Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 133738 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 669(@200wpm)___ 535(@250wpm)___ 446(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 133738 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 669(@200wpm)___ 535(@250wpm)___ 446(@300wpm)
My heart started beating in a strange way I’d never felt before.
It was like there was nothing in my chest cavity, it was hollow, save my heart, and my heart was thumping in there, all alone.
I snatched the handset so fast, my hand was a blur.
And I nearly came out of my skin listening to the warnings about how the police were recording our visit.
When it was done, his name jumped out of my throat.
“Mick?”
“Hey, Evie,” he said, his voice wrong, wrong, wrong.
Tentative.
Trembling.
Scared.
My cocky, criminal, wastrel, good-time, bad-decisions big brother didn’t get scared.
I leaned forward. “Mick—”
“You’re gonna get a text, honey. Take it, and…you know. Just take it and do right by your brother.”
Oh God.
“What?” I asked.
He leaned toward his screen too.
“You…are gonna…get a text, Evie. Take it. And…do right.”
What did that mean?
Before I could find some words to ask him to share in ways that wouldn’t get him into trouble, or later be used to incriminate him, he kept talking.
“I’m counting on you.”
“Mick.”
And then he did not ask me to go to Saul.
He did not say the reasons for his current accommodations were all a mistake.
Or he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or they’d brought him in on nonsense to lean on him to rat on someone else.
Or one of the hundred other excuses he used.
He did something that sent ice splinters tearing through my veins.
He pressed his middle three fingers to his lips, then pressed them to the screen, hung up his handset, stood and walked away.
Chapter Two
Urban Outfitters
Evie
What am I doing?” I asked my reflection as I leaned away from my bathroom mirror and stared at myself.
I was holding a mascara wand in one hand, the tube in the other, and I’d just finished putting on some powder, a little blush, minimal highlights on my cheekbones, under-eye-shadow base over my lids up to my brows to even the skin tone and now mascara.
I didn’t wear makeup unless I was stripping, first, because I had two pounds of makeup on when I danced and that not only felt ick, I figured I was already over my quota, and second, I just didn’t wear makeup.
Okay, lip gloss that was actually lip treatment disguised as lip gloss, of which I had varying colors, but only because this was Denver, Denver was arid, and if I didn’t my lips would be chapped all the time.
So might as well throw a wave at something girlie while I was keeping my skin healthy.
Now, I was going on a date with Lottie’s commando friend and suddenly I was a traditionalist.
Or, probably more accurate, I was going on a blind date with Lottie’s commando friend after my brother freaked me out about some text I’d be getting where I’d have to “do right,” whatever that meant.
And since Mick Gardiner hadn’t done right since he was around the age of two, his version of doing right did not bode well for me.
I’d pushed the wand into the tube and was about to grab a wipe and take all the makeup off, add some moisturizer (again: Denver) and maybe some powder so I wasn’t all shiny, and that was it, when someone knocked on my door.
I looked down at my phone on the basin, touching it to activate the screen.
6:04.
“Hell,” I whispered, tossed the tube in the basket that contained my measly collection of cosmetics, grabbed my lip treatment that was a shade called “buff” and dashed out of the bathroom.
I slicked on the gloss as I shoved my feet in chili-red Rothy’s points, grabbed my blazer that was on the bed and rushed out of my bedroom.
I tossed the blazer on the kitchen counter, the lip gloss on the blazer, at the same time I hesitated because I realized I hadn’t put on any jewelry and considered running back to my room in order to do that really quick.
This was when another knock sounded at the door (apparently Daniel Magnusson was not patient).
This possibility led my mind to race to the hope that, regardless of his apparent impatience, Mag was like Mo.
Maybe not as humongous as Mo (though, that wouldn’t be bad, Mo didn’t seem cuddly as such, more like terrifying and able to tear you limb from limb with his bare hands, but he looked sweet and openly happy anytime Lottie cuddled him).
But definitely as soft-spoken and gentle and loving as Mo was with Lottie.
I mean, it would not suck having a man in my life, that man being like Mo.
I could pay my own bills (and sometimes my mother’s, and a lot of the times, my father’s, this being the reason why it was taking forever to earn my degree—I kept having to sit out semesters because of lack of funds, the sole reason why I stripped, because I didn’t make Lottie-style tips, but strippers at Smithie’s made a bucketload).