Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 137176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137176 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
He let me do that all on my own.
By the time I was done shimmying my body closer and closer to his, my upper body was draped over his chest. His skin was warm and soft but there was no denying the strength of each muscle. “Are you ticklish?” I asked without thought. “Sorry, that was stupid—”
“I don’t know,” Cass responded without hesitation. “I don’t remember anyone ever tickling me before.”
“Not even your grandmother?”
There was enough light in the room that I could see Cass’s facial expression. It shifted a little, but I couldn’t figure out what emotion he was experiencing. “My grandmother wasn’t the most demonstrative of people. She hugged me a couple times but there was always something off about it. I mean, I didn’t really have anything to compare it to when I was a little kid but when your dad would hug me, it was always like a bear hug, even later in life when his body was frailer. I was taller and heavier than him, yet I still felt safe when he hugged me. Like I didn’t need to think about how long I was allowed to embrace him for or if anyone was watching.”
“Have you seen her since—” I stopped abruptly when I realized what I’d been about to say. Reminding Cass of the hell he’d been through in the past two years wasn’t really first date conversation material.
“Yeah. I went to see her earlier this week.”
Cass fell silent. I could feel the tension in his body. His muscles had stiffened and the fingers he’d been running along my spine came to a stop. “I’m sorry, Cass. We don’t need to talk about any of this.”
He shook his head. “No, it’s okay. Believe me, I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about it. No, not someone. You. I wanted to talk to you about it.”
I couldn’t help but press a soft kiss against the skin that covered his pounding heart. Cass began running his fingers down my back again. I wasn’t even sure if he knew he was doing it.
“I think she’s sick,” Cass began. “Some kind of dementia or something. She was so different than I remember her,” he added on a soft whisper.
Despite the very different childhood he’d had compared to mine and Sully’s, it was clear Cass loved his grandmother.
“How so?” I gently prodded.
Cass shook his head briefly. I couldn’t see it, but I felt his chin brushing the top of my head. I shifted my body enough to watch his expressions as he spoke.
“Despite her age and standing in the family, Mother Ashby was always put together. Neat, polished, refined, elegant… she represented a kind of class that no one else in my family seemed to have inherited. Even when I was a little kid, she made sure I represented the family in the same way. She’d always say stuff about me being super important one day. That I’d show the world how powerful the Ashbys really were. I never understood what she meant by that. She’d also tell me I’d take over the Ashby empire when I was old enough. She never mentioned my father, even though he would have still been young enough to keep running the company. It seemed like… it seemed like she had something more planned for me.”
As Cass fell silent again, I thought back to when I’d met him for the first time. I’d never met Chandler Ashby III before or his mother—Cass’s grandmother—but I’d seen stuff about Cass’s father in the news and there had been one incident when a criminal case Chandler Ashby had been involved in had made it to my desk, but I hadn’t even gotten through the first page of the case report before it had been whisked away by my superior.
If Cass’s father had stepped out of line somehow, especially criminally, the press would have jumped on the story. The Ashbys were always involved in some kind of scandal, but it had all been tabloid fodder more than anything. Not one member of the family had ever been charged with anything despite being arrested for DUIs and possession of drugs. The Ashbys had greased a lot of palms when it came to the cops and the petty crimes various Ashbys were always caught up in.
Until Cass. For some reason, there’d been no palm greasing for him. Granted, the crime he’d been accused of had been impossible for the Ashby patriarch, Cass’s own father, to get him off completely, but why hadn’t they provided him with a top-notch lawyer like Asa Hutch?
“Did she shield you from what your family was really like?” I asked. I immediately wanted to take the words back for fear that they’d make Cass angry, but I held my tongue. If I wanted to be his equal partner in whatever kind of relationship we were trying to forge, I needed to be brave enough to speak my mind.