Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 143842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 719(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
I was already putting him at risk—having him here. Having him stand for me the way that he was.
A ball of razors lodged at the base of my throat. “No. Pruitt was more about manipulation and control than the physical. Always trying to force me to be the wife he wanted, mold me into who I wasn’t, sure to let me know when I wasn’t up to his standards.”
At least that was true.
A crack of aggression split through the air, and Cody drew me closer, those big arms holding me as if I were fractured. “I won’t let him get near you, Hailey. Not you or Maddie or your grandmother.”
“I keep warning you that you don’t want to get involved. I’m going to get rid of him, Cody, once and for all, and I’m not sure what that’s going to look like.”
“It’s going to look like me doing it by your side, that’s what.” His voice scraped with determination.
“Cody.” Anxiety riddled my conscience all while I fought the urge to fully sink into him.
“You’re stuck with me now, darlin’.” Cody issued it like banter, though there was something ferocious seeded in its depths.
He took my chin between his fingers. “Tell me how you got wrapped up in him.”
A tumble of nerves skated through, and a sigh pilfered from my nose. “After I left…”
Cody flinched, both of us jarred right back to that time.
When Brooke died.
I gulped around the sorrow that thickened my throat, around the lash of guilt that cracked across my conscience like the scourge of a whip.
“You’d told me you didn’t have plans to leave. That you were going to be going to school in Langmire so you could continue to work on your father’s ranch since that was your dream.”
Agony pulsed, and my tongue stroked out to wet my dried lips. “I couldn’t stay here after what happened. I couldn’t be on that ranch. Not with her ghost lingering there. I felt…”
Tears blurred my eyes.
Cody just pulled me tighter.
“So I packed my things and left for Austin. There was a ranch there that I knew about. My father had sold some horses to them over the years. I got a job there. The year before that, Pruitt had inherited it from his father.”
“And one look at you, and he wanted you,” Cody surmised.
My teeth clamped down on my bottom lip. “I was so blinded by pain that I couldn’t see who he really was.”
“And who was he?”
He pushed me closer to the edge. To that surrender. The guilt that haunted me was only a vague blip in the back of my mind.
“You can tell me anything, Hailey. I’ll hold it.”
“I know you would, Cody. But I…I need to figure out what I’m going to do with this information. With what I know. I can’t drag you into that until I have a definite plan. But you need to understand he’s dangerous. Really dangerous.”
Awareness dimmed his features, and that stubbled jaw clenched. “And these things you know, you’re holding them over his head?”
I gave him a jerky confirmation. “I told him I was going to go to the police if he ever came anywhere near me again.”
Disgrace bit down. “But I’m not brave enough to do it. Afraid of what really might happen. Of what he really might do to me. And I’m over here pouring gasoline on the fire.”
“He’ll die before he gets near you.”
A wave of brutality undulated beneath his flesh.
Reaching out, I touched the hollow beneath his eye, running my fingertips over the fierceness that blazed. “And I’m afraid neither of us really know what he’s capable of.”
Cody took my hand that was tracing his face and pressed my palm to his lips, golden eyes flared beneath the dull, muted light. “We’ll find a way. I promise you.”
“I’m trying…trying to figure out how to do this right. Without putting my family in danger. He made me sign these papers…” My throat closed off with a breath of hate. “Papers that look like I’m a part of things. Papers that look like I involved my father and his ranch. I think it was Pruitt’s way of assuring himself that I would never leave.”
An old kind of foreboding rushed through Cody’s fierce features.
One second later, he solidified, a resolution building like bricks. He shifted and pressed his palm to my cheek. “How could anyone ever fucking believe that you would do something wrong, Hailey? It’ll come out. The truth.”
As if the heaviness was no longer in the room, he squeezed my hip with his big hand. “You wait right there.”
He pushed to standing, and I watched him waltz across my room and flick on the light to the bathroom.
Buck naked.
That was all it took for the reservations that kept trying to resurface to be obliterated.
For the guilt and the worry to fade away in the recesses of my room, disappearing into the vapor of this dream—this fantasy—I was momentarily living in.