Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131459 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 526(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
“Well, I would expect nothing less,” Nora purred, and gave me a glance so filled with meaning, I stood.
“You.” I pointed at Nora. “Drink and try to be the least annoying you can be. I know it’ll be hard. Expend that effort.” I turned to my daughter. “You. Entertain your aunt and don’t get your hopes up.”
Cadence gave me a salute.
Nora gave me a knowing look.
I walked out of the room and up the stairs to my bedroom.
My house was square with a courtyard in the middle. The bottom floor was sunken into the earth to assist in keeping it cool and to help it not make too much of a mark on the landscape.
Cadence and my domain was the upper floor.
My master was enormous, as was the bath that went with it, and it had a seating area that had a push-out wall of glass that extended onto a balcony.
My studio also was huge and had a balcony with a set of stairs that led down to the back garden. A magnificent and expansive space filled with prickly pear, barrel, ocotillo, pinkflower hedgehog, beaver’s tail and fishhook cacti, as well as multiple varieties of yucca and agave, with containers filled with aloe, bougainvillea and hibiscus. All of this was dotted with a variety of mature, desert-indigenous trees that threw beautiful shade. The garden included meandering paths of flagstone with unexpected clearings that had seating areas.
The plants were native and needed little tending, but I had someone come out and see to it occasionally when I wasn’t there.
When I was there, however, it was all mine.
Cadence’s bedroom and “space” were large as well.
Completing the upstairs were two smaller guestrooms with attached baths and a large storage area.
The lower floor included kitchen, dining room, breakfast nook, living room, family room, study and the larger guest suite that had a sitting room and its own private terrace.
The house was actually massive, over six thousand square feet, ludicrous for two people who were there maybe half of their time (and for Cadence, it was less).
But that was the point. Something completely different than our brownstone in the City, which was fabulous, tall but narrow and stuffed full of our lives.
This was not that.
I owned twenty acres. There wasn’t a house or any form of humanity to be seen in any direction. It took us twenty minutes to drive to the grocery store.
This was freedom. And it was quiet. And it was air and warmth and darkness at night. And it was solitude.
And fuck it all, I’d bought it because it was close to Tom Pierce.
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket, curled into the armchair in front of the fireplace, and before I continued to be a loser and found some reason to avoid it, I phoned him.
Again, since he left brunch with something he had to do, I thought he’d be busy and wouldn’t pick up, so I could leave him a voicemail.
He picked up on ring two.
“Mika.”
Ah, hell.
“Tom, I’m sorry. I thought I’d get voicemail. I don’t want to interrupt you.”
“What I had to do was meet up with my youngest and have a few words with her. That didn’t last long because it didn’t go well. I’m now just home from Petco but on the Internet, wondering if I should spend over five hundred dollars on an automated litterbox.”
“Left to perish, now spending life relieving themselves in the Ritz of litterboxes. I’m feeling this,” I encouraged.
“I am too,” he muttered, distracted, and I envisioned his long body stretched in an Eames chair, laptop perched on his muscled thigh, clicking Add to Cart.
“Your chat with Sasha didn’t go well?”
The question was nosy and not my business.
But I found it easier to say than, “I’m sorry I was such a bitch.” Or, “I bought my Arizona house to be closer to you because I was going to approach you because I thought you felt the same as me all those years ago, deep down, because you couldn’t really feel it due to you being taken. And now you’re taken again, but I’ve wasted years, and I can’t do it any longer. I want you in my life. However, I still don’t know how to be friends with you since my heart’s desire at this moment is learning the noises you make when I make you come.”
You could see my dilemma.
He didn’t tell me Sasha was none of my business.
He said, “She has no aim in her life. She’s not working. She’s not studying. She’s twenty-one and living off her trust fund, and she can do that easily since it’s a fuck ton of money, but more, she’s either at my house, or one of her mother’s houses, eating our food and using our water and electricity, so she doesn’t have to dive into it much, except to buy a lot of clothes, put gas into her car and eat out nearly every meal she consumes.”