Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 67468 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67468 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Her groan as I filled her made me smirk.
“Does this answer your question about lunch?” I teased.
She swallowed audibly and said, “Yes, sir.”
God. Fucking. Dammit.
“Oh, sweetheart. You sure know how to do it for me.”
Then I showed her my appreciation.
Twice more.
CHAPTER 13
My vagina is going to close up like an earring hole if you don’t use it soon.
-Text from Alice to Cassius
ALICE
I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere by myself.
If I didn’t have Cassius with me, my dad was with me, or Etienne was with me, or Aodhan, Kobe, Wake, Bain, KD, my grandfather, my brother, and even Karen.
I had a constant revolving cycle of babysitters.
All of which were really, really good about giving me what I wanted, without actually giving me what I wanted.
For instance, right in that moment, I was with Karen.
Karen and I were shopping.
I had a day off—something I hadn’t had in years—and we were going shopping for new clothes.
Or, more specifically, new underwear.
I’d had a lot go missing in the last couple of weeks, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was bouncing back and forth between my apartment and the houseboat. My clothes were split between the two places, and my socks and underwear numbers were dwindling.
“Don’t look now, but we have company.”
I did look, and I instantly regretted it.
Coran was looking at me. Again.
That’d been happening a lot.
It’d been exactly two weeks since the incident. Though I was physically recovered, mentally I still had a lot of excess baggage to deal with.
Like, all of a sudden, I was scared of the dark.
I didn’t like being in the dark if I was alone, and I certainly didn’t like going outside if even a hint of it was in existence.
Cassius didn’t mind that he had to be with me twenty-four-seven when I did anything after the hours of six in the evening—though someone was with me anyway—but unless it was him specifically, I didn’t leave my place.
Mostly because I totally freaked out, and only someone’s closeness—I figured out as long as I was physically wrapped around someone, my brother or dad included—could control my urge to flee. And since Cassius wasn’t too hip on me wrapping myself around anyone that wasn’t him or close family, he made sure to always be there.
“Ugh, there’s no way his father doesn’t see that he’s guilty as fuck,” Karen grumbled under her breath.
That was another thing.
We knew that it was Coran that’d done the attacking.
The certainty in my gut, however, wasn’t enough to countermand his alibi.
Which really freakin’ sucked, but that was where we were at.
Two weeks had gone by that we’d been trying to find evidence that connected him to the scene. But other than our gut instincts and his creepiness, we’d been left swinging and missing.
“What’s that black fabric he has in his hands?” I whispered. “He’s smelling it and grinning, and it’s really fuckin’ creepy.
Every fucking thing about Coran Kalb was creepy. His sniffing. His smiling. His very existence.
“No clue,” Karen said as she fisted her hands at her sides. “It honestly looks like underwear, but I swear to God, I’m hoping it isn’t. I wish he’d just make a move already. This following you around thing is totally pissing me off.”
That was yet another problem.
He’d been following me around.
A lot.
Sadly, just because he was around wasn’t enough to get a restraining order. Or so the judge that was presiding over the case said. Really, it was just that Oberon, Coran’s father, was affluent in the community, and had a huge say in whatever did and didn’t get approved or pushed through.
Since Sheriff Sunny Sommers was new, he hadn’t built the backing that most sheriffs had with their judicial counterparts. Hence, Coran following me, and me with no restraining order in sight.
The two good things I could say about him following us was that one, we knew where he was. And two, he was going to slip up. It was only a matter of time.
In the meantime, my apartment, The Marina, and Cassius’s houseboat all had state-of-the-art surveillance systems thanks to Kobe. And they were monitored twenty-four-seven by Cassius’s good friend and a really good hacker, Folsom.
Folsom who, apparently, was a certified genius and had about ten different professions. According to Cassius, she’d recently graduated from veterinary school and planned to help out at Matilda and Diana’s veterinary practice. But only between her actual job of computer hacking.
Unfortunately, Oberon and Coran lived in the ‘land before time’ according to Folsom. Meaning, they didn’t have anything to hack because they didn’t have a single computer on the property. The only technology on their island was a single satellite phone that Oberon used in case of emergencies.
Which was why Folsom hadn’t been able to help much, either.
One would think that a college student such as Coran would buck his father’s outdated outlook on technology, but no. Not even Coran had a secret cell phone that Folsom could hack.