 by Lisa Renee Jones.jpg)
Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 59395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59395 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Behind the scenes he is a man on edge, and only one woman sees the truth hidden beneath his strong will and dominant rule. Bella is somehow demanding and submissive, fiery and yet sweet. She can give him everything he wants, she just doesn't know it, not yet, but she will. If she'll just say yes and sign on the dotted line.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter One
Tyler
When your father’s a bastard, you become one, too.
I stand on the balcony of my downtown apartment, a whiskey glass in my hand, watching the avalanche of rain plummeting the city. Nashville is drowning in rain, while my family is drowning in the disgrace and sorrow caused by my father. True to the dictator he was, he is gone now, his very absence a command that I clean up the mess he’s left of the reputation of the family law firm. Not an easy task, when much like the rain now rushing through the streets below, scandal sweeps through the hallways of the luxurious offices of Hawk Legal in a bloody damn river.
I down my drink and set the glass on the patio table, and with good reason. Nothing good comes of my drinking. I can’t even become an actual alcoholic, though I tried once, a little too hard. I’d submerged myself in my father’s disapproval and swam around in it with such ease it was as if I was vacationing in that bullshit. I think back to one particularly nasty confrontation with my father in which he told me I would never be good enough to run the family firm I was already running.
That was the night I met Allison, really met her, rather than just passing her in the office hallways.
She’d delivered paperwork to my apartment that night for a big case I was managing the next morning as a favor to my assistant. When she arrived, I’d been three sheets to the wind.
She’d stayed until morning.
I’d known it was wrong. She was my employee. But it was almost as if I wanted to live up to my father’s disapproval, wallow in it, even. One night had become months of involvement. I grew to care for Allison, but she’d come to love me at a time when I hated myself too damn much to even understand the meaning of love. I was toxic and I knew it.
She’d confessed her feelings for me on a night when I was out of my own skin, angry with my father, angry with myself for letting him control me when I let nothing else control me. I was on a path of self-destruction, destined to take her down with me, destined to hurt her. I walked away from her because I didn’t want that to happen.
I wanted to save her.
I failed.
All I did was drive her into my father’s arms.
Now a year later, and a year after Allison left the company, they’re both dead. Her dead at my father’s hand after, per the police, she threatened to go to my mother. Him dead after someone put it all together. That someone should have been me, but I was too wrapped up in my own bullshit with my father to see beyond myself.
To complicate matters, the entire situation is now blasted on every news station for Hawk Legal clients to hear, a problem that jeopardizes our client list, and therefore the stability of two hundred and fifty employees on staff. Also blasted on the television is speculation over whether I will attend today’s memorial for my father to support my mother, who isn’t mourning him, but rather serving an obligation she feels publicly. I tried to talk her out of this ridiculous show of public mourning, but again, I failed. It’s a pattern, it seems, and I don’t like it.
Why am I even entertaining attending a memorial that makes us all look like we support the man who did such a heinous thing?
He killed Allison.
Decision made, I loosen my tie and pick up the glass. I’m not going to the farce of a memorial that only makes my mother look foolish, not respectable, as she claims. I tilt my glass to my lips, cursing when I find it empty. I’m a ball of nasty emotions, the kind no man ever wishes to feel.
I enter the apartment, shrug out of my jacket, and toss it on the chair that’s part of the seating area adjacent to the patio, but I don’t wait to see it land. I’m already continuing to the bar in the main living area. Once there, I do what any man would do on the day of his murderous father’s memorial—I refill my glass, and do so with Macallan 25 whiskey. It was my father’s favorite drink, and I don’t drink it now to honor him in his death, but rather as a fuck you, you will not take anything else from me, not now or ever. I down a swallow of the booze and walk to the living room, sit down on the black leather couch in front of the fireplace and stare down at the journal lying on the table. It was her journal—Allison’s.
She left it here but told me to keep it, read it even, and maybe I would wake up. I never even considered reading it. I didn’t want to know what was inside. But I stare at it now, desperate to feel as if she is alive again. I flip it over and open it to the last page, which is filled with a delicate script, and the words read: Sometimes you love someone who cannot love you back, and therefore you are destined for heartbreak. No, you are destined to be broken. He broke me but I can only blame myself. I knew loving Tyler Hawk was a mistake, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Mine wanted him. But I wasn’t his person. Maybe that means he wasn’t mine, either, and one day, I hope to find the person who will love me. For now, ironically, I end this journal, on the last page of the book, and the bittersweet last chapter of my time with Tyler Hawk.