Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76807 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76807 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Then after dropping that little bomb, he grabbed a small pile of donuts, stacked them on a mug of coffee, and headed out to eat them in front of the TV. Likely watching those fucking rom-coms that he apparently liked.
I hadn’t really considered that.
In my mind, Clay would never want my hands—or any other part of me—on his sister.
“I got a sister,” Callow said, surprising me with that information, making me realize just how many secrets these prospects still had from the rest of us.
Or maybe it was more accurate to assume that I didn’t know because I never spent time with them that didn’t involve bossing them around.
“If I were gone, and they had those kinds of feelings, think I’d be alright with my best buddy marrying my sister. Protecting her. Keeping her happy. Just… something to consider,” he said before taking his donut and coffee out to the living room with Sully.
“You got any advice for me?” I asked Dezi.
“Who, me? Ah, just… having a chick all to yourself is kinda sweet, man.”
“You just say that because she gets you all the donuts you can eat.”
“That’s a definite perk,” he agreed, smirking at me as I turned to get myself a cup of coffee before taking myself back to my room.
I dropped down on the empty bed, her vanilla and rose scent fucking everywhere, making it hard to think past the desire that bloomed through my system again.
The fuck would Clay have wanted in this situation?
Sully was right.
He would have killed me himself if he thought I was using his sister.
But if there were feelings? On both sides? If we wanted to pursue that? Would we have his blessing?
I knew the answer before the question even finished forming.
Yes.
Yes, he would be okay with it.
Clay wanted nothing more than for his sister to be happy. And, when we were close, for the same for me.
If we found happiness in each other, he would have been okay with that. Even happy about it.
After giving me the whole ‘If you hurt her, I’ll pull out your guts through your mouth and give it to her as a necklace’ speech, of course.
So did I really need to keep my hands off of her now? Out of some misguided idea of honoring his memory.
“Fuck,” I sighed, sipping my coffee, trying to clear my mind. Which wasn’t going to happen if I kept trying to find arguments for why I could fuck Caliana.
I forced my mind back to why she’d shown up in the first place.
The watch.
She was right.
Clay never would have sold or lost that.
And the shit about the car?
That was rubbing me all sorts of wrong ways.
I didn’t want to think Clay was into some shady shit.
Clay had always been the more straight-and-narrow of the two of us, knowing his parents’ hearts would break if they found out all the hard work they’d done to keep him on the right path had backfired.
But his parents were long dead.
If shit got complicated, maybe there was a chance that he would seize the opportunity to get a little more in his life.
Fuck, it wasn’t like I was one to judge.
Getting up, I went into my closet, finding the box of paperwork from Clay’s unusually cluttered desk, and bringing it back to the bed with me.
The Corvette.
The life insurance.
Getting his affairs in order.
It was all spelling out something not great.
And the only thing in his entire life that seemed out of order was this desk.
Was that some sort of sign?
To me, who would know how wrong it was?
To dig deeper.
To find clues he might have left behind?
I didn’t know.
But I was damn sure about to find out.
A lot of the paperwork was bullshit. Bills dating back over a year. Shit that would have been paid, since his lights and water were still on.
It was crap to make the pile look innocent. Just your average guy who doesn’t care enough to go through and shred their old paperwork.
Nothing to see here.
That was exactly why, as I kept sorting shit, I became more and more sure that there was something to see there.
I looked through the shit for hours, though, not seeing any sort of note, some message to me about what was going on.
Eventually, I piled it all back in the box in the sorted order, deciding I needed some time away from it, to come back with fresh eyes sometime later.
Besides, I had some leads to track down.
About the watch.
The car.
That kind of thing.
Because I got a really bad feeling that none of this was what it seemed like on the surface.
Not even, I had to accept as I got showered and changed to head out, the note he left about keeping an eye on his sister.
It made no sense to pick me when we hadn’t been in contact for years. He had no fucking idea what kind of man I’d become.