Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 347(@200wpm)___ 277(@250wpm)___ 231(@300wpm)
“Other than the creepy comments throughout the night, she slept fine,” I admitted, unsure what I was supposed to do with Milena’s brother on my porch.
“I had my ear to the ground last night,” he continued.
I waited, not sure that I would like to hear what he was about to say.
“One, I have a lot of eyes on me after Nastya went through a murder investigation years ago,” he said. “It’s been lurking under the surface for a long time, meaning, if I kill that motherfucker the moment he gets out of prison—which apparently is supposed to happen soon—I’ll have every goddamn law enforcement agent in the city coming down on my head.”
“Okay…” I waited for him to add more, and he did moments later.
“I want you to kill him for me.”
My brows rose.
“What makes you think I wasn’t already going to do that?” I asked.
“Because you have a lot to lose,” he said. “I want to give you an incentive.”
I waited, not sure I liked where this was going.
“I want you to marry my sister.”
I blinked, not sure I’d heard him correctly.
“Hear me out.” He held up a hand. “First, I want you to know that we could have an alliance. Or, more accurately, myself and your club.”
I didn’t respond.
“I know that you do some illegal shit,” he began. “I’ve left you alone in this city because your shit doesn’t affect my shit. But I think that we could be better together.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means that if you need help getting your product out of this city, I’m your man. What’s mine is yours. As long as you marry my sister, and you keep her safe,” he elaborated. “I saw the way you looked at her.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I had looked at her in a way that didn’t need to be explained.
I wasn’t sure, though, that I wanted to start a relationship with this woman on the wrong note. I felt what we had could easily be something that could last a lifetime, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that…
“He’s going to kill her the moment he’s out,” Shasha snapped. “I’ve been trying to get her to allow me to have a guard move in with her for years, and she keeps refusing. She wants to seem independent. I don’t know. But the guards that I keep outside her place have intercepted three hits that were taken out on her.”
I blinked, turning my head slowly to stare at him.
“The latest hit was her own ex-boyfriend,” he fumed. “Asher accepted the hit in exchange for someone paying off all his student loans. That night you got her off his bike, he was going to push her off into traffic. He’d set it all up.”
My stomach clenched.
“I need you to be there on the inside. Until I can get to the bottom of this, until Lyle Pennington is nothing but a speck of dust on this Earth, she’ll never be safe,” he insisted.
I swallowed hard. “And how, exactly, are we going to make this happen?”
His lips curled. “Leave it to me.”
I looked at him then.
“I’m not leaving anything to you,” I said carefully. “Do I think that you coordinating with my club will be a good thing? Yes. Do I think that this is a fucked up situation that I’m going to profit from? Also, yes. But I’m not doing anything to hurt her in any way. I’ll marry your sister. I’ll make her mine. But I don’t want her to leave me later on because she finds out that this was all set up by her brother.”
“You actually like her.” He studied my face.
“Like I’ve never liked anyone else in my life,” I admitted. “I just got out of a year-long relationship with a woman that I could barely stand to be around. It’s been like that for all of my long-term relationships. And even a few short-term. I like them, but not enough to change my life for.”
“But not with Milena,” Shasha said.
I didn’t answer him at first.
I stayed quiet, contemplating my next words, before saying, “I’ve never felt like this before with anyone.”
“I thought that when I met Brecken.” He grinned. “I wasn’t sure that I would ever feel that way about anyone, and then I met her, and she started stalking me, and I couldn’t stop myself from finding it amusing.”
My brows rose. “She stalked you?”
“Minutely,” he answered. “In a cute, she never quite could figure out how to conceal herself, kind of way.”
I grinned. “I don’t want her to hate me when this is all done.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Sounds like you might love her.”
I grimaced.
“I don’t know that I’m…”
“You might not acknowledge it to yourself yet,” he offered. “But it takes half a second to fall. And when you do, you’ll tell yourself it isn’t what it is. You’ll fight it, because loving women like them is like taking your soul and giving it to some barely capable of taking care of herself person to protect and nurture your very being. You don’t expect them to take care of it as well as they do, and all of a sudden, one day you’ve let them all the way in and never intended to. You think, okay, how bad can it be? She’s a tiny little thing half my size. I’m stronger, faster. She doesn’t have that kind of hold over me. Then she almost dies in your arms, and you’re wondering how the fuck you’re supposed to live without her.”