Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127484 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 510(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
“Go inside.” The man jerked his head to the building. “Pack a bag.”
He didn’t move as if he was going with me to supervise, ensure I didn’t call anyone, try to escape. It was extremely cocky. Or maybe it was because he expected me to understand just how really screwed I was. There was no escape, no one to rescue me.
I was going somewhere with him, and there was no fight to be had, despite the animal inside me clawing for it. Instead, I got out of the car, walked into my building, ascended the elevator, entered my apartment and packed a bag. Within an hour, we were leaving Manhattan, the island that held my entire life.
I wondered if I’d ever see it again.
Because if I did, it meant I had been convinced to marry a monster.
And if I didn’t, I was fairly certain it would mean I was dead.
I supposed it wouldn’t matter then, would it?
Three
Piper
How had I gotten twisted into this situation?
By attending my sister’s birthday party. That was it. That was my sin.
The birthday party was an apology, an attempt at groveling by her boyfriend Joey. The mobster.
Is that what we called them? Mobsters?
Not that titles really mattered at this point.
And at that point, the birthday party point, I didn’t know he was in any way involved with the mob. I knew he was an asshole, because my sister had been sitting on my sofa, crying into a tub of Chunky Monkey just last week over him. I made a rule to dislike any man who made my sister cry.
Which meant I disliked all of her boyfriends.
Daisy dealt with our daddy issues by choosing men who treated her badly, under the impression that she could turn them right. Fix them. Under the impression that by doing that, she’d somehow erase our own past, posthumously turning our father into a good man.
And those men, after treating her badly, cheating on her, standing her up, stealing from her—none of them had laid hands on her, thank God—would come crawling back. Because even assholes understood that Daisy Matthews was a catch. She was ethereal in her beauty, which had brought them in in the first place. Golden ringlets, wild around her heart-shaped, delicate face. Wide blue eyes, high cheekbones, full lips. Petite too, so even the smallest men—pun intended—felt big around her, strong. Her bones were slight; she barely had an ounce of body fat on her. She couldn’t, not to be a dancer.
Ballet. She truly was a talented ballerina. Worked herself to the bone to do it too. She was just starting to see the fruits of her labor, after graduating from Juilliard—I scraped together every penny I could to get her there, but even with scholarships it was tough—she had landed a job at the prestigious Waldorf Company.
Just the way she carried herself was magical, her steps light, graceful, her body moving to silent music. Watching her dance … transcendent.
And men, bad ones, seemed to gravitate toward her because she was good, she was pure, and she had a talent that they instinctively wanted to taint. To ruin.
I’d tried to protect her from them, tried to convince her that she deserved so much better, but that didn’t work. Not on deep-seeded childhood issues. Not with her trying to find a version of our father and fix him, prove he could still be saved. That he could love her. So I just watched, my heart breaking a little more every time I saw a man chip away at her brilliance, hoping that she’d put herself on a pedestal so high that none of these men could reach her.
Joey didn’t give me much hope.
Even if the birthday party he was throwing was at the exclusive Italian restaurant, Rosso, in Little Italy. I’d heard about it. How you couldn’t get a reservation unless you were connected to the right people, rich or famous. I was none of those things, therefore, I had not eaten there.
I was a huge foodie, had been desperate to dine there, but that didn’t mean Joey’s connections charmed me. The more bells and whistles a man of Daisy’s managed to pull off, the more red flags I saw.
Because a real, good man didn’t need fancy restaurants, expensive gifts or trips across the world to prove he was good.
Good men didn’t need to prove anything.
Well, at least that’s what I figured from books, movies and secondhand accounts from friends in healthy relationships.
I had not had one. A relationship. I had my own daddy issues. Daisy treated hers by throwing herself headfirst into any kind of relationship that promised love, while I treated mine by avoiding emotional intimacy like the plague. The men I did sleep with were all boring, unthreatening and more or less vanilla.
Even I recognized that I was a little jaded, so I let Daisy drag me to the party. And yes, the glee in my younger sister’s eyes helped. The hope. And selfishly, I did want to experience Rosso.