Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91042 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
“Don’t push her past her limits, but find out whatever you can about Perry. Don’t feed her—women like to eat. Try a little hunger, but don’t starve her to the point of death. Make her uncomfortable. Don’t let her out to bathe. Make her use a five-gallon bucket to use the bathroom. You’ve seen her; she looks soft. Well taken care of. She’s not going to be hard to crack. She will talk, and when she tells us how to contact him, we can get word to the bastard that we have his sister and she’s being tortured. Easy. Just go get her, do your job, and we will get our four million back, then hand over Perry Gerard to the Feds.”
He was serious. I knew it because he was right. This was the quickest way to weed the bastard out. Typically, this would be a job for Bane, but this was my mistake, and I had to clean it up. And even if it wasn’t, Bane wouldn’t be sent to take a woman off to the woods and stay in a house with her for an unknown amount of time. He was married with a baby now.
I took the items Linc held out to me.
“There is reason to believe she knows about her brother’s illegal doings. He paid off her school loans, sent her on a cruise, bought her the car she drives, and recently deposited five grand into her checking account. That tells us she is loyal to him. Just push until you find her breaking point. She will talk.”
The image of her face in the pictures turned sour. It was always the ones born with beauty like hers that you couldn’t trust. They had been using the power of their looks over men since they had been old enough to realize they could. Flash a smile, bat those eyes, and—bam—men fell at their feet.
Not this time, darlin’. You are about to meet one who’s completely immune to your appearance. A man who hates you for your connection alone.
Two
Winslet
There were still three more weeks before teachers at MCS had to be back in the classroom to prep for the first day of school. I was almost one hundred percent positive that I was the only one in Hobby Lobby spending their birthday money on supplies for their students.
Perry had gone overboard with his gifting this year. The five thousand dollars I had refused to take from him as a birthday present was magically deposited into my checking account. When I called to tell him to take it back, his phone had been disconnected, which was weird, but this wasn’t the first time he’d gotten a new number. He’d send it to me soon. Perry hated spam calls, and when he got too many, he would always get a new line.
After thinking about it for a few days, I had caved in and decided to spend the money on my new students. Last year, I had found a Pinterest board with all these cool ideas to do with your class. There was this one where each kid could have a keepsake of their year—throughout the entire year, I would take pictures of special projects they did, have them answer current event questions, then build a memory book in a binder for their parents to have at the end of the school year. It wasn’t a cheap task, and it was going to be time-consuming, but I loved it.
So, here I was, in the scrapbook aisle, studying all the options. The number of stickers alone was overwhelming. I dug my phone out of my purse and pulled up my Pinterest app. I had to focus on what all was required for this undertaking. And not get carried away with all the pretties. Five thousand was a lot of money, but a teacher in Hobby Lobby could put a dent in that in no time.
I had a few rules I needed to follow too. For example, less Santa and more Jesus for the Christmas holidays. MCS was a private Christian school. Owned by the big Baptist church in town. I had learned last year that many of the parents didn’t like Santa. He took away from the real reason for Christmas—or so I had been told when I had my students do a Santa art project. Also, little Ben Bagwell had informed me that Santa was a lie and liars went to hell. Which, in return, had made Everly Watson burst into tears because she loved Santa.
Needless to say, the drama that had ensued and the meetings I had to sit through with not just the parents, but several others—including the principal, Mr. Clairton, who explained the reasons why we left Santa out of the classroom as much as possible—was a pain in the ass I did not want to repeat.