Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 62580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
I nodded, happy that he was actually discussing this with me.
“And have you gone to the grave yet?” I asked. “You told me that she never left her grave. How was she able to do that this time?” My brain spun wildly. “And how did that woman know where to come? Has she ever been here before?” I let my feet fall to the ground and leaned forward. “Fox told me this place was a fairly new development for you. That it was built to protect those of your family that needed protection. A safe house of sorts.”
He nodded grimly. “I thought it was a safe house. And it might still be one. Ghosts have no rules or regulations that they live by. If they want to go somewhere, there’s nothing to stop them from doing so.”
“So, where has this wife of yours been hiding all of these years?” I tilted my head sideways. “And who was to say that she actually died in that house fire?”
He opened his mouth to answer me and then snapped it back shut.
“I don’t…” He paused. “I don’t know.”
I nodded grimly.
“It was obvious that your daughter died due to her being incorporeal,” I said. “She also hasn’t aged. Has your wife aged?”
“She’s not my wife anymore,” he muttered. “And I didn’t see her, you did.”
I thought back to what went through my mind when it came to the woman.
“She was young. She didn’t look like she was much over the age of twenty-two or three,” I told him.
“She was twenty when she died.” He stopped, licked his lips, and then cursed. “She could be a vampire. That would explain her not aging.”
I frowned.
“What does a vampire feel like?”
He brought my hand up to his chest, and I pinched him.
He cursed and stepped away.
However, I was delighted to see he had a smile on his face. Although small, it was there.
“There are two ways to check,” he said, his grin becoming wider and wider. “But first, I need to speak to the men.”
“Con?”
I stopped him when he went to step back inside.
“Yeah?”
I bit my lip.
“I lost a baby.”
His head tilted.
“I know.”
I looked down at my feet.
“I loved that baby,” I told him. “I wanted the baby so bad. But I knew that I couldn’t provide the kind of life that she would need. So I chose adoption.”
He wrapped his arms around me.
“I lost the baby during her birth. A baby that I didn’t plan to keep. It was for the best, giving her up for adoption, yet I still feel it like a hollowed-out hole in my heart.”
He squeezed me tighter.
“I love you,” he told me softly.
My eyes closed tightly.
“I love you, too,” I replied back just as softly.
“And I would’ve loved your child, too,” he murmured. “Just because neither one of our children are here any longer, doesn’t mean that we can’t still love them as if they were.”
And with that, I fell just a little bit more in love with him.
“Let’s go figure out what else there is to find out.”
I didn’t like talking about losing my baby. It’d been a stupid one-night stand after I’d tried everything in my power to screw my life up after my father had died, and a baby had ensued from that one night.
But the symbol of life had come at a time when I’d been missing my dad more than ever. Been missing the life I used to have. And pairing the death with the fact that I was at a low point in my life had been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
Knowing that Con understood me, and didn’t think I was weird or stupid for loving a baby I didn’t even really have the chance to know meant the world to me. He meant the world to me.
I just had to prove to him that I could be a great person to have on his side.
Not just a woman that was good to pass the time with.
CHAPTER 22
Fuck.
-the best, most universal word in the English language
CON
“So you think that she’s a vamp,” Fox guessed twenty minutes later. “If she’s a vamp, then she’s a tiny one. She’s also had to have help over the last fifty years to conceal herself from you, because I was with you that night. I know the lengths you went to, to make sure it was actually her in that fire.”
“Likely whoever helped her knew the lengths I would go to, to make sure,” I confirmed. “So she either died in that fire, and was brought back like I did Chen and Acadia, or she was a vampire before she perished. But she couldn’t have been one long, or I would’ve sensed it that night before I left.”
“So what we really need to know at this point is who was helping her,” Pavlov guessed.