Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
He felt her fear.
So yeah.
He kept a finger on the pulse.
They all did.
“Right, I’ll let it go,” he murmured.
“Like, forever?” she demanded.
“No, because I love you and want to make sure you’re okay. But I won’t ask again for two full weeks.”
“I’m counting,” she warned.
He chuckled.
They drove past the club and then they drove down the slope to the house.
He’d been right all those months ago, Lucinda had a beautiful garden around her house. It wasn’t formal, it seemed to grow wild and carefree, but something he’d learned about her since everything went down, she gardened.
She said it was her meditation.
He was unsurprised her meditation created beauty.
And now that things had started blooming, they had fresh flowers in the house all the time.
He parked next to her Jaguar under the overhang that was hidden by the bulk of the house, and like always, he smiled to himself. Because he knew she wasn’t home (being a wilderness mogul, she worked a lot), but she’d taken the golf cart to her office.
They went in, he and Madden worked together to sort her afternoon snack, and Indira showed so Rus could go back to the office for a few hours before coming home.
As he was driving by the club, he saw a beautiful woman wearing a creamy dress standing at the window in the room above the overhang.
He saluted her as he drove by.
She didn’t move.
Though she was too far for him to see it, he knew she smiled.
Rus woke with a jerk.
“Honey?”
She was right there.
Always right there.
He touched her anyway.
Lucinda felt warm.
Good.
He tossed the covers off himself and got out of bed.
The house was dark.
It was quiet, save the constant sound of the river rushing over the rocks.
He moved down the stairs and opened the first door to the right.
He looked in.
Shit.
His blood pressure spiked.
No one was there.
The bed was still made.
He turned immediately to the door to his left.
He looked in.
There was a strange glow in the room that came from the dark screen with the word Samsung appearing and disappearing on it in different places.
And two girls, well, one was a woman, were cuddled in bed, asleep, the detritus of the kind of food frenzy that accompanied binge watching littering the duvet.
Sabrina had introduced Madden to Gilmore Girls.
Rus felt his breath coming easier.
He shut the door quietly behind him and walked through the rest of the house, going all the way down the stairs, checking locks on doors, even scanning the garden and the deck.
She was waiting at the top landing for him.
“Okay?” she asked softly as he joined her.
“Yeah,” he replied, still slightly sweaty and wondering if he should take a quick shower.
Lucinda made the decision for him, taking his hand and closing the door behind her as she guided him to bed.
She sat him on the side then knelt on the floor in front of him and sucked him off.
She was insanely good at that.
It was a gift.
Lucinda then pushed and nudged him back between the sheets and joined him there.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
She pressed closer. “It’s okay, baby. Now, sleep.”
It happened.
Too often.
These days, it was Madden racing through the trees, but she wasn’t alone when she found him. She had someone chasing her and one side of her head was caved in from a hammer blow.
Sometimes it would switch up, and he’d walk in to see Brittanie again, round the bed, look at her face, and the face would not be Brittanie’s. It’d be Sabrina’s.
This situation would calm down.
And the longer he was arresting privileged girls who did what they wanted because they were privileged, having no idea Owen Larson might snap and send a shotgun shell through their spine or some predator hiding in the trees could wander into a wildflower field, and they’d never find their way out…
Yeah.
The longer he had of them making their way to Karen’s cruiser, safe and alive, the calmer his nights would be.
He curled Lucinda closer into his body, and she held on tight.
He let out a long breath.
He was having these dreams now.
They wouldn’t last.
And then something would happen, and they’d come back.
But he’d always have this.
His cunning queen with a heart of gold.
So it would suck.
But he’d be okay.
“Okay, no.”
Rus looked to Kleo. “Why no?”
She turned to him. “Are you trying to set your daughter up?”
From his chair up on the deck, sitting next to Kleo, he scanned the crowd.
Cade and Delphine had thrown a big barbeque for Sabrina and Acre. And it was with zero surprise that, when they arrived, Rus saw Sabrina clock Jason and Jesse Bohannan.
Knowing both of them better, it was with less than zero surprise Jace then clocked Sabrina.
“Jesse’s going to go for someone edgy, like Lucinda, or another take on that, you,” he told her. “Jace needs a princess he can spoil.”
“Oh my God.” She sounded close to hurling. “You’re setting your daughter up. She’s your princess, and the king is picking who to hand her off to.”