Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Has Dennis shown up yet?” Mere asked as Vega flipped through movie selections, a task she seemed to find incredibly important.
“Wait,” Vega said, looking over. “Dennis is… missing?” she asked.
“Sort of,” Mere said, glancing over at me.
“He hasn’t been answering his phone. Hasn’t been to the shop. He’s not at his house. But I don’t really know Dennis well enough to know if he might have needed to skip town to see family or some shit like that.”
“Shouldn’t someone… let the police know?” Vega asked. “I know, I know. I’m not always on the best of terms with law enforcement myself, but they do tend to be the ones you want helping to locate people.”
Sure.
But filing a missing person’s report was typically done by family. I didn’t even know if he had any.
It also meant that there would be people snooping around, looking for clues. Sticking their noses in my business.
“I plan to if I don’t hear from him soon. It’s only been a couple of days and he wasn’t expecting me, so I can’t be sure what his plans were,” I said. “How is the woman who works at the shop?” I asked, looking back at Mere.
“Rayna. She’s in the ICU, but I haven’t gotten any more details than that.”
I’d have to see if I could talk to an old friend I knew at the hospital. Maybe they could get me more information. Had she overdosed? Fallen in the shower? Stroke? Or was she, possibly, attacked?
That last one made my stomach clench. Not necessarily because I was worried about myself. I was armed. I had my brother for backup. I could have half the New York City mafia up in Maine in a few hours if I needed it.
But if Dennis was missing, and Rayna who worked at the store was injured, some not great shit was pointing back to one location.
Where Mere worked.
All by herself.
I suddenly had the strangest urge to drop everything else, and start “working” in Dennis’s office just to keep an eye on her.
But even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do that.
What I could do, though, was be there on delivery days. That was my next step. To have a chat with those guys, see what was going on, when was the last time they heard from Dennis, all that kinda shit.
Conversation died down then, cut off by the opening credits of the movie Vega had finally decided on.
Beside me, Mere picked at her food, playing with it more than eating it. And I noticed her gaze on me often. Looking at my profile, my hands, everywhere, but only because she didn’t think I noticed. So I went on pretending I didn’t, allowing her to get her fill.
I don’t know if Vega just liked that kind of movie, or if she had ulterior motivations, but sometime after we abandoned our plates onto the coffee table, the good guy in the movie was walking down the hall only to have a massive fucking jump scare from the bad guy that had Mere yelping, jerking, and grabbing my wrist in a vice grip.
I watched the panic play out on her pretty features. Not so much for what was happening on the screen, but because she realized she’d grabbed me, was unsure how to untangle herself without feeling awkward.
And what did I do?
Make shit even more awkward by sliding my arm back so our palms touched instead. I even twined my fingers between hers.
“Don’t worry,” I said, leaning close like I was sharing a secret. “I’ve seen this one. The good guy makes it. Just barely, but he makes it,” I told her, getting a sweet little smile from her as her gaze went back to the TV.
I caught Vega’s smirk as she looked at our hands before shifting her focus to the movie again as well.
She seemed to genuinely be interested.
But Mere seemed almost to be staring through it, and her hand was a little twitchy in mine. Unsure.
She had small fucking hands.
I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed that before.
But mine seemed to practically swallow hers up.
I was going to hell for it, knowing she was already feeling a little conflicted, but my thumb moved out, tracing over the skin on the side of her hand, then the sensitive spot under her wrist.
I could even feel the little tremble that moved through her at the contact.
I found myself both thankful and resentful of Vega’s presence right then. Because if we were alone, I was pretty sure my hand would have kept exploring, finding and exploiting her sensitive little trigger spots, then maybe pressing her back on her pristine couch, feeling my cock press against…
Fuck.
I really needed to stop having those kinds of thoughts about the woman.
First, because everything about her said she was not a casual fun kind of girl. And I had been nothing but a casual fun kind of guy.