Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 68033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
“A year? She’s a beautiful girl. You think the men in Rivermont are blind, son?”
“Don’t remind me.” Walsh closed his eyes in now-familiar agony. “I keep imagining some bastard getting next to her while I sit back giving her ‘space’ like a neutered pet.”
“So what gives? It’s not like you to lay back.”
“North Carolina requires a yearlong separation, but then the divorce will be processed pretty quickly.” Walsh bounced his feet on the stair beneath him, allowing his own words to excite him. “She’s been through a lot, not just recently, but a lifetime of crap. She wants time to work on herself. And I, like a lovesick idiot, am actually giving it to her. For the last month, her friend Mama Jess has been updating me. If it weren’t for her, I’d be down there screwing this all up.”
“And you’re sure waiting is the best course of action?”
“Right now, it’s the only course of action,” Walsh said through tight lips, leaning his elbows back on the step behind him. “But I feel like a bull at a rodeo, locked behind the fence.”
“A bull, huh?” Martin laughed. “Don’t let Kassim hear that. I’m sure he’d like to put you out to stud. If we go to Saudi Arabia, he’ll have plenty of Arabian ass to flash at you.”
“I don’t want anyone else.” Walsh was sure that his father, and just about every man he’d meet on the street, wouldn’t understand. His father had loved his mother until the day she died, but Martin hadn’t been celibate for the last fifteen years.
“And you’re not frustrated?”
“Only for her.” Walsh shifted with a little discomfort, aroused by the mere memory of Kerris. Her taste. Her scent. The feel of her pressed and yielding against him. “I’ll wait a year.”
“And after that?”
“I’ll win her,” Walsh said, his natural self-assurance asserting itself.
“And if she doesn’t want to be ‘won’?”
“Remember what you told me I’d have to do if Merrist didn’t cooperate when we were negotiating that merger a while back?”
“Hostile takeover,” his father said, grinning widely.
“Exactly.”
Chapter Thirteen
Kerris glanced around the crowded hotel ballroom, decorated for the Walsh Foundation’s Christmas party. She couldn’t help but remember the last time she’d been in this room. She had been honored as Scholar of the Year that night. It seemed in some ways like yesterday, and in some ways like an entirely different lifetime, one in which she and Cam had been little more than friends and not quite lovers, unsuspecting of the beautiful bomb poised to drop in the middle of their little idyll.
Walsh.
She had met Walsh here. She’d thought of him as a mountain that night—physically imposing and with more presence than she’d ever encountered in one man. She’d thought him a prince, and she had been right. Her chest tightened as her mind sketched her last impression of him four months ago, stretched out so carefully and taking up most of the hospital bed. Holding her as closely as he dared with her so injured, absorbing her tears and her pain like a loving sponge. It had taken all of her willpower not to call him when Mama Jess confirmed that he had indeed come, as she had known he would.
She never allowed her mind to stray much further than the next day. That’s how she’d gotten through those first miserable weeks without Cam and without Walsh, an arm and a leg plastered, and her heart like broken glass, myriad and shattered. That’s how she’d gotten through two months of rehab once the casts were off. That’s how she got through every morning she woke up, wondering what Amalie would be doing by now.
This would have been her baby’s first Christmas. Kerris had always imagined decorating a home for the holidays. A home filled with children, gingerbread, collard greens, and mistletoe and every tradition she could cram into the holiday season.
Kerris always manned a face painting and crafts table for the kids for the holiday event. She grinned, wondering how many reindeer and Santa Claus faces she’d paint before the night was over.
An hour later, Kerris was finishing a Rudolph nose on a little brown-faced cherub when she sensed someone standing nearby. She looked up, the ready smile on her face freezing when her eyes met Jo’s. She looked just beyond Jo’s shoulder, hoping to see at least one child waiting, but unfortunately there was a lull. Kerris dropped a quick kiss on the little girl’s painted cheek before sending her on her way.
“Jo, hi.” Kerris wiped the last traces of paint from her hands. “How are you?”
“I’m good. I didn’t know you’d be here tonight.”
“Haven’t missed one since junior year.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Kerris searched for neutral things they could discuss. Things that didn’t involve Walsh or Cam.
“Thanks for getting the clothes to us.”
Ms. Kris had left Déjà Vu more than half her expansive wardrobe. Jo had handed over each item like it was a treasure. Meredith had “curated” all the clothes, which were so much finer than anything else the shop carried.