Total pages in book: 19
Estimated words: 18063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 90(@200wpm)___ 72(@250wpm)___ 60(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 18063 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 90(@200wpm)___ 72(@250wpm)___ 60(@300wpm)
What he doesn’t count on is having to use both his training and his gun to make it through the night, or finding the last thing he ever expected… someone who actually sees him, not for the man he is, but for the man he could be with just a little bit of love.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
There were a lot of things I preferred doing other than talking to a seventeen-year-old girl about my love life. I could easily list twelve without even having to think about it. The only thing worse was her trying to talk me into letting her set me up.
“You have lost your mind,” I pronounced, glaring into the rearview mirror.
“I don’t care what you say. I will save you from loneliness,” she declared dramatically and with grave conviction.
“You weren’t that big a help the last time,” I pointed out. “Your track record is crap.”
She gasped loudly, clearly deeply affronted. “That’s not fair!”
“And I’m not lonely,” I growled, which probably didn’t help. I might have come off as defensive.
“This fellow doth protest too much, methinks,” she said, murdering the Bard and confirming how I sounded at the same time.
I shot her another death glare, which hardly mattered since the first one hadn’t put the fear of God in her even a little.
“You have to be happy.”
“Who says?”
“Don’t be difficult, simply agree.”
“I’m not lonely,” I repeated.
“Yes, you are. There’s been no one since Cynthia.”
My mistake was talking to her that very first time I picked her up for an event. I should have kept things professional and stayed with “Ms. Kage” the whole time rather than taking her suggestion to call her Hannah. It was all downhill from there.
“Are you listening to me?”
Sadly, yes, but what she didn’t know was that there had been many people since Cynthia, both women and men, though no one who I exchanged last names or phone numbers with. I never slept over; I was the guy who left right after the deed was done, which was just fine with most of them. No one I’d ever had a one-night stand with expected a lifetime commitment. Some of them did expect snuggling, however, and I was shit at that. Being held in bed felt like being suffocated. Cynthia often said that it was like trying to hug an eel.
I yawned loudly.
“Oh, is that how you’re going to play this?” Hannah goaded me.
“You need to respect me and my boundaries,” I scolded her. “I’m your elder.”
Her snort of laughter let me know that me being thirty was not what she considered an elder to her seventeen. At least not where being set up on blind dates was concerned.
“Listen,” I said, pulling over and parking in front of a random house in Elk Grove Village. We were on our way to pick up a friend of hers who was her plus-one for a fundraiser she was going to. Normally, she took her boyfriend, Jake, but he was off the hook tonight. If I were him, I too would have taken every opportunity imaginable to not have to attend another auction for another cause that she and her uncle, billionaire real-estate mogul Aaron Sutter, were hosting. As it was, Hannah had asked the boy she was crazy about—I wasn’t sure if it was love or years of infatuation that had culminated in a relationship—to stay home. When I had picked her up, he already had a headset on and was starting Call of Duty with his two best friends, one of whom was Hannah’s brother. “I will die before I let you set me up on a blind date, do you understand me?”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” she agreed, nodding, eyes big, all fake innocence.
“Can we drop it?”
“Consider it dropped,” she assured me.
It was sooooo not dropped. I knew her better than that.
Pulling away from the curb, I asked her what this fundraiser was for.
“It’s for mental health facilities for the poorer communities in Chicago. There are lots of urgent cares, places to treat wounds you can see, but not a lot of free therapy for kids who have been exposed to violence outside or inside the home.”
“You just gave me a little bit of your speech, didn’t ya.”
“A teeny piece, yes,” she admitted, and her grin was wide when I checked my rearview mirror. “I don’t want to put you to sleep at the wheel.”
“Are you giving the opening address, or is Mr. Sutter?”
She scoffed. “If Uncle Aaron does it, he’ll say something like, ‘kids need help so let’s get this done already,’ and he’ll sound grouchy and people will be offended.”
“I don’t get it. He has the money to do all these things himself. He’s a billionaire, for crissakes. It’s not like he needs these people.”
“Yes, but there are set guidelines for charitable building and funding, and if he does it all himself, then it falls under his business, which is for-profit, when free mental health for underprivileged kids would be nonprofit, and it’s a lot of red tape, and even though he has several foundations that he can build under, getting anything done could take years.”
“That’s messed up that he can’t simply go in and put up a building.”