Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 69927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I felt my stomach clench, finally acknowledging the elephant I’d been skirting around since I got back.
“I don’t want to hurt your sister with my presence,” I told him bluntly. “If I need to hide… I will.”
His reaction was swift and fierce. “If my sister needs us to hide, we’ll leave the fuckin’ state. I’m not hiding. I’m going to live my life, just like she always wanted to live hers. Free. I love her to death, but I saw what staying away from you did to you over the last month. I know what it did to me. She has her own man now, with her own family. As much as I love her, she doesn’t need me. I need you, though.”
I felt something take root in my soul that felt a whole lot like hope.
“Is this fake marriage real to you, Price?” I asked him, hope blooming in my heart as a thousand pleases started to fire off in my head.
“It’s not a fake marriage, Sabrina,” he told me. “It might’ve been something that you didn’t like at first. Something that made you think I thought this was going to be fake. But it was never fake to me. Something happened to me when I saw you on that bench, and you’ve literally been on my mind for weeks. I wake up, and you’re the first thing I think about. I go to bed, and you’re the last thing that crosses my mind. I drive by a goddamn store, and I wonder if you need anything. I pass you and don’t say anything, and I feel like I’m leaving my heart in a bread crumb trail so you can find your way to me.”
I… didn’t know what to say.
That was the sweetest thing that’d ever been said.
“Price…” I whispered.
“One day, we’ll get married for real,” he said. “I’m not even contemplating at this point that we won’t. I know we will. I’ll convince you, no matter what it takes, and then we’ll live happily ever after with me disappearing in the middle of the night to go pick up brains off someone’s living room ceiling. Then, when I get home, I’ll shower, you’ll join me, and I won’t have to think about how I spent the last few hours.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
“Is that something that you do often?” I asked curiously. “Pick brains off of the ceiling of someone’s living room?”
Something intense entered into Price’s eyes, and it wasn’t the shampoo that’d been sitting in his hair way too long.
I pulled the showerhead off the wall and started to rinse the shampoo from his hair.
It was only when he was done, when I was close enough to him that I could hear his whisper, that he said, “I’m not a very nice person.”
I leaned back so I could stare into his eyes. “Mean people don’t bring dead women in from the beach.”
And they didn’t.
A mean person would’ve left me there. Faye and me.
He tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear when he said, “One day, I’m going to show you that mean, and I don’t want you to be scared. That means it might be there for you to see it, but it’ll never be directed at you.”
I stepped back away from him before I did something stupid like throw my arms around him.
Because, after the last day with him, I knew where that would lead.
And my vagina was begging me for a half hour off.
The look that crossed over his face when I stepped away from him had me wanting to lighten the mood, so I smiled. “Don’t frown so, Trinket darling. It causes wrinkles.”
He rolled his eyes and turned the water to cold before stepping out of the shower.
He reached for a towel that was up high on a shelf right inside the shower stall, then methodically started to dry himself off.
I filled my mouth with water, being careful not to allow my cheeks to puff out and give me away, then stepped out of the shower behind Price.
He was bent over, running the towel along his lower legs.
When he stood up, I shot the water out of my mouth and in his direction.
It hit him at his chest and started to slide down his now dry torso.
He looked down at his chest, then at me, then back at his chest.
“Sabrina,” he growled. “You are such a shit.”
I grinned at him, letting down my guard slightly now that I knew he couldn’t retaliate.
Except he didn’t need water to retaliate.
He had a towel.
And it was wet.
Two lethal combinations when it came to him, apparently.
Before I could so much as jump back in response, he flipped the towel out and caught me on the inside of my thigh with just the tip of the towel.