Total pages in book: 211
Estimated words: 201554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1008(@200wpm)___ 806(@250wpm)___ 672(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 201554 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1008(@200wpm)___ 806(@250wpm)___ 672(@300wpm)
I catch her arm and walk her in closer. “Me, too, Harper. Me fucking, too. Why don’t you understand that? I didn’t come to help you. I came because I couldn’t leave you alone. I didn’t have it in me. If I had my way, I’d take you and your mother the hell out of here, and we’d leave Isaac to burn in hell on his own.”
“She won’t leave. She won’t, Eric.”
“Get her to,” I say. “Convince her that staying is dangerous.”
“Is it?”
“Dangerous enough for me to urge you toward an exit strategy and I’m that strategy. I’m your ticket out of here.”
“I don’t want you to be my ticket anywhere. Just like you didn’t want your father to be your ticket. That’s not what you are to me.”
“I’m not offering. I’m insisting you use me.” My eyes twinkle. “Any way you see fit.”
“Eric,” she breathes out, her serious mood not yet dissuaded. “I can’t leave. I could have access to information we need.”
“Blake has everything you could have and more at his fingertips.”
“There’s value to in-person, physical presence to investigate, especially when my mom’s name is on the line.”
“She’s not a strong person,” I say. “You are. Get her out,” I repeat.
“How? How do I do that? I have nothing but my suspicions to support an argument for her to leave, and that’s not enough. She’s afraid to be without your father.”
“But does she love him?”
“No. I don’t think so. No. I know she doesn’t. She doesn’t act at all with him like she did with my father.”
“Then she’ll leave him. Let’s find the motivation for her to get out.” I walk to my bag and retrieve my MacBook, holding it up. “Let’s dig in.”
“My briefcase is still in the car,” she says. “I need to grab it.” She glances at the door and I don’t miss her unease. I’m driving home the theme of danger. It’s messing with her head.
“I’ll get it. You get comfortable.” I head for the door and on my way down, my phone buzzes with a text from Blake: I hacked the HR files and looked at employee numbers and even union membership numbers for Kingston. No go. No matches. Still working. More when I know something.
I shove my phone back into my pocket and make quick work of running out to the car for Harper’s briefcase. Once I’m back upstairs in the bedroom, I find Harper comfortable all right. She’s perched against the headboard, her bare feet crossed at the ankle, and it doesn’t matter that she’s in sweats and a tee. My cock throbs. I want to strip her naked. I want to fuck her. I want to make love to her. But I also need her out of this Godforsaken city.
I cross to the bed and set her briefcase down. “Thank you,” she says, giving me this sweet, sexy look that almost changes my priorities to dirty play instead of my dirty brother.
I sit down next to Harper and we both unpack our computers. For me, that means my MacBook and a full-sized Rubik’s cube. Harper picks it up. “A Rubik’s cube?”
I study it in her hand, the woman that is now holding a piece of me, the way I control my mind, an explanation of which exposes weakness. I could say what I say to everyone and I do just that. “It helps me focus,” but unlike the rest of the world, she doesn’t stop there.
“You’re a savant,” she says. “I read up on it. Most savants have time when the data in their heads takes over, when it overwhelms them and comes too fast. I even read about a man that has seizures when that happens.”
She tried to pull back downstairs, to place a wall between us. I fight the urge to do the same now. I don’t want to pull back with Harper and so I tell her what only Grayson and a few doctors know. “I collapsed in a swell of numbers when my mother died. My father paid for expensive doctors and one of them actually helped me, but when I got pulled up to law school three years early, and with Isaac, he was angry. He tried to trigger my episodes, as someone started calling them, but it’s like the harder he tried, the stronger I got and the more desperate he became.”
“And when you could have ruined him, you didn’t,” she says, repeating what I’d told her earlier.
“Yeah well, he’s lucky I dropped out of Harvard. Joining the SEALs was good for me. They changed me, tamped down on my anger and resentment. They helped me hone my skills and turn them into assets, not detriments.”
Her cellphone buzzes with a message on my side of the bed and she climbs over the top of me and ends up straddling my lap. I arch a brow. She laughs. “I need my phone. You were in the way.”