Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 73043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
She stiffened in my arms, and then bolted.
“Rafe!” Janie cried. “Oh my God! Rafe!”
And, as I watched my daughter land on her knees beside the man who I always suspected wasn’t just a friend, I realized a few things.
One, my daughter was in love with a man that was almost twenty years older than her.
Two, Rafe was going to die—by my hand—if he ever hurt her.
And three, this could go nowhere good.
Especially, I realized, hours later when we found out that Rafe didn’t remember any of the last six months. Meaning, the period of time in which he and my daughter had grown the closest. Nearly choking on my spit at where my thoughts were going, it occurred to me that they’ve obviously become more to each other than I ever expected.
Janie was devastated—beyond broken.
I had a feeling I didn’t have the entire story.
Chapter 1
You look like duct tape and handcuff material.
-Things you shouldn’t say to a man you have a crush on
Janie
The day Rafe no longer saw me as forbidden.
I watched the airport terminal, my belly jostling with nerves.
Rafe would be there soon.
I’d been looking his name up on flight manifests trying to figure out where he was at least once every three or four days. (Yes, I knew I was obsessed.) But, since I had no clue where he was going, I’d started searching specifically for his name, even though I always wondered if he had an alias.
I’d known, of course, that he was going to be there. But honestly, from day-to-day, I wasn’t quite sure what exactly it was that Rafe did.
Though, this time I’d gotten a little help from the man himself—albeit inadvertently seeing as he hadn’t actually given me the information. He’d given it to my Uncle Sam—not the government Uncle Sam, but my actual Uncle Sam.
A girl had to do what a girl had to do if she wanted to see the man she’d fallen in love with, after all. Even steal information off of her uncle’s desk.
It seemed like one day Rafe was home on American soil, working as a liaison between three governmental agencies, and the next he was deployed.
No matter how hard I tried, I could never find anything out about the man. He was too good at hiding.
Jack, my pseudo-uncle and mentor, and his wife, Winter, had taught me everything I knew about computers, and now there was literally nothing I couldn’t find out if I put my mind to it.
Nothing, that was, unless it came to Raphael Luis.
I had no fucking clue why I couldn’t find anything on him.
Literally, there was absolutely no information that was safe. There was nothing that I couldn’t find out. I knew that my dad was once a porn-aholic before he’d met Shiloh—which happened to be over twenty years ago. I’d been on his old computer trying to figure out how to get into the hard drive and had unfortunately discovered that interesting tidbit, something that no girl wants to know about her father. I also knew that my little sister was talking in some nerd chatroom all hours of the night and apparently had a secret boyfriend that she was keeping from my father.
I knew that there were quite a few people in town who were curious enough to Google Free, the organization that Uncle Sam—again, my actual Uncle Sam, not the literal Uncle Sam—had started with my father and the rest of my pseudo-uncles. They wanted to know more, and I understood their curiosity. But to protect Free and the women we helped, I pointed them in a direction that wouldn’t give them any more information than what the rest of the population could come up with.
For that organization that my family had created—the one for which I now worked—I basically did what Uncle Jack and Aunt Winter did, just on a much broader scale.
I’d surpassed the masters, but I still had such a thirst for knowledge that I continued to push myself.
Which was why it was so frustrating that I couldn’t find a damn thing on Rafe.
Not a single, solitary thing.
The fact that I could find nothing on the man was disconcerting.
Not a birth certificate. No social security number. Not even his high school baseball pictures.
Someone jostled me, and I looked to the side to see a very pregnant woman shifting from foot-to-foot. “I’m sorry. I think I’m in labor. My balance is a little off.”
I smiled and scooted away slightly, causing her to laugh.
“It’s not contagious,” she teased.
I shrugged.
Maybe I didn’t want her water breaking all over my shoes. I knew quite a bit of medical related information, and usually when one was in labor, their water broke.
Just sayin’.
“Who are you here for?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’m one of the welcoming committees. I’m here for soldiers who don’t have anyone to come home to. We give them a welcome home goody bag.” I showed her the bags that had a bunch of different shit in it.