Total pages in book: 34
Estimated words: 31834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 159(@200wpm)___ 127(@250wpm)___ 106(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 31834 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 159(@200wpm)___ 127(@250wpm)___ 106(@300wpm)
With her hot chocolate made, she walked back to the ice cream. She tried not to think of Grim and the scary words he had spoken over dinner. Ice cream was a much better thought.
She decided to start with the strawberry cheesecake. Closing her eyes, she embraced the taste. Putting the spoon down, her next choice after a sip of hot chocolate had to be mint chocolate. She was a sucker for the chocolate-and-mint combo. With that eaten, she then ended with a fudgy chocolate, and knew which ice cream she wanted—mint chocolate.
She put the lids back on the other two and placed them in the freezer, turning back to the counter, only to come to a stop when she saw Grim in the doorway. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he did have on a pair of pajama bottoms. Some of his ink was on display and she nibbled her bottom lip as she looked at him. She loved his ink. It was all so perfectly placed.
“You couldn’t sleep?” he asked.
She shook her head because right now, words failed her. Pretty much everything failed her.
“Ice cream. What is upsetting you, Eve?” he asked.
Taking a deep breath, she scooped up some ice cream and then looked at him. “You are.”
“I am upsetting you?”
“Yes, you know you are. I’m not an idiot, Grim. I know what you’re doing.”
He smiled at her, but it was one of those smiles where he seemed to know what he was doing, and he liked it. “And what is it I’m doing?” he asked.
“You know how I feel about you. You know I love you more than anything on this earth, and I can’t just switch off those emotions. You know this and yet…”
“Yet what?”
“You ask what you did at dinner?”
“Eve, you keep asking me for a divorce but it seems to me you don’t know exactly what you want. Divorce is final. It will stop you from being mine but it also stops me from being yours. Do you really want that?”
“See, you’re doing it again.” She pointed her spoon at him. “You know I don’t like this. I don’t like any of this. You made me … have feelings for you, and now…” She couldn’t finish.
“And now?” Grim asked.
She shook her head and shoved her spoon back into her mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.
“Eve?”
“And now I don’t know how to leave. Don’t you see what’s happening? You lied to me. You manipulated me and now … now, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think. Is any of this real, or did you manipulate all of it to suit your own desires?”
“You know that is not true.”
“How is it not true? I don’t know who you are.” She shrugged. “I know what I think and I know what I saw.”
“And they cannot be one and the same?” he asked.
She didn’t know how to answer that.
“Is it wrong for me to be good to you because you deserve it? No one out there does. I don’t trust anyone but you. I know what it’s like out there and you don’t trust anyone.”
“Why can’t you?” Eve asked.
“Don’t be foolish. It does not become you.”
She glared at him, and suddenly her appetite for the ice cream was banished. She put the lid on top of the ice cream, shoved the spoon in her mouth, and placed the tub back into the freezer. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want you to be in the company of a foolish person.”
“Eve, that’s not what I meant.”
“No, but then you do think I’m an idiot, which is why you’ve kept your true self hidden from me the past year.”
She put the spoon and her cup into the kitchen sink, and was able to avoid him all the way up to her bedroom.
Grim didn’t follow her, and she didn’t know if she was happy or sad about that.
Chapter Five
Grim was not in the best of moods as he stared at the sniveling peace of crap that begged for forgiveness. He had absolutely no feeling toward this man who curled up in a ball and begged and pleaded with him to show mercy.
First, he was tired. He didn’t like fighting with Eve, and he certainly didn’t like having cross words with her, and knowing he did irritated him.
Since she had become his wife, he had not slept anywhere else other than by her side. Eve fit perfectly in his arms, and in the past few days he’d not gotten much sleep. That tiredness was making him even less tolerant than usual.
This man before him wasn’t some loser who had lost a lot of money, or even a drug user. No, this man had been caught attempting to abduct a child in broad daylight. His men had been running an errand when they saw this man snatch the child out of her wheelchair, and tried to run away with her. Grim didn’t even want to think of what would have happened to the child if his men hadn’t been in the area.