Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 82060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 410(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
“Good,” he murmured, still raspy.
“Do you need water?” I asked.
He was just awake after getting a tire iron to the head, two gunshot wounds to his thighs, a stab wound to boot, but he’d lived a certain life, so he shook off the stupor and was pretty damned alert as he studied me and nodded.
I got up and used the little plastic pitcher to half fill a little plastic cup with water then I put it to his mouth.
His hand came up, fingers curling around mine as he pushed up a bit in bed, again wincing, and on his own steam took the cup from me and sipped the water.
“The bed lifts up, it’s one of those buttons,” I told him. “You gonna do that yourself too, or do you want me to do it?”
He was still studying me, guardedly, even as he took another sip.
Then he nodded. “You.”
I nabbed the control, figured out which button and pressed it.
“Tell me when,” I said to the control.
The bed whirred.
“When.”
I stopped pressing and dropped the control.
I returned my attention to him.
“Where’s Liam?” he asked.
“With Toni and Tony, seeing as today, I disowned my mother, father and Lena.”
“Baby,” he whispered, but his mouth was twitching.
Fury boiled in my veins.
“Are you being serious right now?” I asked, my voice dangerous, my eyes locked on his gorgeous, full lips.
“Maybe when I’m not in a hospital bed with a caved-in head I can explain this to you,” he said.
My eyes darted to his.
“Explain what?” I asked. “How you, for the last nine years, colluded with my sister, and then my mother and father, to be a part of our son’s life, and you didn’t tell me?”
“Lena caught me watching him on the playground one day.”
“I know.”
“She got up in my shit.”
“You’ve been unconscious for a while, Darius, and cell phone technology was invented before you took that hit for Ally. I’ve had a few conversations since then.” I leaned slightly toward him. “Heated ones.”
His lips twitched again.
Of all the—!
“This isn’t funny,” I snapped.
“Maybe you’ll get there one day,” he murmured.
A tire iron, two bullets and a knife didn’t kill him.
But I was going to.
“Taking us back, I know that too,” I declared. “About Lena getting up in your shit. About you two striking a deal. About how she eventually roped my parents in. Even about the fact that when Miss Dorothea saw us in the waiting room of this very hospital and gasped, she didn’t gasp because she didn’t know Liam existed. She gasped because you were in surgery when it was all gonna come out that all of you all,” I whirled a finger in the air, “were playing me behind my back.” My voice was rising when I finished, “Even Miss Dorothea!”
“I know you wanted Liam to know his grandma.”
“Not behind my back!” I shouted.
“We had to be careful.”
I’d heard that refrain.
And I was sick to death of it.
So my eyes narrowed.
Darius got serious. “Liam didn’t want you to know. He overheard me talking to your father about the precautions we needed to take, and he was adamant. You couldn’t know. He thought, and he was right, that it might put you in danger. You’d push for more. We had what we could have, and it was Liam’s idea, and I backed him, that we had to do it how we could to keep you safe.”
“And you give your son everything he wants.”
“Well…yeah.”
Oh my God!
Why was he so awesome and such a pain in my neck at the same damned time?
Gah!
“Does he know you used to do what you did?” I asked.
“I think he suspected, with all the care we had to take with me being with him, but I came clean to him last year, when he was old enough to get it…and after I was out.”
“So it was only me you kept in the dark.”
“Sweetheart—”
“And when our son started to pull away from his Uncle Tony, it wasn’t because he was settling into knowing it was him and me against the world. It was because he had his dad. Did you play basketball with him?”
“We had to make arrangements so no one would see us, but…yes.”
“You didn’t show to delete his Transformers and give him Tupac because he needed a growing man’s room. You showed because he told you he wanted one.”
“And he needed a growing man’s room,” Darius reiterated.
“Right,” I said crisply. “And when I sat him down and shared about his father, the reason he told me a man has to do what a man has to do isn’t because he didn’t want to hurt me by talking about his dad, a man I confessed to him I still loved. It was because his father and him were lying to me. He didn’t need me to seek you out and ask you to meet him. He’d been hanging with you for years.”