Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
Her tongue pokes between her teeth as she smiles. “Is there candy involved?”
“There will be as quick as I can get DoorDash here…”
She waves a hand. “Meh, my purse is stacked with sour gummies and my last pack of Red Hots.”
“Oh no.” I tug her to me. “Guess we gotta take a trip back to the candy store.”
“Such an inconvenience.” She plays along, her arms looping around my waist.
“I’m about to give you something you’ve been dying for, baby.” I wiggle my brows. “Head up to my office.”
Her eyes light up. “No…”
“Oh, yeah. Books are all yours.”
“Archives and dates and numbers, oh my.” She grins, already tearing away.
I hold her back a second longer, my knuckles pressing at her chin.
“Don’t overwhelm yourself and don’t stress over it,” I tell her. “It’s a shit show I’ve been trying to work through for a year now.”
Davis pushes up on her toes, so I bend, giving her my lips, but she only speaks against mine.
“Challenge accepted.”
And then the girl straight skips into the place, leaving me here to do nothing but stare after her, my brother reappearing as she disappears.
“Could be a permanent thing, you know,” he says, tipping his head toward the door when I frown. “Her being here, helping with shit… if you’d buck up and tell her you bought the fucking place already.”
My eyes slide to the entryway. “When I’m ready, I will.”
“Dude, you’re living with her, doing a fuckton more than that now, apparently, and I’ve seen nothing from her to make me think she ain’t cool with you working here. Fuck’s the difference?”
The difference is huge, and this asshole knows it. Right now, I work as a manager at a bar, a job she might assume is temporary and can get behind. But tell her I own the place? I don’t know about that.
Davis might have forced herself to trust herself by finding a healthy relationship with alcohol, but for it to be part of the foundation her future would be built on with me as a partner and this place my livelihood and focus?
Not so sure she would want that. Not sure it would be right to ask her to, knowing there would forever be a fear in the back of her mind, a worry she might lose me, herself, or someone else to the shit she lost her brother to. She must want a family one day, right?
What woman wants to raise her kids around a bar?
“Crew.”
I turn toward my brother, my eyes following him as he steps up to grab the last two boxes of limes.
“You worked your ass off to make something happen for yourself.” He holds my gaze. “Take a second to be proud of yourself, instead of kicking your own ass over the things you can’t or should do.”
Pressure falls on my chest, and I eye my brother.
How he turned out as decent as he did, I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about the years he was alone with our fucked-up parents—a choice I think he made simply because he was only ten when the Franco’s asked for legal guardianship over me. That, or my dad got in his head when I wasn’t around, which is very fucking likely. He doesn’t want to talk about it though, and I’ve tried a time or two.
I don’t know the shit he saw or what he went through, but I know it was no cakewalk. The day he turned seventeen, he had one foot out the door, waiting for eighteen to get there, but just before his birthday, our dad went to prison—finally—and my mom convinced him to stay. He lasted a while before shit went south yet again.
He took off, lived in solitude in Yosemite before I called him and begged him to come here.
I nod, and he squeezes my shoulder before lifting the last box.
“Hold up, I have to tell you something.”
Drew looks back with a frown, but one glance in my direction, his features smooth and then he’s standing front and center. “Talk to me.”
Crossing my arms, I lean against the door, staring at Davis. She’s sitting on the floor, the cot folded up, desk pushed to the side, and papers strewn out all around her in a chaotic mess that likely makes perfect sense to her. Her staple candy necklace is still strung around her neck, but now stretched across her jaw and face, allowing a few tiny pieces to settle along her lips, just enough to give her a hint of sweetness with each move of her mouth.
It takes her a second, but she finally looks up, the stretchy choker rolling down her chin and leaving a streak of white. She frowns. “What time is it?”
“A little after four.”
Her eyes widen. “We were supposed to be at Layla’s.”
“I know.”
She opens her mouth, but I lift my hand.