Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 71625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
I didn’t argue with that.
She could look all she wanted, but she needed a place she could work that she could get to without a car, and the mall wasn’t one of those places.
“I’ll see you at four, correct?”
She and a couple of friends were watching a movie, having some lunch, and then going to hang until I could make my way back around to them.
I had a million and one things to do today, and all of those things were on opposite sides of the freakin’ city.
“Yeah, Mom.”
Then Conleigh was gone, and I was left with a clearly excited Cody.
Cody, my five-year-old baby boy, was so excited to see his father that I could hardly get him to quiet down.
And I was a nervous wreck.
Cody hadn’t been away from me, except for the odd half a day with Matt’s parents, since he’d been born. Sure, he went to daycare, but daycare always meant that he spent every single night at home with me in his house.
Now, he was staying in his old room at his father’s place, and I was worried that he’d like it better there than with me.
I pulled up into our designated meeting spot and clenched my teeth when I saw Angelina’s car instead of Matt’s Ford.
Angelina got out and started to walk over to me, leaving her own kids in her car, screaming.
Her eldest sat there, too, staring at his mother’s back as she came my way.
Angelina’s eldest was her first child with a different man. He’d been the reason that Angelina and I had first become friends.
Our children were the same age. Her eldest, right along with her youngest.
When I’d moved here, she’d immediately taken me under her wing. She and her husband had made me feel so welcome, that I had no choice but to love her.
She’d introduced me to Matt, her husband’s best friend, and the rest had been history.
We’d always been a team.
And now we weren’t.
She’d stolen something from me that was unforgivable.
I rolled down my window.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Matt can’t make it. He has to work today.”
My eyelid twitched. “Then why didn’t he call and say that?”
Angelina crossed her arms over her chest and stared back at me. “Because he still wants him to come over. He’ll be home around eleven. They’ll have all morning together before we have to bring him back.”
Not likely. Cody slept until ten o’clock most days if he was allowed to. I highly doubted that Matt would wake Cody up. He never had before when he’d been living with us. He’d much rather go work out and do his own thing than have his son tagging along.
Which led me to my next decision.
“We’ll try next weekend.”
Then I rolled up my window.
Angelina looked pissed, but I ignored her.
I was not, under any circumstances, giving that woman my kid.
First of all, she didn’t take care of my children well, and never had.
She was a very lax parent and didn’t care what her kids did—whether that was allowing them to ride in a booster seat when they clearly should be in a car seat or stay up until three a.m. eating junk food instead of going to bed at a decent hour.
So, no, I sure as hell wasn’t leaving my kid with her when I hadn’t trusted her before she’d screwed me over.
Now that she had ruined my life, there was no way I was trusting her with what was left of it.
Conleigh and Cody were the only two things holding me together anymore, and lately, Conleigh was challenging that.
I ignored the woman who was now on her phone, probably calling her new husband, and instead drove away and headed for the grocery store.
Cody, not realizing that he wasn’t going to get to see his father yet, seemed happy and content in the back seat.
“Just wasted an hour of my life I’ll never get back,” I grumbled to nobody in particular.
After making a grocery run, with a still happy and behaving well Cody, I headed back to the main part of the town, only to see my freakin’ daughter in the middle of the road.
Staring at a man who was standing up against a car.
From this angle, I couldn’t see much besides my daughter’s laughing face.
Sudden and irrational anger hit me, and I pulled the car over to the side of the road and yelled at her.
“Why are you here, Conleigh Annaliese?”
Steel turned at hearing me and winced. “Picked her up.”
“And what did she do this time?”
The next fifteen minutes went about as expected.
Steel explained why he’d had to intervene when it came to my child, and I had to hold my tongue while he did. Luckily, after explaining why he had Conleigh, he’d been called over due to an altercation with the naked man and an irate man who wasn’t very happy at having that naked man press his genitals to his wife’s window.