Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 82214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
I should never have slept with some random woman. I should never have started this business. I should never have agreed to that divorce. Now everything was falling apart, and I felt lost and low on options.
I stayed at the bar and finished the next two shots, gulping them down as if they were the solution to my problems. I hadn’t even asked Darlene when she was hoping to leave; it could be any day now. It could be tomorrow.
I never wanted to go this far, but if I had to, I would fight for my son. But before that, I had a lot of work ahead of me. I needed to prove that I was an active and worthy father, but before I could put my all into it, I needed to make sure I could do it for real and not just for a judge.
Chapter 9
Christie
This was bullshit. Besides swearing off one-night stands, I needed to swear off men.
I couldn’t afford a new phone. That was the reality I lived in. I could just call him over and over until he gave me my phone back, but he seemed to have a lot more patience than I did, and my plane left in two days.
Short on ideas and threats, I opened Ryan’s phone and looked through his call log. I was dying to do something I knew would piss him off. If all he wanted to do was play games with me, I’d play games. I wasn’t sure what I thought I’d find. I didn’t know if he lived with anyone or who might know him here. Most of his calls were to random numbers or numbers that looked like they had something to do with work. I thought he said something about expanding his business to other cities in Texas. One of the last numbers he’d called said “Office.”
Whatever. I shook my head, pausing when I closed the call log to look at the sweet face on his home screen. That poor boy had a jerk for a dad. I hadn’t thought much about whether he was in a relationship or, worse, married. He didn’t ever wear a ring. And he’d seemed so nice when I met him, though when I thought about it, was he much different from when I met him? He enjoyed talking and listening that day at the airport, and he’d been interested in how the conference went before I blew up on him.
“And he was a flirt then, too,” I mumbled, swiping to his maps. Warmth spread in my core and made me shift. My abdomen tingled with a steady hum that turned my thoughts elsewhere to a dark bedroom and a spontaneous, exciting few hours. The most exciting few hours I’d had in a long time.
There! Thank Google for its settings. He had an address marked “Home” and one marked “Work.” I wasn’t sure what it was about his work address that turned me off going there. This was a personal issue, and I doubted my phone would be at his workplace anyway.
He would so freak out, but this was a game I was almost comfortable with playing. I had his phone, so it would only make sense that I would have all his personal information. Besides, if he was so worried about it, maybe he shouldn’t have been so quick to try to take me back there.
I redirected the cab driver to his address and scrolled through his photos like the stalker I was becoming. His son was precious. I didn’t see many kids with red hair, and it was charming on this boy. He was like an angel with the most beautiful hazel eyes I’d ever seen. He looked like he was about four. I didn’t see any photos of a woman. That made me feel better. I smiled as I found more photos of Ryan with his son, mostly in a place I assumed was his house. I frowned at the idea of Ryan bringing me home if his son was there. Or maybe he was with a babysitter. Or a nanny who took care of him when Ryan went out of town.
So Ryan could be home alone. Well, shit. My face flushed with heat. I’d walked out on the man after he admitted I was a booty call, and now I was going to his house after blatantly showing him that I wasn’t interested.
Warmth pooled in my core, and I shifted uncomfortably. I wasn’t interested, was I? We had slept together once, so was it normal for people to do it again? I could have overreacted. He hadn’t said he wouldn’t give me my phone, just that I needed to go back to his place to get it. We were flirting, so it was a fair social cue.