospital in Bossier.”
Airlifted.
Bossier.
Over an hour and ten minutes away.
I felt my stomach drop out from under me.
I was already booking it toward my bike as I asked everything I could think of and retained none of it.
The ride to the hospital in Bossier should’ve taken me an hour.
It took me twenty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds. At one point, I was red lining the RPMs on my bike. I was also fairly sure that I would need to check the engine to make sure I didn’t damage it in some way, because I was definitely pushing its capabilities a few times there.
Not to mention I was likely to get a few tickets thanks to the four red lights that I blew. And the cop car that I’d left in the dust.
When I arrived, I parked in the back parking lot—I really knew too much about this hospital that I knew where to park to get the fastest access to the emergency room—and practically sprinted across the parking lot.