Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 147415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 737(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 491(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 147415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 737(@200wpm)___ 590(@250wpm)___ 491(@300wpm)
Apparently, I really want a lawsuit. Or maybe I’m vying for a bullet from her old man.
I’m definitely coming closer to welcoming harassment charges with every word out of my mouth. Just begging history to repeat itself.
Maybe my ruthless asshole of an uncle was right when he said I had a self-destructive side. Once, I was young and stupid and went driving after smoking my weight in weed.
It wasn’t long after he had my father whacked for the insurance money, and Mom was buried in the bottle and long Sunday dinners with her sister. I only found out the truth years later, long after he was behind bars.
I was barely in the game yet, only dabbling with what he’d let me do, driving trucks with contraband TVs and laptops and kitchen crap they knocked off from corrupt dock workers.
Uncle Aidan seemed honestly concerned when the cops he bribed picked me up.
Right up until we got back to my parents’ empty place. Then he smacked me across the back of the head so hard my vision stayed blurred until the next morning.
“Don’t let me catch you trying to blow yourself up again, Shep. Ever. The older you get, the more you fuck up, you fuck me over, too. Now stand up like a man.”
Miserable fuck.
Ironically, I’d wind up being a key part of fucking him over a few years later, just not the way he expected.
“I don’t have much use for comedy,” I tell her, brushing over the Shepherd moment. Hopefully she forgets. “We’re here to field test my drones, Miss Lancaster. And to find your damned otters.”
“Don’t Miss Lancaster me, Shepherd. Not after you saved me.”
Shit.
So much for forgetting.
Her expression also tells me she doesn’t believe a word I say.
If only she had a clue what was running through my head.
When you’ve lived a pitch-black comedy of a life like mine, the only humor you have left is dark and depraved.
She nods and swims back to her kayak, at least, which has floated to a stop a few feet away. I collect her paddle and mine and haul myself over as she turns the boat upright.
Annoyingly, she’s mastered climbing in on the water almost as gracefully as she does everything else.
I want to hate it.
I want to keep hating everything about her sunny, self-righteous little ass, and the fact that she’s here excelling at everything I’ve taught her, making me seem like I’m overreacting.
It feels like the sky is falling.
Or maybe I’m the one going down flat on my face.
It might explain this familiar dizzy feeling of everything spinning out of control.
I’m used to that shit.
The trouble with falling is, there’s always a hard landing.
“Thanks,” she says when I hand her the paddle again. “I appreciate what you’re doing. Even just for agreeing to this, really.”
“Whatever. It’s basic safety protocol.” I won’t meet her eyes and let them drag me down. “Now let’s get going so we’ll make some progress before dark.”
8
A Little Drama (Destiny)
I’m too stunned to breathe when it sneaks up on me.
Somehow, I’m out here having the time of my life.
I won’t lie, when Mr. Foster—Shepherd—suggested we actually go ahead with this trip, I was nervous.
Not least because it’s extremely easy for anything and everything to go wrong out here with him, practically alone.
Not that I think he’s a murderer or anything—when he’s trying to clear his name, he’s not going to dismember me and hide the parts unless I really grind his gears.
But it turns out, he knows his stuff.
Oh, plus being on the water paddling is actually fun.
When I was a kid, I was terrified of the ocean. Wouldn’t go near it, not even when Dad made enormous efforts to make me feel safe on tranquil beaches without a cloud in sight.
There are so many unknowns.
Like, sure, I was scared of sharks and jellyfish.
But the thing that haunted me most was what happened to my mother when her body washed up on a peaceful stretch of shore next to our family coffee farm in Hawaii.
My parents didn’t have a great marriage. It was stormy and toxic and ultimately, my mother smashed his heart.
Even so, Dad was devastated. He never had a chance to fix it, much less end it and move on.
He buried his feelings in chronic work and a defensive short fuse that didn’t go away until Eliza crash-landed in his life.
Thank God she did.
Besides being the catalyst for making him function like a human being again, she also saved me from a lifetime of ocean deprivation.
It wasn’t even the fact that she brought us closure with the past.
She encouraged me to explore my passion for animals at a time when I was a major brat, staring down the barrel of taking over a coffee empire I had zero interest in.
She reawakened Dad’s kindness, too, and together, they got me on boats with dolphins and turtles and then into the ocean with nothing but a paddleboard.