Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Maybe I’ll find someone else in Connecticut. Someone nice.
Someone better.
That way I can get over Hailey’s brother for good.
* * *
• • •
The three of us leave the motel room. An old faded green Honda waits in the parking lot, and Rocky veers past the car toward a motorcycle. He rode a motorcycle here in a suit.
Who is he?
That is a question everyone asks before he disappears out of their life like a specter. Though, I’m one of the few people Rocky sticks around for.
That should make me feel amazing.
Special, even. But I just want to flick him away like a spit-wad.
Hailey bumps up against my shoulder. “This’ll be good. Don’t you think? He’s the best at convincing our parents of anything.” She checks the map on her phone while she talks. “And if they call, he can sweet-talk them into believing we’re on a job or something.”
He’s the best liar—I want to rephrase for her.
The best manipulator.
Yet, his true Brillo-pad personality is what he always gives me, and I should be happy that he doesn’t try to manipulate me (if he does, he sucks), but I’m also too busy being annoyed right now.
“If you think he’s an asset to the plan, then I guess he is one.” I trust Hailey’s “big picture” brain, but I have a feeling her brother is mainly here to sweep up the broken pieces of a failed experiment.
And I bet he’d prefer this experiment blow up sooner rather than later.
A new determination boils inside of me. To prove Rocky wrong. Hailey and I can do this.
Rocky seizes a backpack from the motorcycle’s cargo area over the back wheel. Then slyly, he snaps off the license plate and shoves it inside his backpack. He’s abandoning the bike.
He approaches us. “Ready?”
“Yeah, let’s ditch Indiana.” Hailey slips on dark circular shades and hops into the driver’s seat.
Rocky and I fight for the passenger door, our hips and hands bumping.
I glare at him, and he layers one on me. “Excuse me, you’re the interloper here,” I tell him. “Backseat, bud.” I jam my thumb toward the back door.
He cocks his head. “A Tinrock is driving, so I get the passenger seat.”
I scoff. “We made that rule when we were children.”
“And everyone has abided by it since.” He keeps his hand on the door handle beside mine, our thumbs flush against each other. The warmth of his skin on mine sends a shock wave of emotion through me, my lungs reinflating—and I almost concede and draw back then and there.
He’s the oldest of his two siblings.
I’m the youngest out of three. My brother, Oliver, loved the rule about drivers and passengers sharing the same last name. Whenever our eldest brother, Nova, drove, Oliver had prime-time seating.
Really, I just came up with the rule to irritate Rocky. Growing up, our families spent a lot of time caravanning one behind the other, usually on the road to the next job and distancing ourselves from the pool of white-collar crime we left in our wake.
Besides our parents, Nova was usually the one manning the wheel. Rocky was always trying to one-up him—and I loved watching Rocky’s face when Oliver shoved him aside to sit up front.
And then when Hailey learned to drive, the rule backfired on me. Because she became exceedingly good at it, and now she does most of the driving.
She beeps the horn from the driver’s seat.
Fine.
I remove my hand.
He takes the opportunity to hip-bump me aside.
I flip him off.
He smiles like I just gave him a royal wave.
Ugh.
I crawl into the backseat, tossing my backpack on the floor.
“Next stop, Connecticut.” Hailey peels the Honda onto the road. A twelve-hour car ride ahead of us.
Rocky puts earbuds in his ears, drowning us out. Of course he’s not even going to do the proper passenger-seat duties of entertaining the driver. My glare pinches my face painfully.
Hailey glances to me in the rearview and gives me a sympathetic look.
“We didn’t tell the landlord there would be a third tenant,” I whisper-hiss to Hailey. “How is this going to work?”
She shrugs. “Jake seemed chill over the phone. He probably won’t mind as long as we pay rent.”
I mind.
I care.
There’s a lot that Hailey and I lined up before choosing this town. We’re staying at an old loft apartment near the college campus. Students usually rent it dirt cheap. We have jobs at the nearby country club.
Rocky isn’t in the equation. He never was.
Living honestly isn’t in his DNA. Just like it’s never been in mine.
Four
Rocky
“There’s a reason why we’re called confidence men, Rocky,” my father told me when I was ten. He stood at the bow of an eighty-foot yacht that he’d pretended to own that morning.
His guests had left only an hour before. Two oil tycoons. They each wired him a hundred thousand, an investment toward a company my father created to enhance drilling.