Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 87756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87756 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Things between us were fine for a while, both of us ignoring the other, pretending there wasn't history.
That all stopped when I found out Third Street sold H to my little sister, a girl who had once been like a sister to him as well. Granted, it wasn't him directly, but it happened under his watch. I handled my sister first, shipping her off to rehab even though she had only been high twice. Then I grabbed my gun and sneaked into Enzo's place, walking up behind him as he sat on the couch and put then cocked a gun against the back of his neck. "Sell my sister smack again and you won't live to regret it, Enzo."
The next time I saw him was when my friend Shooter had his girl kidnapped a year back by the Third Street gang's heroin supplier. It wasn't a warm reunion.
It was a sick thing, but I missed him.
I missed the boy I grew up with, the man I did business alongside, the face that used to sit across from me at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter dinners.
But there was no going back from what we had done.
In general, as well as to each other.
Nine
Elsie
"You shot your brother?" I heard myself ask when he stopped telling me his story.
It wasn't an easy story to hear. Worse yet, I imagined, because I came from such a privileged background. That kind of dark and twisted didn't happen in my world. In my world, the worst that you'd suffered through was someone talking behind your back, destroying your image. Maybe a little drug addiction thrown in here or there- alcohol or cocaine mostly, high society drugs. But there were no beatings and backstabbing and shooting and killing.
But the way Paine told it, with a sort of detachment, was a testament to how normal it was in his life. Like that was just how life was where he grew up.
"Yeah, baby. I shot my own brother."
"Wow," I said, sitting down on my couch and looking down at my hands for a second.
"Wanna run screaming now?" he asked and, if I wasn't mistaken, there was some kind of vulnerability in his tone. He expected me to reject him because he had a past. Maybe a wiser person would, but nothing about Paine said he was a bad person. He had done bad things to get what he wanted and needed out of his life. The same could honestly be said about men like my father. He'd sunk smaller businesses to build his up, laying off thousands of families that needed paychecks, throwing them into financial uncertainty. He did this without a thought, without a flinch. He never stopped to think about what his actions did to others, what they did to himself.
Paine did.
So I wasn't going to fault him for having a sordid, ugly past.
"No."
"You should," he said, coming over toward me, sitting down on the coffee table in front of me, our legs touching. He reached behind him and put the jewelry box down.
"Probably," I agreed. "But I don't want to."
Paine's head cocked to the side as he watched me for a minute. "Pretty rich girl wants to go slumming?"
I felt my eyes lower as I stiffened. "Don't turn me into a trope. I'm not a God damn trope. I don't want you because you are a bad boy tattoo artist who used to run a street gang. I think you're a good man. You've been good to me as a whole. So don't you dare try to pull the 'oh the poor little rich girl can't get fucked right by the rich guys so she needs some back street guy' thing on me. I deserve better than that. And, quite frankly, so do you."
Somewhere along in my speech, Paine's lips tipped up and by the time I was done, he was full-on smiling. "You want me, huh?"
I felt my eyes rolling. "Of course that was all you heard."
"You want me," he repeated, his hands landing on my knees as he slowly moved to stand, raising one hand to rest on the couch behind my head to balance his weight as his body curled, forcing me to press my head against the couch to tip my head up and look at him. His other hand slid up my thigh, over my stomach, over my breast, then cradled my jaw. "Say it," he demanded, his voice low.
I wet my lips, swallowing hard.
"I want you," I admitted because, well, I did. I wasn't the kind of woman to play coy and evade when it came to sex. I knew what I wanted; he knew what I wanted. What was the use in denying it?
"Fuck babygirl," he said, fingers stroking up over my cheek slightly. "Any idea how good that is to hear?"