Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 72543 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 290(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72543 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 290(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
The brightness of the moon and stars burn through the windows, illuminating the room and I walk to the bar as I pour a shot of the most expensive whiskey I own. After which I step to the window and think of that moment when Alana was straddling me, begging me to stay with her, and yet I’m here. Fuck me, how has this night become this. I should be with her, but I don’t even know what that means.
There’s a shift in the air and while I don’t turn, I know Caleb’s energy. He walks to the bar, pours a drink, and steps to my side. For long seconds that stretch to a full minute we just stand there until he says, “You know what we have to do. It’s the only way out for both of us.”
It feels convenient. Like a trap and I don’t bite. I don’t even look his direction. “You do what you have to do. I’ll do what I have to do.”
Seconds tick by with heavy hands punching at the silence before he downs his drink, sets the glass on the window ledge and then turns and walks away. I snatch my phone from my pocket and text Blake: Caleb was just here, suggesting we partner up against my father. It was a trap. All of this is a trap. I’ll call you in the morning. I don’t want to talk about it tonight, but I do want to have a conversation.
I send the message and only then do I notice the unread message from Alana: You have no idea how much restraint I’ve shown not calling and texting. I need you. Please come home.
I plant my hand on the window, a streak of lightning in the distance, warning me that I’m the calm before the storm. My chin lowers to my chest with the punch of emotions I feel that only Alana can stir in me. She’s “home” waiting on me. It’s everything I have ever wanted. But I’m beginning to think it’s everything my father has ever wanted, too.
Chapter forty-three
I enter the apartment to the dim glow of a living room lamp, the sound of country music, and the sweet scent of perfume scenting the air, but Alana is nowhere in sight. I shrug out of my jacket and hang it on the coatrack, and then just stand there in the entryway a moment, allowing myself to drink in how damn good it feels to come home and know she’s here. After all the bullshit I’ve waded through this damnable night, this feeling—her presence in my life—makes the battle worth the scars.
That is, until I eye the dark bedroom, and there’s a punch in my gut with the idea that she’s not here at all. Adrenaline surges through me, and I’m across the room in less than a minute, standing inside the doorway and flipping on the light, only to find the bed tucked and the room empty. The realization guts me right here, where I stand. I turn and face the frame, pressing my hand over my head, chin dipping low with the impact of her leaving. Damn it, my father’s been leading her mother around like a pet he plans to put down. I had to get a read on Caleb.
I shove off the wall. I’m going to get her. No more running from each other.
I head for the door, and there’s a shift in the air—a soft whisper of a sound that halts me in my steps and draws my gaze toward the chairs. That’s when Alana shifts in the one she’s claimed, and I can see her there when moments before I could not. Relief floods my system with the intensity of a tsunami, and it actually takes me a minute to fully process that emotion. The idea of her being gone destroyed me. There was a time when I would have seen my reaction to her as weakness, because my father did.
Not anymore.
My father is a fool in a CEO chair he wears like a disguise of genius.
I will bleed for her. And he will, too, if that’s what it takes to protect her.
I cross the room and find her curled up in the same chair I’d been sitting in earlier. I kneel in front of her, drinking in the sweet image of her in slumber. Her long, dark lashes are wispy half-moons against her pale skin, her brown hair silk against the satin of a robe I can only assume she wore for me. She is beautiful, peaceful even, when I know she was feeling anything but when she fell asleep. And as much as I want to touch her in this moment, I do just what I did all those times as a teen when she’d fall asleep next to me in my family’s media room: I draw out the moment, watching her, savoring how damn beautiful she is, how perfect. But the difference between now and the past is that way back then, I’d hungered to make her mine, and now she is mine.