Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 105231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 526(@200wpm)___ 421(@250wpm)___ 351(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 105231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 526(@200wpm)___ 421(@250wpm)___ 351(@300wpm)
Boggled the mind. He’d never really experienced such disobedience.
“I’m going to need her phone number,” he told Lacey abruptly.
“Yeah, that’s not happening. Also, you need to leave her alone. No following her.”
“I wasn’t following her!” he snapped. “I was there on a date.”
Silence came from down the other end of the phone. “A date?”
“Yes, a date. That thing people do when they are looking for someone to . . . settle down with.”
“Settle down with?” Lacey repeated.
“Are you all right? Why do you keep repeating me?”
“Am I all right?”
“Lacey,” he grumbled. “As nice as it is to talk to you, you’re going to need to stop repeating everything I say.”
“Right, um, right. I thought Clay was joking when he said that you’d started dating.”
“Is the idea so funny?” he asked in a silken voice.
“Not at all,” she said hastily. “It’s just hard to imagine you dating, settling down, getting married.”
“Happens to most people eventually.”
“Right, yes, of course. I’m glad you’re dating. So it was really a coincidence that you were there?”
“Yes, I’m not a stalker!” Although he had contemplated sitting outside Caren’s apartment waiting for her to leave so he could talk to her.
But that didn’t make him a stalker. He was just . . . concerned about her.
It was a welfare check.
He should be praised for his level of care.
“Right, that’s good. You still shouldn’t have gone over there and insisted that she let you take her home.”
“She was going to take the subway!” he said. “At night! In New York! She has no idea how dangerous that is.”
“Caren is used to taking care of herself,” Lacey told him.
“Just because she’s used to it doesn’t mean that she’s good at it.”
“She’s still alive, isn’t she?”
He grunted. “That doesn’t mean that something couldn’t happen. She’s small. If a man tried to overpower her, she could be badly hurt. She shouldn’t be meeting with strange men. And she definitely shouldn’t have taken public transit. What if he’d followed her home and attacked her?”
“That wasn’t going to happen.”
“You don’t know that, Lacey.” His cousin was surprisingly naive for someone who had worked for the FBI. “There is danger everywhere.”
“I know there is. And it was nice of you to take her home. But you can’t force her to move in with you. Or for her to let you vet her dates.”
He wouldn’t be so sure of that. “She would be safer here with me.”
“Travis, you can’t. She’s her own person. That sounds like kidnapping.”
Yeah, he couldn’t deny that that had entered his mind. He could just steal her away into his apartment and lock her up until she agreed with him.
“Travis! No kidnapping her!”
“What if it’s for her own good?” Surely there was a gray area of kidnapping. Good versus bad kidnapping.
Right?
“It’s not. Kidnapping someone is never allowed. Understand? It’s against the law. And she’s my friend.”
“Which is part of the reason I should be protecting her.”
Lacey sighed. “Travis, she doesn’t want your protection.”
What did that have to do with anything?
“And I’ll reiterate, she doesn’t need it. She’s fine.”
“Dating strangers without someone watching over you isn’t fine. She has no sense of self-preservation.”
“You have never wanted to do that in the past for any friend I’ve had. You didn’t say two words to Indie at the wedding.”
Indie? Who the hell was that?
Oh wait. She had a friend called Indie.
“I don’t know Indie, why would I talk to her?”
“And you don’t know Caren either. You haven’t seen her in a long time. And to be completely honest, big cousin, you never did know her. You didn’t want to. You thought she was weird and a nuisance.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“We don’t lie to each other, remember? Also, I overheard you saying that to Jace once when we were younger. The thing is, so did Caren.”
He winced. Fuck.
“I was a complete asshole, wasn’t I?”
“Well, you weren’t nice. But you were also a lot younger. I got really mad at you and was going to go after you, but Caren stopped me.”
“Why?” It would have killed him to have Lacey truly mad at him. Sure, she got annoyed by him sometimes, although he honestly had no idea why. Something about him being too protective and stubborn.
You know, some sort of bullshit like that.
But she never got truly angry at him.
“Well, she told me that what you said wasn’t wrong. That she was weird and probably annoying. I disagreed. She told me that was because I was way more mature than you as girls’ brains developed faster than boys. Then we giggled.”
“I’m six years older than you!”
“Uh-huh and you were still blind to the fact that there was more to Caren than met the eye.”
Fuck it.
He had been.
And he couldn’t deny it. He’d been focused on teenage bullshit when she’d first appeared. Then getting into the Marines.