Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 71090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
There were men lined up behind the counter, all of their eyes wide as they looked at me, wondering what they should do.
I could practically hear their thoughts.
Should we help him?
Can he get back up by himself?
Oh, my God. That woman just made the cripple fall.
Narrowing my eyes on them, I stood, making sure no one saw how awkward it was to actually stand, and walked out of the door.
Once I reached the front steps, I crossed my arms and watched as the woman yelled at her grandfather. The old man that looked like the most innocent man in the world.
The man who’d pulled the knife on me quicker than I could blink.
He was lucky all I gave him was a weapons citation.
I could’ve arrested him for threatening a police officer with intent to harm.
When she spotted me, she started to march up the steps, coming to a stop two down from me.
“He tells me you’re lying. That he had nothing more than his pocket knife,” she held up a fucking switch blade.
I reached for it, and she warily placed it in my hand.
Acting quickly, I pressed the lever, disengaging the blade and scaring the shit out of her.
“This,” I said, holding my hand out to her, offering her the hilt of the blade. “Is a switchblade. This is not a pocket knife. It’s also illegal, because it’s double sided.”
She looked at the knife now in her hand, then offered it back to me.
“Just keep it.”
I took the blade from her hands, collapsing the blade, and shoving it in my pocket.
“What the fuck, grandpa! That’s illegal, too!” I heard just before she dropped down into her nineties model Camaro and closed the door.
I couldn’t help the smile that overtook my face.
For the first time in months, I had something to smile about.
Chapter 2
I hope a bird shits on your car.
-Blake to Foster
Blake
“Way to go, Blake!” I cheered myself on. “Make yourself look bad when you’re about to start working there. There’s a good idea!”
Jesus Christ.
Fucking grandpa.
I should’ve known he’d lie about that.
He was a shit like that sometimes.
Bursting through my mother’s door with Gramps at my heel, I immediately shouted, “Mom!”
My mother was in her fifties and the proverbial ‘housewife.’
She stayed at home while my father brought home the bread money, stating that she was staying at home to take care of the kids.
Even now he was still working, and she was still keeping house.
I found my mother in the kitchen rolling pie dough out on the counter.
My mouth watered, and I got distracted from what I was going to tell her.
“What kind of pie are you making, mama?” I asked, leaning over her shoulder to look.
Peaches were sliced on the counter, and I think I zoned out for a few seconds, because I only caught the second half of her sentence.
“…the garage. Would you mind?”
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked, shaking my head and backing away from the food.
I was on a diet, and I was determined to stick to it this time, no matter what.
“I asked if you’d go get me the potatoes from the garage. Are you staying for dinner tonight?” she asked.
I went to the garage and grabbed the potatoes, giving my gramps a glare when his eyes looked up from his car he was tinkering with.
“Um, no. I’m not,” I told her.
If I stayed, I was fairly positive I wouldn’t be able to skip the pie. I had willpower…kind of. Just not that much.
“Oh, that’s sad. Are you going out with David for dinner?” She asked. “He called here looking for you.”
I gritted my teeth, smoke nearly pouring out of my ears.
“Actually, mom, no. I’m not planning on ever having dinner with David again, if I can help it. My next lifetime would be too soon.” I told her, turning my back on her pity filled face.
David was my ex-husband.
He was a cop with Kilgore Police Department, and we’d been divorced now for nearly a year and a half.
“I don’t know why you have to be so uncivil towards each other,” my mother admonished.
The tick that only ever came on when I thought about David started back up.
David and I had fallen in love when we were teenagers.
We got married when he was twenty one and fresh out of the police academy, and I was twenty.
I’d gone the housewife route, although we’d never had any children. Thank God!
I’d thought that we had an awesome relationship, too.
I’d been so proud to be known as a police wife. The woman who stood behind her man. Supported him in his every endeavor
Then he started working ‘mandatory overtime.’
It started out as just here and there, and slowly morphed into over eighteen to twenty hours of extra time per week. At first, I hadn’t been suspicious.
Then little things started to stand out.
How he started changing at work and coming home freshly showered and shaved.
How he’d be super sneaky with his phone, putting a passcode on it and forgetting to tell me the code.
Then there were the random purchases on our account.
Thirty dollars here at a flower shop. A hundred and fifty dollars there at a jewelry shop.
When we’d first started our life together, David had been the one in charge of the finances.
I’d trusted him to do what he needed to do, and had never needed to check our bank account.
We lived modestly in a house his parents provided us when we got married. I also stayed home most of the day, rarely venturing out to do anything other than get groceries or essentials.
Most of the things we needed I waited for David to do with me.
But then he’d started being gone a whole lot more and I started to get suspicious.
I don’t know if he thought that just because I was a blonde, and that I only had a high school education, that I was stupid. But I most assuredly wasn’t.
I’d been taking online classes here and there throughout our relationship. Also, before I’d even graduated high school, I’d had nearly enough hours to graduate with an associate’s degree.