Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 73192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Oh, shit was right.
I stared at the double doors of the station entrance, waiting with my heart slamming inside my chest.
The moment he breached the door, I felt something inside of me let go.
That part of me that had been holding strong just let go and I slumped in my chair, knowing that for the first time in hours, I was safe.
Tyler wouldn’t let anything happen to me.
What I hadn’t expected was for him to start yelling—at me.
He stalked toward me, an angry, almost disappointed look on his face.
My heart picked up speed and I stared at him like he was my lifeline.
“I cannot fucking believe you went and did that,” Tyler hissed. “You’ve gone and fucked up your entire record because you can’t control your goddamn urges and stay on public property. I told you this was going to bite you in the ass one day. Told. You.”
I felt my stomach drop.
I hadn’t been trespassing.
I’d still been on the water. I hadn’t even gotten out of the boat! I’d been forced out.
It hadn’t been my fault!
But did I say any of that?
Hell no.
I was too pissed off.
He hadn’t even given me a chance to explain before he’d started in on me.
“And the goddamn dog that you refuse to name…”
“Groot,” I murmured.
I’d done a lot of thinking over the last hour while I’d waited to find out my fate and one thing I decided on was the dog’s name.
Groot.
I’d loved that little character in the movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, both number one and number two. And Groot was both massively huge and tiny small. My baby Groot was small when I’d found him, but also big—and getting bigger every day.
Not to mention Groot in the movie was a little badass, just like my Groot.
Therefore, the name suited him.
“Groot.” He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Here’s the problem we’re running into. The man that lives there—the same one that I arrested—is saying that you came onto the property and wouldn’t leave despite him telling you to.”
I didn’t argue with him.
What would be the freakin’ point?
He’d already made up his mind.
“I…”
“Chief?”
Tyler looked over his shoulder at the man who’d interrupted his rant. One of his officers.
“Yeah?” Tyler sounded aggravated and annoyed that he was interrupted.
“You got a minute?”
Tyler sighed and gave me a pointed look that clearly told me to behave or else. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
I felt the first tears fall, the ones that I’d been holding in since the incident and came to the realization that I couldn’t be with a man like Tyler.
I couldn’t.
He was too strict. Too unyielding. Too mean.
I may put on a good game face, but I couldn’t handle the man. Not at all.
I wasn’t perfect—far from it.
And I never would be.
I would not spend my life apologizing for being who I was.
Not now and not ever.
He could kiss my ass.
Chapter 16
How do you lose ten pounds without cutting out Mexican food? Asking for a friend.
Tyler
“What?” I asked Rodriguez.
“You’re going to want to listen to the 9-1-1 recording before you do any more yelling,” he informed me.
I frowned. “What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.
“Just listen.”
And that was what I did for the next ten minutes. Listen to the woman that I loved beg and scream for a man to get off of her.
She’d never used his name, but it didn’t take much to guess who it was based on what Reagan was saying in those ten minutes.
Ten minutes—nine minutes and fifty-two seconds, technically—that she would never get back. Ten minutes that she was so scared for her life as she screamed for help and begged the man to get off of her.
Son of a bitch.
Closing my eyes, I counted to ten.
“She didn’t say anything,” I murmured.
“You didn’t give her a chance to,” Rodriguez informed me bluntly. “You went in there, guns blazing, because you were pissed off.”
And suddenly, I was chastised by one of my newest police officers. He was a year out of the police academy and he was looking at me with such disapproval that I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
Me, a thirty-five-year-old man, who’d been through wars and every goddamn thing imaginable that a police officer could go through, hardened and experienced and now the chief of police, being yelled at by a rookie officer and realizing that I’d made a huge mistake.
“Goddammit.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes and tried to rid myself of the tension headache. “I’m so fuckin’ stupid.”
Rodriguez grunted in response.
I knew that he agreed, though, but he didn’t want to express that verbally, which somehow just made it worse.
There was nothing he could say that could make this any worse. I was already starting to understand what I’d done and I totally understood that it wasn’t good.
She deserved better than the scene I’d just given her…regardless of what I’d just learned or not. I’d fucked up.