Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
She frowns.
“You’re fake dating Jake Waterford.”
She winces. “Shit.” Apologies fill her eyes. “Sorry.”
“No apology necessary,” I say. “The fact that he’s a forgettable piece of your life makes me rock-hard.”
Her eyes dip to my crotch. Hidden by a sliver of the white sheet. She bites down on the chocolate. “I’ll break up with him.”
“Obviously,” I say.
“Obviously,” she combats roughly like that word was unneeded. The heat in her eyes makes me want to take her again, but I’ve delayed too many conversations already.
I throw back the last M&M, crunching harder. “I can’t do this without your permission, but if you’ll let me, I’m going to tell my mother to give you a larger cut of the Fiddle Game earnings.”
“Don’t,” Phoebe immediately says. “I know it might piss you off that I didn’t see the money—”
“Four hundred grand, Phoebe,” I say with heat in my chest. “What’d you get?”
“It was always supposed to set up Seattle,” she refutes. “It was going toward reestablishing our lives in a new city. That’s what every big payout at the end of a job does.”
“We didn’t go to Seattle,” I remind her. “Which is exactly why you and Hailey deserve more—”
“I don’t want it,” Phoebe snaps. “That con wasn’t about the money for me. It was about not failing the team, and if I take more cash, then it just makes me feel like I prostituted myself that night more than I guess I did.”
I put my hand on her knee, intaking a boiling breath, and I nod a few times, respecting her decision and dropping it. She’s tense, and I reach out and bring her closer.
Phoebe lies against my chest, and once her pulse slows, I breathe, “Speaking of money. I bought a horse.”
“What?” She shoots back up and spins to face me, knocking over the bag of Halloween candy. “You? The guy who curls his lip at Seabiscuit and Black Beauty and Flicka—”
“We get it—”
“—bought a horse?”
“Jake’s horse,” I clarify.
Realization widens her eyes. “The horse stables.” What I haven’t told her about since I’ve been gone for two weeks.
“Actually, it was his sister’s horse.”
Her mouth keeps dropping. “What?” Her eyes grow again. “That’s why you needed a big chunk of change. To buy his sister’s horse?”
“A hundred grand.” Could I have swung that without leaving? Eh, it’d put me closer to a financial hole, and I hate even stepping toward one. It was smarter to leave town and make the cash the immoral way.
Phoebe straightens up in anticipation. “So what’d you find out?”
“ ‘Chiquitita.’ He wasn’t calling a broker.”
She gasps. “I knew it.”
“He was calling his little sister.”
She goes still. “The one that died? How . . . ?”
“She’s not dead.”
I tell her everything I know about Jake. How his sister is still alive and how he staged her death. How I’m the proud new owner of a warmblood named Bowie. She snorts when I say proud, which makes me grin, truthfully.
I end by saying, “It’s weird. Jake’s the first guy I’ve ever known that I don’t want to con—but he’s primed for conning.”
She frowns. “Is it because you like him?”
I glower. “I don’t like him.”
“Not sexually.” She glares back. “But I guess I’m just thinking it’d be easy to like him now that you know he’s capable of deception. That’s a trait most people scorn, but you’ve always seen it as a sign of capability.”
Maybe.
“I do envy him,” I say. That admission feels good.
Her brows shoot up. “Really?”
“Yeah, he was able to deceive his own parents, and there’s no chance in hell I’ll ever be able to do the same.” I unwrap another Almond Joy, a tension winding its way through the room. Just because we’re together now doesn’t mean we’ve suddenly joined sides on the issue about our parents.
We can agree to disagree and still love one another. She doesn’t need to believe in everything that I believe in. It won’t make me care any less about her.
She takes a deep breath. “I still really love my mom, Rocky.”
“I know,” I say into a rougher sigh and then smile dryly at her. “We all have our flaws.”
She tosses an M&M at my face. I catch the candy in my mouth. Crunching on the chocolate, I say, “As long as we’re on the same page with us, I don’t really care if we disagree about them.”
“Same,” she says.
I look her over. “Have you decided if you’re going to stick with this ‘honest’ lifestyle?” Hailey put the ball in her court.
She shakes her head. “I’m just taking it day by day.”
I nod slowly.
Day by day.
That’s all we can do at this point in our fucked-up lives.
She tells me, “First order of business: break up with Jake.”
That—I’m going to love to watch.
Thirty-Nine
Phoebe
“You want to break up?” Jake asks behind the pool bar. Erik called in sick this morning along with four other servers who went to the Gulp Seafood & Lounge last night. They all ate the oysters, and now they’re probably making best friends with their toilet bowls.