Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Bruno looked at her, too, as he took a sip of his beer.
He was drinking it out of a mug, unlike the woman across the table who was drinking it straight out of the bottle.
“Sure doesn’t, does she?” Bruno chuckled underneath of his breath. “What the fuck is she wearing?”
“No idea,” I admitted. But some part of me wanted to strip it right off before I fucked her.
“Is that a bag of potato chips?” he asked.
Sure enough, when the first course of our meal was set down in front of us, Six waved the woman away and pulled out a bag of Lay’s potato chips, my absolute favorite, from her purse.
“Looks like it,” I answered with amusement lacing my voice.
I looked down at the first-course meal in front of me and played the part, making myself seem more knowledgeable than I actually was.
See, I grew up in a family that was wealthy, but not wealthy in the sense that we attended frivolous dinner parties and ate five-course meals.
After the death of my sister, Lacy, I started to immerse myself into a world that I didn’t quite fit into. Yet I played a damn good game, which happened to be how and why I was now the mayor of Kilgore, Texas.
“Why are you doing this again?” Bruno mumbled as he trailed his finger through the broth on the plate in front of him.
He, like me, was more of a burger and fries guy. This bullshit that we were dealing with today was hopefully a ‘one and done’ thing.
Hopefully.
“Because we didn’t like how this city is turning out after the last mayor had his claws in it,” I explained.
Bruno knew this, though.
I was a lot of things, had played a lot of parts in my life from king pin to bookie to FBI consultant. What I had not done before was dabble in government politics.
But after witnessing the old mayor take advantage of a few decent men, one of those being a good friend, and trying to kill his career by using his power to force him into compliance or else, I’d had enough.
Upon researching the old mayor, Dave Jackson, I’d not only found out that he was dirty, but I’d found out that he was a sick bastard, too. The sick bastard liked to force women to do things that they didn’t want to do—like marry him. Have his children. Fuck him on the side to keep a job here. Give him head to grease some palms for a house loan there.
But that’d only been the tip of the iceberg with Jackson.
The first step of digging out his corruption had commenced—beat him at a race for mayor.
Today I was officially the new mayor and I would start fixing the things that Jackson had broken.
But first I had to find a way out of jail for those broken things.
The second course was brought out, and our broth was taken away, neither Bruno nor I having done much more than play with it.
When the salad was placed in front of our plates, I instinctively glanced at the girl across from me.
She now had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in her hands, and her father was looking at her with murder in his eyes.
“Oh, boy.” Bruno chuckled under his breath. “I think I like this girl.”
I did, too.
If she could elicit that kind of reaction out of Ivan Broussard, then she was already leaps and bounds ahead of about ninety percent of our table.
Feeling my eyes on her, she looked up, and I was captured by her violet gaze.
She blinked, took a bite of her sandwich, and then continued to chew as she stared.
After she was done with her bite, she took a swig of her beer, then grimaced when she came up empty.
When she set the bottle down onto the table, she wasn’t quiet about it.
My lips twitched.
Instead of continuing to stare, however, I looked away and went back to the semi-conversation that was going on with the men beside me, playing my part and donning the mask even though I didn’t want to.
CHAPTER 3
I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain this to you.
-Six’s secret thoughts
SIX
Twelve months later
The next time I saw Lynnwood Thatcher Windsor, was at a board meeting of all places.
My father forced me to come to them because I, and I quote, needed to learn how to handle the ship if I wanted to board it.
I didn’t want to board shit.
I wanted to do what I loved, and what I loved did not have anything to do with four confining walls.
Yet, there I was, because I knew that if I didn’t come, my father would hold up the meeting indefinitely.
He was that asshole.
The one that waited for everyone to get there, no matter what.
And I’d found out the hard way over the years because I’d been forced to attend them all. One time I planned to skip a meeting, and I found out later that my father had, apparently, held that meeting up for three hours while they waited for me to arrive. Only, I’d never arrived. I’d been hiking the Grand Canyon at the time.