Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Sometime between thirty minutes and five hundred years later, movement caught our attention.
And then time officially stopped.
I could live forever and I’d never forget the moment when those gates opened, revealing the most gorgeous man I would ever see. That had more to do with the fact that it was Ramsey than the way he actually looked.
He was taller than I remembered. Clean shaven, and his hair was short. With a garbage bag thrown over his shoulder, lean muscles showed beneath his plain white tee. The lanky legs that had once carried me on his back anywhere I wanted to go were stretching the thighs of the jeans I’d helped Nora shop for a week earlier. But none of that, not one damn part of that, was why my lungs seized and my throat closed.
He was smiling—a pure and genuine Ramsey Stewart special edition I had missed every single day for over twelve years. A sob tore from my chest as I slapped a hand over my mouth and stared at him.
Not in cuffs.
Not in a prison jumpsuit.
Not locked behind bars.
My Ramsey was finally free.
Nora climbed out of the car first, tears already falling from her eyes. And at the sight, her brother’s smile grew tenfold.
His full lips moved in the pattern of, Hey you as she jogged toward him. The second he got close enough, she jumped into his arms. He laughed, holding her to his chest, her feet dangling off the ground. It was hard not to be jealous.
Sucking in a sharp breath, I collected myself and gave them a moment for their private reunion. Seeing him with her, grinning with so much pride and adoration—it made my nerves momentarily calm. The longing only grew. When I couldn’t force myself to wait any longer, I threw my door open and climbed out.
It took him several beats to notice me, but like I’d been hooked up to a set of jumper cables, I felt the shock down to the core of my soul when his dark gaze landed on mine. His back shot straight and surprise robbed me of his smile. His jaw got hard, and a mixture of agony, shock, and fury mingled in his handsome features. This was more than likely what he had dubbed the Thea Hull trifecta.
“What the hell,” he rumbled in a raspy voice I would have recognized anywhere.
That fool. It was as if he’d really thought I wasn’t going to show up on the day he was finally released.
Nothing could have kept me away.
Not his first and only letter from prison lying to me that he didn’t love me anymore and urging me to move on.
Not twelve freaking years of him ignoring all of my correspondence and blocking me from visiting.
Not the overwhelming hatred I felt for him because he’d ruined us in ways he’d sworn he never would.
Not even because he’d turned his back on me when I’d needed him the most.
Yet there I was twelve years, eight months, three weeks, four days, thirteen hours, and thirteen minutes later, waiting for him just like I’d promised.
Because unlike him, I knew how to keep my word.
So yeah. I was pissed off at Ramsey Stewart with the fiery passion of a woman who had spent over a decade trapped in hell. But as he dropped his bag, turned on a toe, and tried to get back inside the gates, I finally got to say the words that had been devouring me from the inside out for the better part of my life.
“I fucking love you too, asshole!”
Eighteen years earlier…
Fifty-one…no, fifty-two minutes. That’s how long it had been.
I should have been crying. Fat, ugly tears should have been rolling down my face. I should have been lost in a sea of grief. Instead, I couldn’t stop staring at my watch. It was the digital kind with the date and time. The one that counted individual seconds as they passed, never to return again. My mother had ordered that watch for me a few weeks earlier because it had a little button on the side that made it a stopwatch. She’d said it was so I could time myself as I raced around the neighborhood on my bike. It wasn’t like I had any friends to compete with. I was a girl who hated dresses, dolls, and gossipy, hair-flipping girls. I was also a girl—therefore I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with any of the boys.
But with everything that had happened over the last few months, I didn’t mind riding alone. I liked the peace and absence of despair that had been hovering in my house like a cloud of smoke suffocating us all.
Fifty-three minutes. Almost an hour.
Was she still there? Had the funeral home picked up her body yet? Was my father going to force me to wear a dress to her funeral? Would my bratty cousins come in from out of town? Was my life ever going to be normal again?