Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
I tried not to feel guilt as the gunshots rang out.
I’d done everything I could do.
At personal risk to myself and my son.
Some awful part of me hoped that Warren wouldn’t come back, that his men wouldn’t. That I could get free, run to my son, and get us out of this mess.
But just as the hope was growing, I watched as Denny half-carried Warren back to the car, both their eyes panicked.
The guards… didn’t make it back.
Lord knows I didn’t mourn for their loss, but I did shoulder some of the guilt for it by warning the handsome stranger.
“God damn fucking slick Aurelio Grassi,” Denny ground out as he got behind the wheel, turned over the car, and peeled out of the lot of the docks.
Aurelio Grassi.
That was his name.
I hoped he was alive.
He seemed like a decent man.
I’d all but forgotten that such a thing existed.
“How bad is it?” Denny asked, looking over at Warren, who was peeling off his suit jacket.
“I’ll live long enough to make that motherfucker pay for this.”
No one said another word the whole way home.
Not even as Denny backtracked to free my arm from the bar.
No one even followed me inside to make sure I didn’t make a run for it.
Everyone was too worried about their king being shot.
As I gathered up my son, ice cream dried all over his shirt, but still red-eyed and splotchy-cheeked, I wondered if this was my chance.
For just a second.
Before the cavalry arrived.
Half a dozen cars pulling into the driveway.
“Not yet, buddy,” I told Judah, pressing a kiss to his curls. “But someday,” I promised.
Someday.
CHAPTER THREE
Aurelio
There was a tension in my spine as I pulled into the lot of the docks the night of the deal.
I couldn’t pinpoint a reason why, and eventually chalked it up to unease at this unusual situation. Knowing the guys and I would be carting around a shitton of illegal guns until we could put them in the plastic containers I had waiting for them, then tuck them safely into a storage unit.
Then we would meet with the bikers, make a deal, and let them handle it.
My mind was on a million of those things when I heard a female voice—so unexpected in this place at all, let alone at night, and on an evening with a meeting like this going on—call out toward me.
My head whipped over to find a black SUV sitting there, engine off, the back window rolled halfway down.
I saw her first.
Because, fuck, how could I not?
I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of not knowing exactly what you were looking for until you saw it—the right car when it was time for an upgrade, the perfect gift for someone hard to shop for, the kind of food you didn’t even know you were craving—but this was that times a fucking million.
If there was a physical manifestation of a woman I could see on my arm, at my side, for the rest of my life, this was the one.
Judging by how much of her I could see through the window, she was tall, which I’d always known was a preference of mine. She was maybe a little too much on the thin side, but that was nothing some of my cooking couldn’t fix.
She had wavy warm brown hair cut on a long bob—a ‘lob’ Elsie had called it once when she’d come home sporting one she’d immediately regretted because she felt it made her face too round. But on this mystery woman, it perfectly suited her face with its slightly sharp, square jaw, highlighting her full mouth, her delicate nose, and these gorgeous amber eyes.
Not a stitch of makeup.
Still the most beautiful goddamn thing I’d ever seen.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that her arm was jacked up at a weird angle. And that a fucking handcuff was around her delicate wrist.
Warren, because it had to be Warren fucking Graves, had handcuffed this woman in his car.
Why?
Afraid she would run away?
Was he keeping her prisoner?
“Angel,” I said, voice soft. “What—“
“It’s an ambush,” she cut me off, voice frantic.
Then she told me something that I probably should have guessed all along, since Warren had given me bad vibes since I’d met him.
That he was going to double-cross me.
That he was going to kill us. Then, of course, take the guns for himself.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a squeaky voice as I drew closer to the car, wondering how long it would take me to pick her handcuff lock since I didn’t have a key on me.
“I have to get you out of here,” I told her.
There wasn’t a single bone in my body that was going to let me walk away from a woman cuffed in a car, helpless.
“No! You can’t! I can’t,” she added, and there was something so final, so sure about her words that they did give me pause. It was the kind of desperation in her voice that said that even if the door to her cage was flung open, there would be something preventing her from escaping to freedom.