Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“So I get having a shitty dad can do a number on you.”
Ah.
“I’m good,” I assured.
“He pay up when you needed toilet paper?”
He did not.
“We survived,” I hedged.
“Right,” he bit off, all of a sudden verbally irritable. “So you’re good swearing off men because the first one in your life, the one you should be able to depend on straight to your bones until the day he dies, fucked you over, fucked your mom over, and that was the launching pad for you to find men who would prove your theory true that all of us are trash and you’re good to live your life depending on no one but you.”
It felt like someone punched the breath out of me.
Hello? Logic called. Psychology minor? Girl, you cannot blame me for you walking face first into that one.
Okay, seriously, he’s hot and perceptive and clever and protective and real and a great kisser. We…have…hit…the…MOTHERLODE! Dreamer crowed.
“Willow?” Gabe called.
“I’m done talking,” I snapped.
“I bet,” he muttered, and there was some humor in that mutter, but also some impatience.
Good.
He could stew in conflicting emotions for a change.
We rode the rest of the way in silence, and he got out when I got out.
“I can make the delivery myself,” I told him.
“You’re not walking there and back three times. You’re walking once, getting paid, and I’m walking twice, then we’re getting dinner.”
I mean…
The man made being awesome and annoying an art.
Naturally, I focused on the annoying.
“You’re very bossy,” I remarked tartly.
And that was when it happened.
And it happened so fast, I had no hope of evading it.
What happened was, he whisked the box of cupcakes out of my hands and put them on the roof of the Jeep before he got in my space, caught me with both hands cupping my head, and he put his face half an inch from mine.
My breath went on vacation at having him so close and decided it might never come back when I read the look in his eyes.
“Cupcake, you are not getting this, so I’ll spell it out,” he said in a steely rumble. “I am in this to win this. If you were honest with yourself for a single fuckin’ second, you’d know it. You’d know why I am. You’d know why you should let me in. You’d learn why you should give me a shot. And you’d learn why it wouldn’t only be me winning if you did, it would also be you.”
“Full of yourself much?” I pushed out, because…
Fuck.
He was getting to me.
“I wanted to build a strong, healthy body. I built a strong, healthy body, and I maintain it.”
He sure does, Dreamer cooed.
“I wanted to be starting tackle on my college football team,” he carried on. “I worked my ass off and made starting tackle my sophomore year.”
Oh shit.
I was sensing where this was going, and it was scaring the dickens out of me.
“I wanted to make detective after three years,” he continued. “I made detective. I wanted a place on the Nightingale team, and trust me, being blood to a partner with a stake in that business did not get me a pass. It made it harder because I had to prove to the others I wasn’t a family hire. And they do not fuck around with training. We function as a unit, and if you don’t hold up your part, you’re out. I worked with a partner on the force. The force on the whole is a team. But I have not been trained extensively like Cap, Knox, Shaw and Landon have to do my part to keep my brothers alive. They came in instinctively knowing what their role was. I had to prove I could learn it and then do it.”
Okay…
Ummmm…
Yikes.
“And I did,” he went on. “In case you aren’t following, I not only do not shy away from a challenge, I actively seek them. Not one thing in this life is worth it if you don’t have to put in the work to earn it. So keep going, baby, because the more you try to keep me out even knowing you’ve already let me in, the harder I’ll work to show you what you’ll get when you get me.”
“I have not let you in,” I denied. “I’m just trying not to let this escalate to me being a bitch like last time.”
“Willow,” he whispered, him saying my name in that tone something I knew to my marrow I’d remember until my dying day, “you curled into my side last night and said, ‘Goodnight, Gabe.’”
I closed my eyes.
I did that.
I totally did that.
I tried to pretend I didn’t, to the point, in the waning throes of taco-and-beer-infused denial, I totally lied to myself that I didn’t know how he got there.
But I did that.
He kept at me.
“And you pressed into me this morning knowing exactly who you were pressing that sweet body to.”