Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 84982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84982 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
I’d never felt the overpowering need to protect someone like I had with her. It was something that still bothered me.
Beauden Redd had been a bully. I went to high school with him, and I never once reacted to the shit he did or said to others. I had not once given a flying fuck. It didn’t concern me. He’d stayed clear of us.
Thinking back on that afternoon—when I’d been walking back to my truck from picking up a box of condoms in the pharmacy and heard a panicked, muffled cry, then followed it to find Beauden holding a girl up against the side of a dumpster—I still didn’t know what the fuck had happened. Everyone always acted as if I had no impulse control or I was unpredictable. I let them think it too. But the truth was, I always knew exactly what the fuck I was doing.
Except that day.
I’d stopped to consider doing something about the situation when big gray eyes looked over at me through ugly-ass, wide-framed glasses. When I stared at her terrified face, a switch flipped. Ice-cold rage exploded in my chest, and any sanity I had was snatched from me.
I then said his name. The threat in my voice made him step back and let her go. She looked at me, and I made the mistake of shifting my attention to her yet again. Her body was visibly shaking, and it only seemed to heighten the fury taking over me.
“Go home,” I’d told her, and she took off running.
Beauden backed away and started going in the opposite direction. I did my best to let him leave. Find some way to calm this thing inside me. But the vision of the girl and those eyes of hers kept taunting me. Fanning the flames of whatever demon inside me she’d unlocked.
When Beauden reached his car, parked behind the pizza place where he worked, he realized I’d been following him. His body tensed, and he turned around to look at me. For a moment, I wondered if he saw the evil clawing just beneath the surface where my soul should have been and realized this was it. His last breath.
Then, I’d snapped his neck.
• One •
I had told too many lies, and the Lord was teaching me a lesson.
Capri
Present Day
My New Year’s resolution was not turning out like I’d planned. Even though I had spent New Year’s Eve cutting out pictures from magazines and printing out sayings I’d found on the internet to pin on my dream board for the year, I was failing miserably at achieving them. Turned out, pinning things on a board to hang on your wall as a reminder of what you wanted didn’t mean you’d get said things. In fact, I was starting to feel as if it was jinxing me.
Sure, I had gotten the job of my dreams, but everything else was a bust. I glanced over at my board nervously, wondering if I should take the photo of last year’s Kentucky Derby down, just in case the board was bad mojo.
Being hired by the Shephard Ranch as one of their jockeys was a major deal. As in insanely big for me. I had pinched myself so much the first day there, meeting with Stellan Shephard, the owner, that I had bruises on my arms for a week. I’d have taken a role as an exercise rider if they’d offered it to me. Just to be working with one of the biggest names in horse racing. Getting to ride for them was so much more than I’d ever considered.
Granted, my parents were against me riding for them. For the past month, I’d had to listen to them complain about me being associated with the Shephards. They were dangerous people. They had too much money. They controlled too many things. They could commit murder and get away with it. I had heard it all from both of them. I also ignored everything they said.
My mother was sure if you didn’t grace the doors of the Methodist church, you were not going to get into heaven, which meant you must be a criminal. My father wasn’t as bad as her, but he was a close second with his judgmental beliefs. He thought anyone who went to a church, any denomination, was getting through those pearly gates. It was only those who didn’t go to the Lord’s house on Sunday that were bound for the pits of hell. Well, except Catholics. He was sure they were all going to hell too.
Don’t even get me started on that. It gives me a headache.
I dropped my gaze back to my phone lying in my lap. It was Friday night, and I had expected JB, the guy I’d met at the Shephard Ranch, to call me. We had gone out twice over the past few weeks, and with the way he smiled at me when I was at the ranch to ride one of the horses and how he always sought me out … well, I had hoped it was going somewhere. But it was eight, and my phone had yet to ring. I’d even skipped my workout earlier in case he called, I wanted to be ready. I was riding for the Shephards in the Belmont Derby Invitational, and I shouldn’t be skipping any workouts.