Total pages in book: 41
Estimated words: 38786 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 129(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38786 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 129(@300wpm)
I lose the chance to tell him I don’t have to wait another year—Kelsey is the best gift I’ve ever received—when my charge through the curtains has me stumbling onto a handful of nurses staring at me as if I am talking to myself.
They’re acting like a patient didn’t just dart past them, and the concern on their faces triples when I ask, “Did anyone see which way Santa went?”
CHAPTER 16
Zane
Casey sighs when I rip at my bow tie with the tenacity of a shark. I’m moody, tired, and wearing a stupid-ass groomsmen suit for the ninth time in my life.
After ensuring the nurses from the ICU that I didn’t need a psych evaluation, I raced to Kelsey’s apartment, determined to prove Santa wrong that I wasn’t ready to have my Christmas wish granted.
I’d already met the girl of my dreams, so I only needed to tell Kelsey the truth.
All I found at Kelsey’s building was an empty apartment and a receipt for my donation to the charity Santa the night I returned home.
I’ve tried Kelsey’s cell a hundred times, and when my desperation reached fever pitch, I went to her old place of employment to see if she’d given them a forwarding address.
I even asked Noelle, who was acting far too heartbroken over a man like Peter, if she knew where Kelsey would go.
Every direction I took was a dead end.
I’ve never had a case backfire so severely before.
I startle when I realize the inaccuracy of my last thought. Kelsey isn’t a client of mine. She isn’t a case number. She’s just clueless because Santa fucked everything up when he stalled proceedings by faking a heart attack.
“Fucking Santa.”
“Don’t blame him,” Casey snaps out, over my shit. I’ve been a grouch all day. “I’d make you wait a whole lot longer than a year if I had discovered you were profiting off women’s heartache.” My family were clueless about what I did for a living until Casey followed Peter and Noelle’s storm out of my suite. “You used vulnerabilities exposed by their exes to weasel your way into their lives for profit. Then you made them our mother.”
I pfft her. “I did no such thing. I built them up before making them realize they deserve better.”
She holds her hands out as if to say, “Exactly,” before she thrusts them at the aisle our mother is due to walk down in under an hour. “You built her up so much, Zane, she never comes back down. She goes through husbands like underwear because you’ve made her believe she can do no wrong. How has that helped her?” Before I can speak, she mutters, “And if you’re helping them be ‘better women,’ why do their exes pick up the tab?”
Since I can’t find an appropriate response, I murmur, “I help them move on.”
“No, you help them turn a blind eye to the scheming pieces of shit they’d already moved on from before you became a part of their lives.” I’ve never seen her so worked up when she gets up in my face and says, “If she wants a billionaire’s house after she’s given him an heir and a spare, she deserves the billionaire’s house. If she wants to keep the Rolls Royce he gifted her on her birthday, she deserves to keep it.”
She hits me where she knows it will hurt. “If she wants to make him fret for a week about a family heirloom he offered when he asked her to be his wife, she gets to make him fret! It is the least he should suffer for making her sit across from them necking like teens for an entire week three weeks out from their wedding!”
Her snarl is vicious. “It isn’t up to you to inflate her ego to such an unmanageable level that she walks over everyone she’s meant to love.” Her voice cracks when she murmurs, “She’s our mother, Zane, so I will always love her, but has she ever put us first? Has she ever wondered how it feels for us to have these men introduced into our lives over and over again?” She angrily wipes at a tear streaming down her face. “Has she ever wondered how this affects us? How it affected you?”
“No, she hasn’t,” I admit, the fight no longer in me. The wind was released from my sails when she compared the women I thought I was helping to our mother.
Casey doesn’t hesitate to continue cutting me down. “Then don’t blame Santa for your fucked up notions of what women want. Make the real culprit pay.”
When she darts past our mother coming to check we’ve set the aisle up exactly how she wants, my father signals that he will take care of Casey while I deal with the actual perpetrator of her upset.