Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 96167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
His heart stuttered painfully. Her confession was so fragile, bleak, and…inaccurate. But he’d thought the same about her once, before he started watching her. The tough girl from his childhood had grown into every bit the fierce, beautiful woman he’d imagined she would be.
“I miss…us,” she whispered. “But I’m afraid, if we met again, I’d find that the concept of us is just a jagged mote of a memory. I don’t think I could handle that. I want that part of my life to remain real. Untarnished.”
She had no idea how much of her childhood was a lie. But the thing between him and her?
“What we had…have…” He closed his eyes, fighting the impulse to snap at her for doubting them. “It doesn’t get more real than that.”
“People change. How can you be so sure?”
Over the years, his need for her hadn’t faded. It had become a living, starving thing inside him, ruling his fucking world. There was something else, though. Something beyond his desire to take, overpower, and claim.
It felt like a dark, festering mass knotting around his organs, strangling him with nothingness. Did it have a name? He rubbed his forehead, searching for a way to identify the persistent, agonizing…what?
He opened his eyes. Loss. That empty feeling, the hollow pit in his soul, was her absence. He mourned her. Deeply and endlessly.
“Remember the shack on the north side of the grove?” He traced the edge of the screen, lost in the fuzzy outline of her lying in the grass.
“Mierda.” She laughed. “I was convinced a cannibal lived there.”
“Not just any cannibal. A big, hairy one that buried bones—”
“Children’s bones.”
“—under the floorboards.” He grinned.
“I didn’t make that shit up.” She sounded defensive, but a smile teased through her voice. “Or maybe I did, but I swear I heard their cries from my bedroom window.”
“That was Luisa riding her boyfriend in the backseat of his car.”
“Oh, God.”
A heavy hush settled between them. He wasn’t sure if she was thinking about her sister or the night she finally entered the shack.
“You were so determined to get me to go in there.” She let out a ragged exhale. “I was horrified by the idea.”
“Do you remember what I told you?”
“The fear will haunt me,” she said quietly, “until I step inside and show it my teeth.”
“You took that quite literally.”
He hadn’t known the true meaning of painfully hard until he’d watched her strut her sexy ass inside that dark shack, holding the flashlight like a weapon and baring her teeth.
The moment she’d realized there was no cannibal, no rotting bones, and that she’d well and truly conquered her fear, she aimed the beam of light on her stunning smile and said, “Wanna know who I love? That guy.”
She’d turned the flashlight on his face, and he’d felt her blinding declaration like a magnetic pulse. It had electrified every inch of his body, lighting up his chest and settling at the base of his cock.
They were virgins then, her sixteen, him eighteen. In the months leading up to that night, they’d fumbled and groped without clothes on, learning how to make each other come with fingers and mouths. But the look she’d given him in that shack, her eyes aglow in the shadows of her defeated fears, he knew she’d been ready. For all of it.
He’d pinned her against the crusty wallpaper in the shack’s only bedroom and fingered her until she screamed her declaration over and over. Until his conscience had forced him to step back.
Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted Nico behind the SUV, puffing on a cigarette.
He turned back to the phone. “I should’ve fucked you that night.”
“I should’ve let you.”
His chest clenched. They hadn’t wanted their first time to be in a smelly shack. So innocent. Foolish. He thought they’d have more time, more opportunities, a lifetime of them.
Instead, he gave his virginity to a prostitute in a smelly alcove beside a dumpster.
“I wish I’d known,” she said, voice clipped, “that was our last time together.”
Neither of them had known what the next day would bring. She still didn’t know it was the Restrepo cartel that had led him away with a gun pressed against his ribs. Or why.
“When did you lose your virginity?” All these years, and he hadn’t been able to uncover her sex life. Or come to terms with it.
“I could ask you the same thing, but let’s not do this to ourselves, okay? The answers hurt too much.”
The misery in her voice gave him comfort. Thinking about her with someone else ate at him like a sickness. With her knock-out body, lethal confidence, and fuck-me eyes, she could have her pick of drooling dicks.
In one of her nine phone calls to him since her escape, she swore Van did not take her virginity. Outside of that, however, she remained tight-lipped. She didn’t discuss sex with her roommates, didn’t bring lovers home, didn’t publicly date.