Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69785 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69785 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I eyed the brownie. It did look good.
But I was still eating my burger, so I wasn’t as interested in it as I probably would have been had I been finished.
“Yep,” Hunt said as he picked up a handful of fries and popped them into his mouth. Then, around a mouthful, he said, “You should’ve seen the stash of chocolate he has. I brought groceries in for him, and three out of the four bags that I brought in had some sort of chocolate in it.”
Swayze looked over at me curiously, her eyes trailing down my tattooed arms, settling on where they were crossed over my abs.
“Hmm,” she said, as if she couldn’t quite believe that I had a thing for chocolate.
She continued to eat, and I finished my food off, wondering what in the hell I was doing.
When I got out early, I told myself that out of everything that I was going to do, the top priority was to stay away from Swayze Marrin. I was going to make sure that I kept my nose clean. I was going to make sure that this time, with my newly found freedom, I wasn’t going to fuck my life up like I did twelve years ago and regret it.
And I had a feeling that staying away from Swayze Marrin was the way to keep my nose clean.
Except, I hadn’t expected her to be in the damn city that I’d moved to. When where she used to live was hours away from here.
Secondly, I sure the fuck hadn’t expected that if she lived here, I’d be running into her as much as I did.
And lastly, I never expected her to live right across the damn street from me where it’d be physically impossible to stay away and never see her.
Hell, my gut instinct when I’d found out that she was in the same city as me was to tell her to stay the hell away from me and my sister.
Obviously, that’d worked out so damn well—at least when it came to me.
My sister had been having the time of her life in her group home that Swayze had found her, and honestly other than dinner and a lunch since I’d gotten out, she hadn’t needed me nearly as much as I’d expected her to now that she was so far away from my mom.
It was awesome as hell to see her flourishing.
I got up and tossed my trash, hesitating when I was about to come back to the table because Swayze was standing to toss her trash, too.
When I saw that half the brownie was left, I frowned.
“Here,” she said as she shoved the plate into my chest. “I can’t eat this. I’m too full.”
I looked down at the brownie and nearly moaned.
Picking it up with two fingers, I bit into it and did moan then.
“Holy shit, this is good,” I said as I took another bite.
And another. And another.
Eventually, it was gone, and Swayze was left blinking at me.
“You know,” she said. “If you weren’t such an asshole to me lately, I would’ve said that was really hot.”
She turned on her heels and left, leaving me watching her go.
“Walk her out, please,” Crockett said softly from where she was washing a large pan in soapy water. “There have been some… vagrants lately.”
Zach’s head popped up. “What do you mean vagrants?”
I didn’t stop to listen to the explanation.
I was outside and striding toward her faster than I intended.
She looked over her shoulder when the door to Crockett’s place opened and slowed her march.
Her heels slowly stopped clicking against the concrete when she turned and waited for me to catch up.
When I caught her, I jerked my chin at her to keep moving, and she fell back into step beside me. When we got to her car, she yanked open her car door and started to drop inside. I waited until she was closing the door to head to my bike. But it was her quiet question that had me turning around and looking at her.
“How are you out?” she asked quietly. “I… this is really weird, Trick. It’s not that I’m complaining that you’re out but… how?”
I decided to give that to her.
She deserved to know.
“Two months ago, a man came to me with an option,” I said, straddling my bike and crossing my arms over my chest. “Get out of prison early and help him with a few things that might or might not be illegal or stay where I was. You can guess the obvious choice that I took.”
“What will you be doing?” she wondered.
My lips twitched. “That’s something that you don’t really need to know.”
With that, I started my bike up, signaling the end of our conversation.
She slammed her car door closed and backed out of the parking lot, driving sedately home the two blocks that it took her to get there.