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 pulled back with a gasp, my hands on his face, and stared at him.
“What the hell was that?” he rasped, moving deeper into the darkness of the hallway, pressing me against the nearest wall.
“That” I ran my hands up his chest, “was three hours of frustration.”
He laughed, and then he was kissing me again.
I’d just gotten into it, really loving the tingling feeling he was giving me, when I heard it.
“Where the fuck is my daughter?”
The bellowed words that could be heard over the bar’s music had me stiffening.
Catching on to my obvious tension, Trick let me slide to my feet.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
I swallowed hard as disappointment rolled through me.
I wouldn’t ever be seeing Trick again, and I really liked him.
Son of a bitch.
“That’s my dad,” I admitted. “The asshole shouting out at the bar.”
He paused at my words. “He sounds like a real peach.”
We’d just separated even more, me taking a step backward to slide around Trick, when the lights were now blaring in the hallway and my dad was staring at me accusingly from the mouth of it.
“You little slut,” my father growled upon seeing me.
Trick and I weren’t even kissing anymore.
Hell, we weren’t even touching.
He was at least a foot and a half in front of me.
“Sure, Dad,” I grumbled as I sidled out farther into the hallway. “Me standing next to a man makes me a slut.”
“You’re sixteen and a little bitch, aren’t you?” Dad crossed his arms over his chest.
I felt Trick stiffen behind me.
“Seventeen,” I corrected him. “My birthday is today, remember?”
“Seventeen,” Trick practically hissed from behind me.
“And he’s what, twenty-one?” my dad pushed. “That’s statutory rape, motherfucker.”
I growled in frustration. “Age of consent in Texas is seventeen. And we weren’t doing anything. We were standing next to each other. That was it.”
I looked over my shoulder at Trick, hoping to see understanding.
There wasn’t any.
He was staring at me in shock.
Shit.
That made me feel kind of bad.
Maybe I should’ve told him I wasn’t eighteen yet.
But a girl that had led the life I had? I was way older than my years.
That was for sure.
“I’m sorry,” I mouthed.
Then I was walking toward my father.
When I got there, he grabbed my wrist in a punishing grip and tugged me inside his office.
CHAPTER 2
I am looking for a married woman, betrayed or disappointed, with a desire for revenge, who wants to sell her husband’s Harley for cheap.
-Trick’s secret thoughts
TRICK
Seventeen.
Seven. Fucking. Teen.
What in the holy hell?
That girl did not look seventeen.
Young, yes. But not seventeen.
She was in a bar, drinking for Christ’s sake!
Holy hell.
I’d almost fucked up royally.
I’d spent the entire night next to her, talking to her, looking at her, listening to her. She hadn’t ever once indicated that she was underage.
Though, just sayin’, but in Texas, legal age of consent was seventeen. If I had done anything, it wouldn’t have been illegal. As she’d said.
But still. Seventeen.
I was twenty-one.
That was four years difference.
And at our age—more accurately, her age—that many years was a big deal.
I walked back up to the bar and ordered another beer, mind reeling.
Seriously, out of everything that had happened, that could’ve been disastrous.
“See you’ve met the fruit of my loins,” the bartender said as he brought me another beer. “He’s something special, right?”
I grimaced. “Your granddaughter seems to really dislike him.”
“That’s because he’s an asshole,” the man said. “Name’s Jugg. If you need another beer, holler.”
Jugg.
What an odd name.
Then again, Swayze was an odd name, too.
But I liked it.
A lot.
Too bad she was goddamned seventeen!
I drank my beer and had just gotten it down to about a quarter of the way filled when something urged me to stand up.
I frowned when I looked around, spotting Shawn at the opposite end of the bar practically mauling the blonde next to him.
Jugg was at the end of the bar, too. He was serving a new woman that’d just sat down. There was a man beside her, and they both looked very concerned.
Everything else in the room seemed normal, but my sense of danger had been finely tuned when I was in Iraq.
I knew when it was around, and my senses were screaming that I needed to get up and move.
I did, walking toward the back room.
I wasn’t sure what propelled me in that direction, but I knew as I got closer, that the danger had somehow included Swayze.
I wasn’t sure how, but it was a gut feeling that I never, ever would’ve ignored.
Sidling up to the closed door, I closed my eyes and listened.
There was no talking.
No nothing.
Just as I was about to walk away, about to pull myself not only out of the hallway, but out of the freakin’ building altogether, I heard it.
A rough sounding, meaty thump.
It was one of those sounds that I could always, always pick out in a group of sounds.