Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 77841 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77841 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Not because I care, despite our shared history, but because I don't give a shit about Angel Guerra. So long as I keep getting those jobs in my email, I'm happy.
I don't want to be his friend.
I don't wonder what the man does at night.
I don't even care about the jobs that he takes that could get him killed. I only care about how it affects me.
I just want to get paid, stash my money away for when I feel like not doing this anymore, and move on.
“You honestly think that he would hurt us if we found out more about him?” Nash asks.
It's my turn to laugh.
“I'm pretty sure that Angel could’ve killed me sitting right here on this beach several months ago and no one would have noticed. He's that dangerous. He's that deadly. I like life too much to chance crossing the man.”
“We deal with deadly shit on a daily basis,” Hollis says.
He's right. We do the jobs that lead us to the darkest, dangerous, most sinister places in South America.
What he's not saying is that each and every one of those trips could find us dead, and I don't think that Angel would blink an eye if it happened. Hell, the impression that I get from Angel is that he doesn't even care if we work for him or not. He doesn't care if we die.
We're not in any form a liability nor an asset to him. He's making fifty percent off our backs, but if we don’t take the jobs, the man is more than capable of doing them himself.
It doesn't bother me though. He finds the job. He pays for the expenses.
I get paid, he gets paid, and I don't have to waste my time trying to find the next job to do. There’s always work. There’s always someone willing to pay an insane amount of money to get their loved one back.
“I think you're lying,” Nash says.
I turned my eyes from the waves to glare at him. “I'm not fucking lying, man.”
“You don't seem like the type of person who's going to work for someone that they don't know, at least on some level.”
My smile is slow.
Neither of these men really knows me. We're not friends.
I'm not working under the assumption that either of them feels differently than I do.
“He has to at least be from Texas, right?” Hollis prods.
“No clue,” I answer, turning my eyes back to the waves.
The sun is beating down on all of us.
Summers in Texas are brutal, but for some reason this summer seems hotter than normal. I haven’t even gotten into the water, and I can feel the salt from the sweat clinging to my skin.
I’m agitated and annoyed about even being here and the heat is only acerbating my mood. The guys trying to grill me about Angel aren’t helping either.
Conversation halts, and a normal person would want to fill the silence. They would want to give more details. They would want to make excuses about why they aren’t saying more. They’d feel the need to apologize.
I'm not a normal person. They're not normal people either, so it's ignorant for them to even think that way.
“You don't have a fucking chance,” Hollis says. “She's a fucking ten.”
I look over at Nash, tracking his eyes across the sand to a gorgeous brunette.
I can see the appeal. I'm a man, after all.
She has long golden tanned legs and dark hair floating in the wind. She swipes it away instead of pulling it back despite it continuously getting in her eyes.
That woman knows exactly what she's doing. She's caught the attention of damn near every man in a thirty-foot radius.
That tiny bikini clinging to her skin would be see-through if she actually got into the water, but she's not here to swim. She's here to entice. She's here to feed her ego.
“I'm a fucking ten,” Nash argues. “Tens date tens.”
“Date?” Hollis scoffs.
I have to smile. Men like us don't date. We don't have any bonds other than fake ones.
Connections are dangerous.
Connections are how the enemies hurt you, how they control you, how they're able to bend you to their will.
I don't do connections, and I never will.
They're hazardous.
“I use the phrase date loosely,” Nash qualifies. “I don't want to date her. I want to fuck her. It's that simple.”
Hollis grumbles again, still sounding like a petulant child as he reaches down and swipes sand off the cast on his foot.
“That girl has the pick of any man on this beach, and you really think it's going to be you?” I look over at the two of them, slightly annoyed but also distracted by their banter.
“I think I have as good a shot as anybody else,” Nash says.
“I’d rather be working,” Hollis complains, and I understand the feeling.
Idle time for men like us is dangerous.