Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 89145 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89145 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
“Harder, papi. Fuck, that’s it. Oh my fucking God, you feel good. Please don’t stop.”
Anger and desire weren’t the best combination.
I swallowed hard and stared unseeingly at the steak.
He had to be drunk in order to text me something like that.
“Are you okay, West?”
No, I fucking wasn’t.
“I’m fine. Just a check-in with the kids. All is well.” I faked a smile and returned to my food.
Thank fuck, my drink soon arrived.
I wasn’t gonna be able to drive home.
Uber, it was.
I released a breath as we left the restaurant, and I’d hoped for fresh, crisp air…to clear my head.
That wasn’t happening in July.
What a fucking disaster of a night.
“Where did you park?” Lance asked.
I pulled out my phone to go to my Uber app. “Uh, garage by 15th and Locust,” I replied. “But considering how much I let loose with the drinks, I’ll pick up my car tomorrow.”
I wanted to get out of the city before I did anything stupid. Alfie lived just a few blocks away, and that was a circle of hell I didn’t need to visit.
“I don’t suppose you wanna go to a bar?”
Fuck. Time to end this on a decent note. He deserved an explanation from me.
“Unfortunately, I’ll be up way too early because my children don’t care that Sundays were meant for resting,” I chuckled. “I’d like to apologize if I came off as distracted tonight, though. It’s my first date after the divorce—I think I told you. So I guess you can say I’m rusty.”
He smiled, and he might even have looked a bit relieved. “I totally get it. I hope you’ll text me if you wanna do this again sometime.”
I don’t.
I smiled back. “I will.”
CHAPTER 4
Alfie Scott
“Do you still have the gun I gave you?”
I eyed Kellan in the rearview before I made a turn on Spruce. “Yeah?”
He nodded once and looked out the window. “Start keeping it close when you work. You should hit up a shooting range once a week too. I’ll help you get sorted with the paperwork and a legal gun, which you’ll carry, but we don’t wanna use anything that’s registered.”
“I have that covered,” I replied. I wasn’t completely new. If I was keeping a gun or two around the house, I wanted to know everything there was to know. I could admit I hadn’t gone to the range once a week, but at least once a month the past three years. Around the time I moved out of West’s house, once a day for quite a while.
Ironically, my first run-in with guns had been because of West. He was a gun owner, though not for protection purposes. He’d competed in IPSC and archery as a young snob with too much money.
Then he’d found golf…
“Really? Fuckin’ A.” Kellan was pleased.
A lot was changing, but I didn’t mind. If anything, I welcomed every distraction. Every appointment, every errand.
Kellan could come off as cold and calculating around work, but I appreciated his method. He was protective too, and he wasn’t giving me anything I couldn’t handle. The weeks I didn’t have the kids, I was going to help him monitor and orchestrate shipments coming up from Miami. The rest of my responsibilities stayed the same. I handled his scheduling, and every crew boss who wanted a sit-down had to go through me.
In return, I was gonna make more money, the security around my house would be tightened, and I was getting a new car for the sole purpose of keeping work and personal stuff separated. The car sort of came with a one-bedroom condo near Mick’s pub, which would function as my office and the place where I switched between work mode and private. All things Sons would be kept there. Both Kellan and Finn were adamant about keeping shit separate. Home was sacred. No work around children and spouses, as Finn had said. If the Feds raided my place, they shouldn’t find anything.
I’d seen Finn twice this week, and I’d had to mentally apologize to my mother every time, ’cause I was fucked. I liked Finn a lot. He was so damn family-oriented and protective. Not in a million years would I have expected him to personally set up an appointment to have his guys upgrade my security system. Granted, it was his company I was formally employed by, but he had people to do shit for him. And still, he’d been all ranty about making sure nobody who wasn’t welcome would ever enter my home where my kids were.
I’d been around a minute, so I wasn’t too worried to begin with. I knew what our cops were busy doing, I knew the Sons’ local enemies, and I knew I’d barely be on any radar. That wasn’t naïve; it was a fact. I’d still be a background worker, for lack of a better term. Because as Kellan had pointed out, they tried to keep the management squeaky-clean.