Things We Burn Read Online Anne Malcom

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary, Sports, Virgin Tags Authors:
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Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
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She wasn’t wrong. I’d been ignorant of him and the power of social media for a long time, but since I’d been researching him, I couldn’t deny the league of fame he was in. It was hard to remember when I was with him. Because he wasn’t Kane ‘The Devil’ Rhodes when we were together.

I still didn’t know how I felt about that. We’d enjoyed a relationship in the shadows, drinking coffees together in the early morning, no realities of who we truly were in the daylight.

That time had ended. I was with someone famous. Hugely famous. He had millions of followers on social media, was photographed wherever he went. And whenever a woman was with him, she was picked apart.

By accident or grace, that hadn’t happened with me. Yet.

A deep dread rolled in my stomach, knowing it was just a matter of time before that happened unless I ended it. I had a small amount of attention and fame, but I had managed to remain uninteresting enough that people didn’t want to know about Avery Hart the person. Any kind of attention that Kane enjoyed, even an ounce of it, was too much for me.

Yet there I was.

“That purse is ridiculous,” I muttered as Keira took longer than she should’ve trying to arrange her phone, lip gloss and credit card just so the thing closed.

“This is not just a purse,” she said, aghast. “This is the Fendi Baguette from the Sex and the City movies. Do you know how hard these are to get? It’s a collector’s item.”

I rolled my eyes. Another way that Kiera and I were vastly different—I did not get excited over purses, certainly not overpriced ones that the designer paid big bucks to put in a movie in order to create a false scarcity and try to justify the price tag.

Not that I would ever say that to Kiera, never judging her for the things that made her happy. She worked damn hard for every cent she made.

“It’s my thurdy gift to myself,” she declared, admiring the bag. I took back every judgmental thing I thought about it. If something as simple as a bag could bring that look of childlike joy to my friend’s face, who cared about the price or the false scarcity?

“You’re thirtieth?” I echoed. “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

Kiera shot me a vicious gaze. “It absolutely is not a little late for that since I’m only twenty-nine.”

I kept my lips pressed shut. Kiera had been twenty-nine for three years. Another thing I didn’t understand about women—how we were desperate to seem younger, not just denying the aging process but spending thousands on making it look like we were perpetually in our twenties.

I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay, so you’re twenty-nine, and it’s an early thirtieth gift.”

“Thurdy, not thirty,” she said.

“Thurdy?” I repeated.

She nodded. “A thurdy gift is something a woman in her thirties or older buys for herself. It’s most often rather expensive and from a casual observer’s gaze impractical, but it brings her joy and signifies the life she’s building for herself.” She grinned at me. “I coined the term. Think it’ll catch on?”

The roar of the crowd jerked us from our conversation. Music was playing so loud it became a second heartbeat inside my body. I watched in awe as bikes sped by, unaware that was possible.

Then Kane was announced.

The crowd went wild. I could feel the change in energy. The power that he wielded.

“Fuck yeah!” Kiera shouted from beside me, grinning widely at me and quite obviously embracing the energetic atmosphere.

I couldn’t embrace anything.

My heart stuttered as Kane went through the air at a height that seemed inconceivable. It only resumed at an uneven beat when he landed back on the ground, wheels first, carrying on the track at a dizzying speed.

More roars. My pulse was racing at a speed that made me feel like I’d just drank four espressos. I was more wired than I had been in any kitchen.

And that was just from watching.

I felt excitement, I felt dread, I felt immense fear. That was Kane. Doing this. And he did this constantly. Rode hand in hand with death. This was the man I was with.

I loved it. Hated it.

Music boomed through the stadium, his bike flipping and flying seemingly with the rhythm. He hung off it, holding on to the handlebars with one hand in a move that seemed to defy physics. It was like a dance. It was an art, I realized. Not just someone hopping on a motorcycle to prove they were a man, like Kane had told me. No, this required skill. Though the ones who came before him were impressive, there was a tangible difference. I understood why he was so famous. Because he was the best in the world. He made it look effortless.



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