Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 43444 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 217(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43444 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 217(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
He’d added to her dinosaur collection with a stuffed T-Rex wearing a glittery green top hat. He’d sent her a flowerpot full of gold-wrapped chocolate—her favorite kind—and enough emerald green yarn for her to crochet him a William-sized blanket.
How had he found out enough about her to get her such personalized presents? More importantly, why was he bothering? They both knew the marriage was an in-name-only stopgap measure. No one had addressed the issue recently, but Bronte had to assume it was taking longer for Mr. Tanaka to sort out William’s citizenship issue because of his sketchy background. He hadn’t exactly been a boy scout.
When his cousins met him in Ireland, he’d been participating in and betting on the kind of fights that only happened in smoky bars and abandoned buildings. The kind with bare knuckles and very few rules.
A man like that might not appreciate being told what to do. Was that why he’d been trying to win her over? Was he crossing a line just to prove he could? Because he’d been told by his cousins to leave her alone?
No. That didn’t ring true.
His texts, the gifts, all of his appeals to her were too genuine. If she were only a challenge or a poke in the eye of authority, the gains he’d made wouldn’t have been worth his effort, since ninety percent of the time she’d done her best to ignore him.
But not always. Some nights she’d been weak and he’d sounded so lonely she couldn’t help but relate. Respond.
During those occasional slip-ups they had an unspoken agreement not to talk about the status of their relationship. Instead, they’d talk about nothing for hours at a time. Usually until one or both of them fell asleep still clutching their phones like a lifeline.
In the morning, the cycle would begin anew, with her ignoring and him persisting until he wore her down again.
She’d started looking forward to their silly conversations and his playful pictures. Craving more. But until today, she’d never been the one to initiate any kind of contact. She hadn’t even texted him that she was coming.
If you had, you could have saved Tasha the trouble.
She’d told herself she couldn’t take the chance that he’d get a member of his family or hers to stop her from showing up. He’d never asked her to visit. Not really. But she needed to be face to face for this conversation.
Stop lying and admit it. You want to see him because he’s getting to you. You miss him.
Maybe a little.
Thank God the rest of her family accepted the “spa trip with her friend Erica” excuse without too many questions. She’d made sure Austen knew who she was going with, which guaranteed she wouldn’t try to join her to see if they’d be interested in her skincare line. The pediatric nurse, her dramatic mood swings and her well-documented husband trouble was enough to put anybody off.
Bronte had been counting on that. And the distraction caused by the Irish invasion as the Finn and Wayne families merged.
They were both large and close-knit, so it made sense that they would start to blend after Hugo and Younger got hitched. Even more so once the matriarchs bonded in protest over the small civil ceremony that happened too quickly for them to plan a proper reception.
Ellen Finn and Cassandra Wayne wouldn’t be getting over that anytime soon.
Bronte didn’t blame Hugo. He’d been waiting longer than most of them knew for the man he loved. He wanted to lock that shit down, get married and start their lives together ASAP.
No one knew that Bronte had actually been the first in her family to skip out on invitations and orange blossoms for a Finn. They’d never even met William, and Bronte would never be impulsive enough to elope with a man who was practically a stranger. Her mother, who was famous for having extra sensory snoop-abilities when it came to her children, would have sensed it, right? But she hadn’t, which was both thrilling and a tiny bit depressing.
Of course no one suspected her. Bronte was, hands down, the most dependably average of them all. The registered nurse who, at forty-one, had never done anything unexpected, impulsive or remotely illegal. The good sister who took up the art of crochet instead of skydiving or krav maga, and always lived a raised voice or a stone’s throw away from at least two members of her family. She’d gone from her parent’s house to the Wayneplex with her siblings…then back to her parent’s.
She’d never even moved out of the neighborhood she’d grown up in. There was no reason to believe someone like that would keep something so important or salacious a secret.
But she had. For months.
And yes, it wasn’t technically a secret, since most of the Finns, her brother, Hugo, and half the police force knew about it thanks to her initial overreaction. But she’d never kept anything from her sisters before. From her mother. The fact that she had, as far as she was concerned, made her Mata Hari.