Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 69511 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69511 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 348(@200wpm)___ 278(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
“Mother, now’s the time to tell me if you’re going to tell me,” I snarled. “Or I won’t have anything to do with you. Ever.”
“I just wanted to know you were okay!” she cried out.
“You can’t do this anymore,” I said. “It’s unhealthy, and if I took the police officer’s advice today, I could’ve had you arrested. This is beyond disgusting behavior. I’m an adult! You can’t keep doing this.”
She started to wail, and I knew I’d never get anything out of her.
Knowing that, I listened for a solid thirty seconds longer than I wanted to before I hung up.
I shoved my phone across the table and closed my eyes, leaning my head back to stare at Gable’s stupidly gorgeous ceiling.
I loved it.
I loved everything about his house—even though I hadn’t been inside it since it’d been finished—I knew it’d look fantastic just like the outside.
I had gone through it once with Maven when they were putting up the walls.
I liked the design concept.
He’d done away with the open floor plan that all the other brothers had done.
He’d gone more cottage feel with his inspiration, and the entire house looked like it could be in the middle of an English countryside.
There was a lot of stone and darkness to it, but despite all the darkness, it looked open and airy—from what I’d seen.
The ceiling above our head was actually made of stone.
The porch itself extended out over our entire group and had plenty of room to spare.
It was cool and shielded us from the sun that refused to let go despite it being October.
“Are you listening, my good girl?” Gable whispered in my ear.
I blinked, then brought my head back up to see that while I’d been resting it on Gable’s bicep, they’d apparently been talking all around me.
I was good at that—disassociating.
When I was younger, I’d become increasingly good at it as I tried to find a foothold in a world without my sister.
Eventually, it became a way to escape after my dad’s death.
“I’m processing,” I admitted.
“Okay,” he said. “In the meantime, they asked if we wanted to go eat with them.”
The pizza had never happened.
Though it’d arrived, we’d given it to a neighborhood kid who’d ridden by on his bike. Neither Gable nor I had been hungry at the time.
“Where?” I asked.
Because I wasn’t going to say yes if it was fish.
I hated fish.
I also hated anything overly spicy, so a lot of the Thai places were out.
“How about Rocky Roads?” Maven suggested, her eyes lighting up. “Food sounds really, really good.”
“You just want the chili cheese fries,” I laughed. “Yeah, Rocky Roads sounds good.”
Rocky Roads was good for me in multiple ways.
It had a plethora of food to choose from, but it also had a very extensive dessert menu, which actually sounded way better than actual food.
I needed to eat my feelings in calories.
And Rocky Roads was the perfect place to do it.
So I may not even be close to a 10 at the beach, but I’m a solid 8 at Walmart.
—Athena’s secret thoughts
ATHENA
You know what I loved about all the Carters?
They didn’t care if I asked a lot of questions.
I’d had a boyfriend once who liked to give me shit about all the questions I asked.
At a dinner with his family, one of many I’d gone to with him, I’d overheard his mother and sister talking about me when I got back from the restroom. And my boyfriend at the time had done nothing to stop them from making fun of me.
I couldn’t help the questions I needed to ask.
That was just my brain.
It ran a million miles an hour.
Quaid, Quincy, and Quinn—the triplets—were laughing at my previous question and discussing it amongst themselves now.
Their wives were chiming in, and I loved that my need for knowledge fueled their own, too.
I’m not sure how we’d gotten onto the next subject, though, just that we were now on it, and I had questions.
“Why is it that people will swim in an ocean, or a lake that has a ton of dead bodies in it, yet they won’t swim in a swimming pool with a dead body in it?” I asked Atlas, who’d been talking about the lake he wanted to go fishing at that his parents owned a house on.
My mind was firing, though, and I didn’t realize that no one had answered it at first.
“Do people have a corpse to body of water ratio?” I asked.
Silence.
I looked up from the blanket I was crocheting—yes, at the dinner table, it helped me unwind, and I carried it everywhere in my purse with me— to see the Carters staring at me like I was crazy.
They usually didn’t have any problems with my odd line of questions. Perhaps, this one was a little too weird?
Even though there were only half of them there—as well as the Semyonov Bratva (even though I had no confirmation on the Bratva part)—they were still overwhelming in their intensity.