Total pages in book: 41
Estimated words: 38444 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 192(@200wpm)___ 154(@250wpm)___ 128(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38444 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 192(@200wpm)___ 154(@250wpm)___ 128(@300wpm)
What he really needed was to get out of the house. What better way to do that than to start questioning the people on his list? Decision made, he walked back into the living room. “There’s fresh coffee if you want some. I left you a mug on the counter.”
“Thank you,” Alaric answered, pushing off the wall to stroll into the kitchen. Damn. The man even walked with a sexy, sure stride.
When he came back, Ezra handed him his notebook. “I’ve laid around the apartment enough. This is a list of people I want to talk to about this.”
Alaric scanned the page. “Jake Langford is first?”
“He’s one of my ex-husband’s bodyguards. The only one who was nice to me. I doubt he’ll talk, but it’s worth a try. It’s his day off, so today’s a good day to get him.”
“Who is your ex-husband?”
“Brian Kemper.”
Both black eyebrows lifted immediately.
“Know of him, do you?” Ezra asked with a smirk.
“I do, though I’ve never actually seen what he looks like since he’s never in public and avoids all publicity. You were married to him?”
“I was the unfortunate winner of the arranged marriage lotto. My father had one use for me, and it was to help tie our families together.”
“Why did you go along with it?”
Ezra shrugged, making his sore shoulder complain. “Just call it one last attempt to appease the master. I stuck it out for a few years, but there was never anything real between us. It was a disaster really, so I left earlier this year. He wasn’t happy. Kemper doesn’t like to fail at anything.”
“Was he mad enough to hire assassins?”
“Don’t know. Probably. He’s drawing out the divorce. Refusing to sign the papers. I’m going to have to confront him.”
“You’ll do that with me present.”
Ezra snorted. “Of course. I’d planned to meet him somewhere public, anyway. Just not yet. Not until I’m healed.”
Something flickered through Alaric’s expression, but he schooled it—just not quickly enough. Ezra narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about my ex?”
“That he has his hands buried in the dirtiest of crimes. But he’s good. Covers his tracks well. Not to mention the people actually willing to turn on him tend to go missing. He’s dangerous, Ezra. Very.”
“It was nice of my dear father to pay him off with me, wasn’t it? I didn’t know just how bad he was until I moved into his mausoleum. Which is a fitting description of that house, because the man is dead inside. Completely and utterly dead.” He glanced at Alaric’s stoic face and decided to poke the bear again. “Sex was like being with a robot.”
Alaric briefly closed his eyes as if his patience was barely hanging on by a thread. “I don’t need to hear about your sex life.”
“Well, it was bad. I don’t even think he liked sex. The kicker was, he ordered me not to get sex elsewhere. I was like some kind of possession that he trotted out for appearance’s sake. The ultimate trophy husband, just because my last name was Forsberg. He never failed to crow about that, like owning his enemy’s son was some kind of coup.”
“How long were you with him?”
“Three long years. My father was so angry when I left, he refused to speak to me. I just couldn’t…take it anymore.” Plus, he’d seen something that had scared him so badly, he knew he couldn’t stay in that house another day. Jake had actually been the one who helped him escape. The hired guard had a surprising soft side, despite who he worked for.
Ezra watched Alaric take a sip from his mug, his gaze lingering on the elf’s Adam’s apple as it bobbed. He wanted to put his mouth there. Maybe that would elicit a reaction.
This fierce attraction he had toward Alaric frankly flummoxed him. He liked sex, but he’d never felt like he needed it badly before. He hadn’t been lying that sex with Brian had been lackluster. Lackluster was actually too nice a word for what it had been like. Brian was a cold fucker—both literally and figuratively. He fucked like he was a corpse and had a soul that was made of ice. He did everything with a perfunctory manner that had left Ezra feeling like nothing but a hole. Brian hadn’t even liked to give or receive oral sex—said it was too unsanitary. Fuck, he’d been weird.
The sad thing about the whole situation was that at first Ezra had expected something different. Yes, he’d gone into the arranged marriage hardly knowing Brian, but the man was seriously handsome and had been attentive in the beginning. Ezra had actually believed they might be able to make it work at first. But Brian had been donning a mask of kind humanity. It hadn’t taken one week before Ezra had realized there was zero chemistry, and that Brian wasn’t even capable of feeling. He was a true sociopath who acted his way through life. They’d only had sex a handful of times in the entire three years he’d lived there. Not at all in that last year, which he’d been thankful for. He wouldn’t have been able to fake his way through another one of those awkward experiences.