Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 72090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
They had done the complete opposite. And then of course, owning The Vault had only fueled my desire more. I owned a playground where every fantasy could be met with parties and people like me could quench our every thirst.
Sometimes I didn’t mind a casual fuck. Sometimes I wanted to be left alone. It was a balance that I’d been happy with as long as I’d had Gabriel and his daughter as my surrogate family to ground me. To keep my ego in check and remind me that I was a human being who still enjoyed meatloaf and watching a Sunday night football game with a buddy. But now that he was dead… things seemed darker, and I wasn’t rebounding as I should.
I worked around death used as consequences for deals gone bad. I had lost more friends than I could count. You couldn’t be where I was in the circle I frequented and expect to grow old or have friends who did the same. Not unless you were dying old behind bars.
But my friendship with Gabriel had been different.
Gabriel had been my normal.
Now I just felt like a dark motherfucker again. Alone.
Work helped—the length of my work weeks was getting to be ridiculous. They were the things of which legends were made. But the solace was empty. Beyond the isolation, there were miles and miles of nothingness, and I considered walking away from the dark world altogether. I knew that my partners at The Vault would shit themselves if I left. But I was growing weary of being there every night. I had no desire to take part in the parties. I wasn’t sure what the fuck was going on, but the dynamic of our club was changing and it no longer had the same appeal to me that it once had. Even though the club was packed on most nights, I was over smoking cigars and drinking whiskey with men who didn’t measure up to Gabriel.
It was getting old, or I was getting lonely. Or I just needed a fucking attitude check.
I wasn’t sure what the fuck to do, but I was tired and sick of just about everything. I needed to get my shit together.
The one bright spot in my life was the only social engagement I cared to keep—my twice a month lunches with Storee.
She’d been a rock for me when Gabriel died, even though I was supposed to comfort her as she grieved for her father, and I wasn’t about to forget that. I’d always liked Storee, although I knew that she was completely off limits. She was much younger than me and the daughter of my best friend.
Was she fucking beautiful? Hell, yes.
But the answer was no. No fucking way would I even consider her.
Was I lying to myself? Hell, yes.
I considered. Fuck me, I had considered every time I jacked off after a dinner with them.
She was of age… barely.
But I was a total shithead and an absolute creep for doing so.
I owned it. I owned just how fucked up I was.
In a perfect world, and if I were a good man, I would have never considered plunging my cock deep inside of her.
But the world was far from perfect, and I most certainly wasn’t a good man.
But I’d hidden my lustful thoughts from Gabriel, and for that, I was proud.
Storee couldn’t have been any more uncomfortable around me if she’d tried—fidgeting, stuttering, and never meeting my eyes the entire time she was in my presence. She’d only gotten a little better about it since we’d been lunching.
I probably should have let her off the hook about the lunches, but I wanted to stay as close to Gabriel’s daughter as I could, and being with Storee reminded me, in a sad sort of way, what it was like to have someone you loved in your life. She was as close to family as I had. And I enjoyed the lunches, once I pulled her out of her shell. Storee was smart, and when she was comfortable, had a biting wit that I enjoyed. She had a look of purity but not blatantly so. She’d gotten her lovely, naturally curly hair directly from her father. If she was talking about something she was interested in—like her art—her face lit up from within.
She certainly had gotten more than her fair share of her father’s stubbornness, though, and adamantly refused to let me take her to lunch, or to go to dinner with me. I was so determined not to scare her off and lose any sense of normal that I had left, that I’d hesitated for a long time to put my foot down. But at our last lunch, I’d just decided that I wasn’t going to let her have her way.
She’d also gotten a heaping helping of Gabriel’s pride. She wouldn’t even let me pick up her lunch even though my paying for her food was a drop in the bucket compared to what I made in a day. She’d practically gotten into a physical fight with me the first time we went out because of that.