Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 45063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 225(@200wpm)___ 180(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 225(@200wpm)___ 180(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
I can always tell Adam I ran into her by coincidence. Would he believe that, after what I did, after the fight?
“Are you hungry?” Harper asks, as though finding the silence difficult.
I shake my head, staring hard at her. “Not for food.”
That makes her cheeks blush gorgeously, reminding me of the way her round ass looked as I buried my hands in her flesh, pushing them together and slipping my manhood in between.
I push those thoughts away. They take me far too close to the edge, and anyway, my woman deserves better than to be treated like that.
I’ll let the savage out… eventually.
“Adam never told you I grew up in an orphanage,” I say.
She looks at me as though eager for more. Her eyes widened in that intoxicating way. “He never talked about your personal life.”
I shrug. “It’s not a big deal. I didn’t have it as bad as some others. My parents were alcoholics. I don’t remember much about them, except for the yelling and the fights. Then they lost custody. I was raised in the system. I went through a period in my twenties…”
Her hand slides across the table. When I move mine away, she flinches, as if waking from a dream—a dream in which she can squeeze my hand in comfort without blowing our worlds to pieces.
Her hand returns to her cocoa.
“I drank,” I tell her. “A lot. I repeated the mistakes of my parents. Luckily, I never did anything bad. I’d finish my classes at med school. Then I’d come home and study some more, drinking myself to sleep. One morning I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror, and dammit…”
My voice is shaking. “I never talk about this stuff.”
Harper looks at me patiently. The pizza joint bleeds away behind her, and she’s in the birthing bed, the same expression on her face as I cradle our first child.
“It was like my dad was staring back at me,” I tell her.
I’m tempted to mention Eva, but then I remember what Adam said, what Eva herself said, and I let that thought drop away.
“That’s when you stopped?” Harper asks.
“Yeah. I had to. I couldn’t repeat those mistakes.”
“Where are they now?”
I take a sip of my water. “Gone. Both of them.”
“G…”
She’s about to say gone, but then our eyes meet, and she gets the point.
“They drank and drank, and then it was the end.”
We sit quietly for a while, and then I laugh darkly. “I told you, it’s depressing.”
“Maybe it is,” she says. “But it’s also your life. I want to know you, as much of you as you’ll let me.”
She bites down, as if she wishes she could take the words back.
“What’s wrong?”
Shaking her head, she says, “I sound like a stalker weirdo.”
“No, you don’t,” I tell her firmly. “You sound like…”
I trail off when the door opens, and two men walk into the bright sauce-scented room. One of them is tall with a lean face and a mustache I remember well.
“What is it?” Harper asks.
“That man.” I nod across the room. “He works for Adam.”
Harper turns, looks, then turns back to me, her mouth falling open. The man’s standing at the counter with his back to us.
“What do we do?” Harper whispers.
I swallow, hating what I’m about to say. Suddenly, the idea of telling Adam this was a coincidence seemed ridiculous. It would be insulting to lie to him about something so unlikely.
“We have to go. You leave first.”
Harper nods slowly. Hurt flits across her eyes, and my chest tightens in response. I feel like a bully.
She stands, head bowed, pulling her hood up as she quickly makes for the door.
The man doesn’t see her as she walks out. He sits at the other end of the bar, not looking in my direction.
I follow Harper, averting my gaze from him. It wouldn’t be a big deal if he saw me.
I need to see if Harper’s okay. She’s leaning against my car, her arms folded.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“It’s not your fault,” she murmurs, staring at the ground. “Adam’s my brother. He’s your best friend. You didn’t choose that any more than I did.”
“But still…”
She flinches away when I raise my hand to touch her shoulder, glaring at me. Her eyes glisten as though she could cry at any moment, but she’s somehow holding the tears back.
“What if he sees? What if somebody else sees? We have to be careful, remember?”
I open the car door and climb into the driver’s seat. My head is full of voices, all of them telling me in a thousand different ways to reveal the truth to Harper, the fullness of my need, of my purpose for her.
She sits pressed against the passenger-side door as though she doesn’t want to be close to me.
“You deserve better,” I say. “Earlier, when I went savage on you, you deserve better than that. And in there, rushing out before you even got to finish your drink…”