Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
“What? No. I mean… no. You seriously can’t be talking about A,” I insisted.
“Oh, please. Even you have eyes and ears. He’s hot. And that kinda slow cadence of how he speaks, mixed with that little raspy, rumbly voice? God,” she said, picking up her piece of pizza, so she could fan herself with her grease-stained paper plate.
“That’s a little much,” I said, though I’d had similar thoughts about his voice recently, so I couldn’t object too much. “But, no. The favor is actually that you just… don’t tell our friends and family about this. I mean about living with him and acting as his maid,” I clarified. “I don’t care if they know about the case. What?” I asked when she stared at me for an uncomfortably long moment.
“You know, for someone who genuinely doesn’t give a fuck, you really do care a lot what everyone else thinks,” she said.
Okay. Well. Ouch.
Violet wasn’t supposed to be the tough-love cousin. She’d always been a bit like me. A little hardass. Definitely kind of detached because work made her that way. Though, objectively, she was probably more laid-back and fun than I was.
But she damn sure wasn’t the one to give me life advice or call me out on something.
“I don’t want them worrying,” I said, though I was lying through my teeth.
“They all kind of know A. They would know you were safe enough. But, fine, I won’t say anything. So long as I can crash here for another few days while you’re gone.”
“You never hang around this long.”
“I know. But Willa’s having that dinner party. And then Luna has her birthday. And one of Billie’s fifty children has some sort of talent show,” she said, rambling off the names of our cousins. “I figure I should show my face at important events on occasion.”
It showed what a shitty cousin I was that I’d totally forgotten about all three of those things. I would remember eventually. Usually because someone would remind me, or because I set an alert on my phone.
“Should I make excuses for you not being there?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I told her. “I will try. So don’t say anything in advance. And, yeah, you can stay here. Just make sure you dump any of the food and take the trash out before you leave. I don’t want to come home to a science experiment.”
She had already stocked the fridge, despite being a take-out addict. I pretty much always kept it empty due to that aforementioned science project aversion.
“Got it,” she said, nodding. “Now, get to packing.”
That was exactly what I did, and pretended to ignore her when she called out to remember to pack Mr. Good Vibrations.
He stayed right there in my drawer.
Where he belonged.
I wasn’t going to need him.
As if my body was set on betraying me, though, I woke up from a sex dream about Andres, leaving me sweaty and frustrated, with an aching sensation between my legs that I was going to go ahead and blame on a long dry spell, and not the man himself.
A few hours, and a very cold shower later, I was pulling up to Andres Alcazar’s sprawling mansion.
Climbing out of my ride share, I was met almost immediately by two burly guys at the gates, the telltale bulges under their shirts letting me know they were carrying.
“Let her in,” A’s voice sounded from the little speaker inside of the guard booth.
Yes, the man had a guard booth.
The two men exchanged a glance, but one hit the button to open the gate, and the other waved me in.
As the gate slid closed again behind me, I had the strangest thought pop into my head.
There is no going back now…
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hope
I’d seen the mansion more than a few times, what with growing up in Navesink Bank and all.
In some other lifetime, the place had belonged to a truly vile human being named Lex Keith, a man who trafficked women, and had once held and tortured my aunt—in all the ways a man can torture a woman—when she was underage. An act that eventually led her to become a bit of a vigilante herself.
And the woman who, eventually, set a bomb to the mansion where her attacker lived.
I don’t think anyone figured the place would be inhabited again after that. Who wanted to own a house where such horrific things had happened?
But after the place was demolished and then rebuilt, and enough time had passed that most people forgot about the legacy, it made sense that such prime real estate got snatched up.
There weren’t a lot of places left in Navesink Bank that had so much land and privacy as the former Keith estate.
It looked like Andres had put all the old security measures back into full effect.
A tall, unclimbable gate that surrounded the whole grounds. Men. Dogs. Cameras. Cameras everywhere.