Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 95471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95471 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Jasper stops what he’s doing to shoot me a dry look. “Do we have to keep talking about this asshole?”
My smile widens. “There’s no good reason for you to hate him, but you’ve been critical of him since I told you he existed.”
“So?” he mutters, bending back down to detach another piece.
“So, I think you’re a little jealous,” I tease.
That gets his attention. He snaps back up, looking at me again with those intense blue eyes of his. “I am not jealous of that guy. He’s got nothing I want. No reason for me to be jealous of him.”
“He had me,” I point out.
Just to be a dick, Jasper reaches over and ties the restraint around my ankle, even though it’s no longer attached to anything. “And now I do.”
I narrow my eyes at him, bending down to unfasten the cuff.
I don’t bother arguing, though. He’s right.
At least for the moment, Jasper has me.
Chapter Eleven
Jasper
Autumn watches out the window with all the eagerness of a child heading to an amusement park as we drive into town.
Admittedly, it looks picturesque this time of year—snow-dusted pine trees leading to an idyllic Main Street with shops in historic buildings on each side of the street. The street lights cast a yellow glow even though it isn’t dark yet. Every business has snow on the roof, and though the sidewalks have been cleared, there are banks of snow piled up all along the road, too.
According to my car it’s about 12 degrees outside, but the inside is nice and toasty.
Personally, I like to drive in silence, but when we got off the freeway, Autumn twisted my arm until I agreed to turn on some Christmas music for her.
“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” plays as we pass through town. Autumn hums along, but periodically stops to point excitedly out the window at something she wants me to notice.
“Look! An old-fashioned ice cream shop. You have to take me there.”
An ice cream shop? I haven’t been to one of those since I was a kid, and never an old-fashioned one… whatever that even means.
I’m no longer sure which of us is the hostage in this situation.
When she looks back at me, her eyes dancing with so much excitement, I can’t bring myself to say no. “I’m sure we’ll have time to walk through downtown and check everything out. We’re bound to get hungry. We can stop there for food and get you some ice cream.”
She grins at me like I’ve made her whole life and then turns to look back out the window. “I love this place. It’s so cute.”
“I’m gonna tell Osseo about this wandering eye of yours,” I tease.
She twists in her seat to look back at the road I just passed. “Hey, I said I wanted to live in a small town like that one, I hadn’t committed to anything yet. And this town has a malt shop, Jasper. A malt shop.”
“Maybe we’ll retire here instead—as long as my mom has moved onto a new town and new husband by then, anyway. I can’t retire to the same town my mother lives in.”
Sighing blissfully as she settles back against the seat, Autumn tears her gaze from Main Street and looks over at me. More soberly since I touched on a potentially serious subject, she asks, “Were you and your mom ever close?”
I keep my gaze trained on the road ahead of us. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Not even when you were a kid?”
“Nope.”
I know that’s odd—most children idealize their parents, regardless of the gaping holes in their character. They don’t see those things until they grow older. They can’t. Kids are disposed to trusting their parents; to know their well-being depended on a hot mess would be terrifying.
Me, I didn’t have the luxury of not knowing that. I didn’t have the luxury of being scared of it, either. I had little sisters to protect.
Autumn probably can’t relate, so I explain a little more.
“She wasn’t around much when we were kids, so I had to pick up the slack. I didn’t grow up in a place like this,” I tell her, gesturing to the cute small town she’s so eager to explore. “Supposedly, my mom has her shit together a little more now, but I don’t know. Nora has always been overly generous with my mom, so maybe she’s just saying that. But back then, we were dead-broke, living in a run-down, dangerous place. She was always off with some boyfriend or other. She’d leave us for days at a time, no groceries in the fridge, no money to buy any. She was absorbed in her own life, and somehow we weren’t really part of it.”
That’s when my career as a criminal started, but I don’t add that part.
I shoplifted a lot as a kid—not to cause trouble, but because we needed stuff I couldn’t pay for. When Nora was starting kindergarten, she didn’t have shoes that fit her and I didn’t have money to buy any, so I got it in my mind to steal a pair. I didn’t tell Nora that, of course. I took her to the mall to try on shoes and see what size she needed, told her I was selling some stuff to some guys at school, that I’d come back and buy whichever shoes she wanted later that week. She had her eye on a girly pink pair with shiny stars on the sides and light-up soles.