Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 74227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Krisney shifted in her seat, pulling my attention away from the sickly-sweet sight in front of me. “Now spill.”
Oh, I wanted to spill alright, but not the words that I’d been so close to spilling before. Now I just wanted to spill my lunch in the form of vomit.
“Nothing to spill,” I hedged.
And there wasn’t.
Seeing that girl, and then the Andie chick, wrapping their arms around Baylor like they were one big, happy family was the exact thing I needed to get my head on straight again.
And honestly, it was a good thing.
I didn’t have the time, nor the desire, to deal with that again.
Been there, done that, had the broken heart to prove it.
Why was I here again?
On that thought, I got up and walked away before I could embarrass myself by crying, leaving all four women to watch me go with varying shades of confusion on their faces.
It was probably the first time they ever had someone walk away instead of answering their question.
But I didn’t care.
I’d learned to protect myself the only way I knew how.
By walking away.
***
Baylor
With sweat dripping down my face, I walked over to our group and scanned the crowd of people left over after the game.
“Where’s Lark?” I asked.
I was eager to speak to her again.
I’d watched her leave sometime during the game, but had assumed she’d gone to get a drink or something. But I hadn’t been able to spot her again anywhere in the complex.
“She left before the game started,” Kennedy, Evander’s wife, answered.
I looked over at her.
“But hadn’t she come to watch the game?”
Kennedy opened her mouth to answer, but Krisney, who was as far away from Reed as she could without breaking off from the group, answered before she could.
“I asked her if she wanted to come. She said yes, but agreed only to stay for as long as she felt like it.” She hesitated. “Apparently, she was done.”
My eyes twitched.
“Baylor?”
I looked over and down, turning slightly to the right to allow Adrienna to enter the huddle.
“Hey there, Adrienna. You heading home?”
Adrienna nodded her head, giving me a full-throttled smile. “My grandpa is coming to pick me up tomorrow. I have to be well rested, he said, because we’re going to Sea World in the chopper.”
My brows lifted.
“You are?” I asked. “That sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Adrienna’s grandfather was Ruben Kelly, the same man who’d given me the money when his son had nearly ruined my life.
“If you say so,” she giggled then. “Grandpa still thinks I’m all of five years old. I told him that Sea World really isn’t something I’m interested in anymore, but he refuses to see reason.”
“Your grandfather likes to remember that you are his daughter’s daughter.” Andie came up to her daughter. “You need to be nice to him, and act like he’s doing the best thing ever. One day he won’t be around anymore, and you’ll miss him.”
Wasn’t that the truth.
I grinned at Andie.
It was a small world.
A lot of years ago, Andie had been married to a good buddy of mine. A man who had died while we were deployed.
I’d lost touch with her up until the accident that’d nearly killed me.
Andie had come back from wherever she’d gone, and in that time Adrienna hadn’t been the only one to do some growing up. Andie had, too.
Left in the old Andie’s place was this woman who I rarely saw smile unless she was watching her daughter succeed.
“Not to interrupt,” Parker, another man that now worked with us butted in. “But Baylor, are you gonna need a ride or will you be catching one with one of your brothers?”
I looked over to find Parker staring at me intently.
What he wasn’t doing was looking at the woman at my side.
His eyes were solely on me and not on anything else.
“Nah, man,” I said. “House is about a half mile walk from here. I planned on hoofing it.” I paused. “Thank you for the offer, though.”
Parker nodded and left without another word.
“Nice of him to stay for the after-party,” Travis muttered to no one in particular.
I snorted.
“Y’all aren’t a very welcoming lot,” Rafe said as he grabbed his bag and slung it over his shoulder. “It takes an act of Congress to get you to do anything without your certain group of people.”
With that, he left, too.
Which didn’t surprise me.
Rafe was another one of ours. He was new as well.
When Dante had decided to call it quits with Hail Auto Recovery, he’d left a void that was just now being filled.
With Rafe, Brock, and Parker stepping up, it’d given us the additional help we’d needed, and it was only recently that we’d each gone from working seven days a week to five.
It was a breath of fresh air, if you asked me.