Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 138683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138683 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
“Are you trying to run me off again?” I forced a shaky smile.
He pressed my hand flat to his chest, covering it with his in a desperation that made me want to weep. “I want it so badly, but this week, it’s become abundantly clear what I might be putting you through.”
I huffed like it was nothing. “Pssh. Lying under oath? I’ve done it a hundred times.”
It wouldn’t be a lie, though. What I felt for him. Who I believed him to be.
The smallest grin curled his lips. “A hundred times?”
I shrugged a small shrug and peered up at his intimidating beauty, struggling with all the needy bits inside me to keep this thing light. “What can I say? I’m a rule breaker.”
He gruffed out a chuckle, his voice so low and smooth.
Raw liquid silk.
I wanted to roll around in it.
“Rule breaker, huh?”
“Yep, of the worst kind.”
Because my thoughts about him were slanting criminal.
“Murder?” His eyes widened with the tease.
“You’ll never know,” I played right back.
Somehow, he’d drifted even closer, and his free hand had found its way to my hip, and crap, the other was lifting my hand that sported the ridiculously gorgeous ring that I only could have imagined in my dreams. It was so perfect for me it kind of made my heart hurt looking at it.
One he’d picked himself, like he knew me, inside and out.
He held it up between us, watching the big diamond shimmer in the flashes of light. For a moment, we both stared at it before his gaze drifted to mine.
“You don’t seem like much of a rule breaker to me,” he mumbled so low, the words ripe with affection.
My tongue swept over my dried lips, my voice cracking on the truth. “I think I’d break any rule for you, Milo Hendricks.”
He pulled me against him then, to the hard, hulking planes of his gorgeous body, and he pressed his face to my neck, his breaths harsh and shallow where he exhaled them just behind my ear, his hold fierce and unrelenting. The man was as close to me as he could be without taking me, but I wondered if it might be just as intimate.
“Thank you, Tessa. Thank you for saving my heart and what’s left of this life.”
And I knew right then, I’d give him anything he wanted.
EIGHTEEN
MILO
In life, we all had choices to make.
Some were cut and dry.
A line that clearly delineated right and wrong.
Others were grayed in uncertainty and ambiguity.
By circumstance and morality.
Some were distorted by greed and selfishness and egocentric behavior, and others in insecurity and doubt.
And then there were the ones that were a composite of so many factors that there was no defining the right answer except for the one you held in your heart.
My heart that was currently lodged in my throat and constricting airflow as I pulled my Tahoe into the parking lot of the city park nestled in the center of Redemption Hills.
Tessa clung to my hand the same way as she’d done the entire ride over, neither of us saying a word, both lost to thoughts of every one of those factors above.
During it, a quiet support had settled over the cab of the SUV.
Wrong or right, we were in this together.
No matter what.
Slowly, I pulled into a spot two spaces down from Paula and Gene’s Range Rover.
It still shocked the shit out of me that they would allow themselves to become so lowly that they’d set a meeting place in a public park, but it wasn’t like they were going to extend me an invitation to the country club.
I didn’t realize how hard my hand was shaking until I removed it from Tessa’s, put the SUV in park, and killed the engine.
Silence descended.
Thicker than before.
My attention was out the windshield to where I could barely make out my children in the distance, little more than specks of color climbing the jungle gym.
Paula and Gene were facing them with their backs to us, off to the side the way they always remained, stoic sentries guarding their charges.
I was thankful they loved them so intensely, but I wouldn’t lie and pretend I didn’t hold an animosity so fierce toward them that I had to keep my spite under lock and key when I was around them. Going apeshit on them wasn’t gonna win me any points with the courts.
Besides, I had to remember grief changed people, made them resentful and bitter, desperate to bring punishment on the one who’d brought on their sorrows.
I knew it firsthand.
Old anger flared in my spirit.
The pressure.
The judgment.
The curl of Paula’s nose the first time she’d met me like she’d caught a whiff of something bad.
It wasn’t as though they ever liked me, anyway.
I’d never be anything more than a piece of trash in their eyes.
“This is it,” I mumbled, having no clue what form of hostility we would be met with, but make no mistake, there would be hostility.