Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69303 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
He kept talking to Eugene, but he allowed his eyes to roam the length of my body.
“Who are you…”
I looked away quickly, turning my back on the two men so that Eugene wouldn’t see my face and react to my presence.
I didn’t want him to know that I was here.
I needed some concrete proof that he was cheating on Daniella, or she’d never let him go.
I’d spent five hundred bucks on a last-minute ticket here, and I was not wasting that money.
Something had to give, and it needed to be Eugene.
If I just found some dirt on the man, Daniella would come to her senses. Surely.
Because if she didn’t, I’d be spending the rest of my life picking my sister up off the floor as her severe anxiety took over and held her hostage.
I knew how this would go.
Eugene would leave her. Daniella would spiral, and I’d have to deal with her stalking Eugene.
And she would stalk him.
Daniella had a disorder—obsessive love disorder.
When we were kids, it was directed at a couple of boys.
At first, everyone thought it was cute.
Then she started to fight over the boys with the little girls.
It’d only grown from there, and now when she meets a guy she likes, she hyper fixates on them.
Some guys really like it—she makes them the center of her world.
And some guys don’t.
Either way, it was always a bad thing when she obsessed over someone new.
They never worked out—and it was always them breaking up with Daniella.
Daniella would practically smother them with her love, and when they finally decided they needed to breathe, they chose to end it.
Sometimes it ended with them being cordial while Daniella secretly stalked them. And sometimes it ended with them breaking up, cutting ties, and the men moving so far away that Daniella had no choice but to let them go.
She always, always found someone new, though.
Eugene was just the newest man in a long line of men.
He wasn’t the first, and he wouldn’t be the last.
I loved my big sister.
I swear I did.
But she was a lot of work.
From a young age, Daniella had always had trouble being in public places, especially if those public places were with people that she didn’t know.
As time went on, that anxiety grew and she’d allowed it to start controlling her life.
She found solace in finding men that would take care of her and give her whatever she wanted.
Honestly, wanting a man to take care of you wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, when you did it in such a co-dependent way, tailoring your life around a man that would one day leave because you asked him where he was ninety-two times in seventeen minutes, it wasn’t a good thing.
And for Daniella, I could literally see the erratic behavior building, and I knew this time, it wouldn’t end with them breaking up.
It would end with a restraining order, which Daniella would certainly break, because Eugene was a powerful man. And though he liked my sister’s utter devotion, one day he would realize that she was just too much.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
It was literally making me sick knowing what was coming.
She’d already quit her job at the apartments where she and I had once lived. Daniella had been the manager there and I lived there at a reduced rate.
And since she’d done it on such bad terms, the owners had decided that they didn’t want anyone with the last name Rossi at their properties, forcing Daniella and me to get out.
For Daniella, it hadn’t necessarily been a super bad thing.
She’d just moved in with Eugene—God help her.
However, for me, I’d had to move into a shitty apartment in the downtown area.
I literally had all of my valuables locked up tight in a storage facility in Plano while the stuff that I didn’t care about was at my apartment.
I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it’d even be there when I got home.
I quickly shifted my hair to cover the tattoo on the back of my neck, allowing my long ponytail to hang straight down the length of my spine.
I wasn’t tall. Wasn’t super in shape. Wasn’t overly attractive.
However, I did have great hair.
It was long and auburn, shone like whiskey fire in the sun, and I never had a bad hair day.
It looked great in a ponytail. Great down. Great in an updo.
“…are you looking at?”
I tensed.
I immediately cursed my stupidity for wearing something that showed off the windchimes on the back of my neck, inked in black and gray.
Normally I tried to keep it covered because those windchimes held a special meaning, and I hated when people asked about them because I then had to lie.
Eugene was one of the men that I lied to, but he’d studied them extensively when he’d walked in on me changing one day and hadn’t told me until I was half naked with him behind me.