Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 151430 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 757(@200wpm)___ 606(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 151430 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 757(@200wpm)___ 606(@250wpm)___ 505(@300wpm)
Christ, if life had a rewind function, I’d have told her to forget about the contract and stay, signed over half my net worth, whatever she wanted if it bought me another chance.
Even if I was heartless and sporting the world’s dumbest mouth, I was still enough for her.
We were friends.
The deep, tight kind who only start to click after hating each other’s faces.
She fit in my world. We made sense. And we could’ve had it all if I’d had the courage to gird up my balls and tell her she did the impossible.
She made me fall in love.
Except, I couldn’t chain her to a life where two evil gremlins drop in whenever they want money and start raising hell.
I’m more pissed off than I realized, my blood roaring in my ears.
My thoughts propel me up the stairs and before I can blink, I’m beating my fist raw on the door of 3A.
Game show music plays from behind the door.
I’m ready to graduate to kicks in no time.
“Open up or I’ll knock the damn door down. Last warning!” I bark through the wood.
Three seconds later, the door opens narrowly, the chain still slung across it.
“What’s the big idea? Calm down. Shit, I thought someone was here to repossess the flat screen. Didn’t know it was you.”
My fist shoves through the open space and I rip the chain off, throwing it on the floor. My hands reach through, pushing the door wide open.
Dad staggers back as I come through the door, his lazy eyes wide and spinning.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Squaring my shoulders, I tower over him. He’s a small, rakish man, and it seems like he’s shrunken another inch every time I lay eyes on him.
I step forward. He steps back. Three more sprawling footsteps and he’s cornered, falling down into the leather sofa.
He cowers against the cushion.
“So, you’ve come to resort to this crude bullying now?” He makes a tsking sound. “That’s too bad. I’d expect this kind of thing out of your brother, but you? I always thought you were the smart one.”
“If you ever say anything about Nick again, I’ll fillet you like a fish.”
He’s silent.
I pull a black folder out of my jacket while his eyes flick with alarm. “Relax. I’m not here for violence. Yet. If you fuck my life up again—or Nick’s—I might reconsider. Hurt Grandma, and they’ll never find your body,” I growl.
He rolls his eyes, but I let him think I’m playing for another loaded second.
“I’m here to make a deal.”
“Deal?” he echoes, wrinkling his nose. “You’d actually pay me after...all this?”
I can see the greed, the dark hunger rising in his beady little eyes.
“No, old man. I have no heart, and most of the time my reactions are void of sanity. All of that, I get from you and Mother. Fortunately, I spent so much time with my grandparents, I learned how to be a functioning human being. I’m generous and overprotective. Mostly, I manage my anger well, thanks to them.”
“Quit preaching and get to the point,” he snarls, straightening his crooked body with one hand on the sofa.
“Here’s your payoff.” I hand him the envelope.
He raises an eyebrow but takes it cautiously.
“Don’t get too excited. It’s a one-way ticket to Kiribati. It’s a small island nation in the central Pacific and it’s the place you’re going to live out the rest of your days. I suggest you take it and don’t come back. That’s called generosity.”
“Kiribati?” he spits it back at me like something rotten. “You can’t be serious, boy.”
“I’m not finished. Your alternative is immediate arrest.”
Again, that eye roll worthy of a sixteen-year-old rather than a man in his sixties.
“You always were so dramatic,” he says with a sneer. “I’m not fucking going halfway around the world to some island exile to satisfy your ego. No deal. You can’t make me, kid.”
“Can’t I?” I cock my head, staring him down until that vicious smirk he wears so well fades. “When you open that envelope, you’ll find a copy of a criminal report that’s been filed with the SEC. It involves a lot of illicit trades with a certain pharma company, plus a hint or two of your outstanding gains from funding a biker bar fifty miles up the highway. Apparently, it went down in a serious drug bust.”
His eyes go wide and his lips open, but nothing comes out.
“We found out everything, and you’re boned. Your bullshit cost me too much this time,” I say coldly, Paige’s face flashing in my mind.
He cost me a gorgeous, whip-smart blond who loved me even when I couldn’t pour out emotions for her the way she did for me.
“So, this trip to beautiful Kiribati isn’t so much exile as it is a head start,” I say. “The material we filed should be with a special agent in forty-eight hours. I hear they’ve gotten very good at hunting people down for your sort of trouble across international lines these days.”