Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Though in the moment, she’d bought it all. In the moment she’d felt her soul split at the thought of Kyle dying. She’d known she wouldn’t love another man, that he’d taken a piece of her with him.
She’d had to be dragged to the hospital and sedated so they could set her arm and see to her other injuries. When she’d woken up, grief had poured through her, a wild river she’d known she would drown in. That pain had been so much worse than the physical. It had been worse than the realization that her father loved keeping the peace more than he loved her, worse than that moment when she’d accepted her mother would die.
Losing Kyle had made her wish she’d been in that building with him so they could go together.
And then Kyle’s tracker had come back online. Someone had made sure her phone was on the table beside her, and she’d had to look. She’d had to see that Kyle’s tracker was dead to start to accept the loss. She monitored the trackers on all the operatives. Ian Taggart liked to tag his puppies, as he called them. More than once those locator devices had saved the day.
Kyle must have forgotten about it in the moment. She could understand. Things had moved quickly once Julia—who’d presented herself as Jane Adams—had killed the doctor who’d performed her earliest plastic surgery. That was the excuse she’d given for murdering the man. He’d been a member of The Reef, and Julia had worked her way to a position where she could take the doctor down and screw up her ex-boyfriend’s life at the same time. So it was reasonable that Kyle had forgotten his uncle could literally track him.
Not that Ian wasn’t in on it. He had to be since someone had gone in and made it look like the tracker had gone dead at the time when Kyle would have exploded. They’d erased the hours when she’d tracked him from Malibu to downtown LA, where the signal had suddenly been lost.
She wondered if Drake had been the one to tell him he was a dumbass and the world was still watching him or if he’d figured it out on his own.
Of course there was a darker scenario. Maybe Julia had pointed it out herself.
“Boomer, Kyle’s alive.” She was suddenly deeply concerned that Boomer hadn’t gotten the memo the rest of the group seemed to have received. Oh, they were all holding the line that she was sure Kyle wanted them to hold, but they couldn’t fake the grief they obviously didn’t feel. Yes, they were military dudes, and perhaps if she hadn’t checked the monitor list, she might have bought it, but she had.
Boomer frowned. “I don’t see how.”
She reached out and held his hand. Boomer was the best guy in the world. He’d been in the room the first time she’d had this argument with Tag, but he might have only heard his boss telling her Kyle was dead and he’d ID’d the body himself. “He faked it because his ex-girlfriend is alive and he either thinks he’s protecting me or he’s going back to her.”
When she thought about it, it was a novel way to get out of a relationship that didn’t work for him. The sex might not have been as good for him as it was for her.
Or she was exactly what she’d feared she’d been all along. A placeholder. The sanctuary in the storm of his real epic love story.
She could put on fishnet leggings and dye her hair purple, but deep down she was just a normal, boring girl. How was she supposed to compete with the Charlotte Taggarts of the world?
And what was Julia Ennis if she wasn’t Charlotte Taggart gone wrong? Even a bad Charlotte would be more exciting than a boring MaeBe. Even her fucking name was dull. It literally meant someone who couldn’t make up her mind. Maybe.
Kyle might think he could fix Julia and then he would have the gorgeous, dangerous lover of his dreams.
He hadn’t even topped MaeBe.
“I don’t think he would go back to her. I don’t think he liked her much,” Boomer said.
“I know he didn’t.” Ian Taggart stood in the doorway, his massive, muscular body taking up most of the space. Hutch was behind him, going on his tiptoes to get a glimpse into the room.
Well, that explained how they’d changed the records. Hutch was excellent with code, and he would have all of Kyle’s potential problems erased as soon as they identified them.
Hutch was in on it, too. They all were.
Did they know Kyle had fucked her once and then decided she wasn’t strong enough to fight beside him?
Or he’d fucked her once and decided she wasn’t worth fighting with at all.
“One of you better put Boomer out of his misery. He still thinks Kyle’s dead,” she said, unwilling to leave Boomer on the outside even though she knew she would be. She didn’t need company. It wasn’t like she was going to stay around.