Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 98398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 492(@200wpm)___ 394(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 492(@200wpm)___ 394(@250wpm)___ 328(@300wpm)
One day to become accustomed to the idea that she was now mine.
One day away from me.
Twenty-four hours.
That was all I was willing to give her.
Not only did I need her in my bed.
I needed her at the office. We still had work to do, and clearly it wasn’t bullshit that she was the best paralegal I’d ever been assigned. Her legal research was far superior to some of the attorneys in my employ.
She would make an exceptional attorney one day.
And I had every intention of making that happen.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind she was living in that rat-infested hellhole to save money for law school. She probably had her mind set on some affordable, half-assed legal education that was reasonably priced and would teach her just enough to pass the bar without throwing her into a lifetime’s worth of debt.
Well, that dream of hers was over.
I was going to see to it that she was accepted at New York University School of Law. I would also pay for every penny of her tuition. I could arrange for her to go to Yale, my alma mater, but Connecticut was too far away from me. NYU Law was ranked fifth in the nation and would get her a degree she could be proud of.
But first, I needed to get her back into the office… and my bed.
In the meantime, I was forced to play the groom gallant for Mary Quinn Astrid and her doppelgänger and soulless protege—my fiancée.
It was all a waste of time, energy, and money.
I should have been in the office instead of in another overdone ballroom dripping with gold and diamonds, where people who wore designer clothes—that were probably handmade by starving children in third-world countries—while drinking hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of overpriced wine got to feel good about themselves for deigning to admit the existence of people that needed their money more than they did.
Another asinine charity event that could have given so much more had they simply cancelled the party and donated its budget, along with the invitees’ donations, to the people or cause they were supposed to be helping.
The hypocrisy of these events was stifling.
But Mary Quinn Astrid insisted my attendance was mandatory. There were connections I needed to make at this party, people who would eventually become the donors that made my campaigns possible.
The English language did not currently have words to adequately express my distaste for this entire system. But it was what we had, so I had to work within it. Even with all the money in my investment portfolio that I had quadrupled since inheriting my trust fund, I couldn’t dismantle the system from the outside.
To make this night even more intolerable, I was to spend the majority of it with Catherine on my arm.
I understood why we needed to be seen together at public events. I just wished she didn’t insist on talking while at the events. Her topic of choice tonight was about the importance of God only knew what.
I’d stopped listening when she complained about how some people were so incompetent at their jobs they could not discern the difference between ivory, cream, ivory-creme, white, off-white, eggshell, and about fifty other shades of white fabric that she was considering having her wedding dress made from.
The only thing she had said all night that had merit was the possibility of buying a second home in Aspen. All I could do was pray that she’d decide to live there full-time.
It probably didn’t help that my mind kept going back to Eddie.
I had tried calling her several times throughout the day, but her phone went straight to voicemail. Fortunately, the police officer in civilian attire I had placed on her floor had assured me she was home and safe. Since demanding the police presence in front of her building and in her immediate neighborhood, they had nabbed four probation violators, three dealers, two outstanding warrants for domestic abuse and one pimp.
Captain Raydar had applauded me for the tip I had given him and the chance to boost his precinct’s closure numbers. There was no point in telling him of my personal angle. Let him think the confidential nature of the favor I requested was due to information I couldn’t share with him from a case.
The sex was a surprise. Not only that it happened—I had never crossed that line before—but how intense it was. I understood that she needed time to process what happened, and under normal circumstances, I would have insisted that she take that time.
Preferably naked and next to me in bed, spending hours debating our arrangement, what it meant and what it didn’t mean, and the boundaries we wanted to establish, all while resting between rounds of more incredible sex.
But at least she’d taken the car back to her crack shack of an apartment. God only knew what could have happened to her between leaving my office and getting there.