Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 51131 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 256(@200wpm)___ 205(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51131 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 256(@200wpm)___ 205(@250wpm)___ 170(@300wpm)
“We have to go. Parker thinks there’s someone in the house. I have to—she called me. I need to call her back. We need to call the police.”
He hasn’t moved. He’s still holding the phone in one hand, my arm in the other. “Gemma, calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! Let me go. My daughter needs me, and I’m not there!”
“Parker is fine,” he promises.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
His voice is so calm while I’m so frantic. It takes a few seconds for that to register and for me to notice the grim look on his face.
Any other time, I would care enough to ask, but if Parker might be in danger, or if she was in danger before and I’m too late to help her, then nothing else matters. Nothing else will ever matter.
“Please,” I say tearfully. “I have to get to my daughter.”
“Parker is okay,” he assures me. “I’ll take you to her right now.”
“Why are you so calm?”
Dread darkens his features. He looks down, swallows, then looks back at me, but something is different. He no longer looks like a man confident anything in the world he wants will be his. He looks like… like he understands what I’ve known all along.
We are impossible.
My stomach rocks, but I don’t understand why. My instincts click the pieces together before my tormented mind can. “Who was on the phone?”
“The first call was Landon.”
“And the second?”
“A friend of mine at the station.”
“The station?”
He closes his eyes and nods.
“The… police station?”
He nods again.
“Why?”
Hayden sighs softly, his eyes opening back up. I can see the regret and frustration. “Because Landon was arrested.”
My eyes widen. “For… for what?”
“Breaking and entering.”
Chapter Eleven
Hayden
My rage can scarcely be contained as I escort Gemma into the police station.
She has calmed down some since I filled her in on what I knew of the details. No one was hurt. My fucking son just had too much to drink with his asshole friends and thought it would be fun to give Parker Johansson a good scare.
Turns out, the cameras I had installed caught the asshole who has been playing juvenile pranks on Gemma and her daughter.
Also turns out, it wasn’t her sleazy neighbor.
It was my fucking son.
Even if I would’ve pieced together that the pranks began the year he got his driver’s license, I never would have guessed that.
All along, Gemma has been trying to tell me he’s the immovable object in the way of us ever being together, and all along, I have thought she was overreacting.
I guess not.
Gemma hasn’t said much to me since she wrapped her head around the fact that my son broke into her home tonight to go after her daughter. Most of the ride here was silent and not in the peaceful way it was earlier.
She doesn’t know her way around the police station, so she has no choice but to stick close to me as I lead her to Parker.
She breaks away from me as soon as she spots her.
I’ve never seen Parker, but I recognize her immediately because she looks so much like her mother. The same big doe eyes and similar ginger hair, though hers is longer and not as bright as her mom’s. She’s sitting cross-legged on a chair in a pair of black yoga pants and a baggy gray sweatshirt, her long hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head.
“Honey,” Gemma says, rushing to her side and pulling her daughter into her arms.
Parker returns her mom’s hug, but her gaze meets mine as I walk past them toward the desk where my son is sitting.
Landon is wearing dark wash jeans and a black hoodie, his dark hair mussed and his face set in a sullen expression. It’s clear he’s resentful about being here, like it’s not his own damn fault he is.
He doesn’t look at me as I approach. He looks past me at Parker and her mom embracing.
“Didn’t know there were two of them,” he says in a glib, sarcastic tone that makes me grind my teeth.
“You think this is funny?” I ask him, stone-faced.
He shrugs and crosses his arms over his chest as he gazes up at me. “I got a good laugh out of it.”
The police officer who called me as a professional courtesy is sitting at the messy desk, offering me an embarrassed, apologetic smile as my son shows his ass.
I desperately want to wring Landon’s neck, but I can’t blow up in public, so I shift my attention away from him.
I shake the officer’s hand and thank him because we both know my son shouldn’t be sitting here sulking in the police station. He should have been processed and had his ass thrown in a cell with all the other criminals.
The officer fills me in on what’s happening and tells me—so Landon hears, since he’s undoubtedly been a pain in the ass since he sat down—how lucky we are that this didn’t turn out much worse. The homeowner could have had a gun and killed him. They could have had a guard dog and set them loose on the intruder.