Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“Who was that?” Hades asked.
“I’m Briley.”
Briley.
The football player’s daughter.
I went around a few racks of clothing and finally found Briley.
She was tucked up in a corner, munching on an apple, and flicking through her iPad.
My gaze went to the iPad in her hands and my gaze skirted over the screen.
“What’s that one about?” I asked curiously.
It was an article that had a crying woman on the cover of it.
“Ninety minutes after the debut opening of the Emerald Plunge, a ten-year-old boy zoomed down one of the park’s slides. Three stories. He flew off the edge near the bottom, scraped across the concrete on his back, and was rushed to the hospital,” she read to me.
I shook my head. “Wow.”
“This one is worse,” she took another bite of her apple, chewed, then swallowed. “A cable broke at an amusement park in Kentucky. One of those ones that plunges down, you know?”
I nodded at her. “Yeah.”
“The cables were whipping this way and that, and one girl said she started smelling something burning. When she looked down, she saw that her feet had been amputated by the whipping cable, and the burning was her flesh,” she explained.
“All right.” Hades came to a stop beside the girl. “No more reading those, or I’ll never get my twin sister to do anything fun again.”
Briley looked at me as if she was asking if I wanted her to stop.
Damn, I liked this kid.
“Where did you come from?” I wondered.
“I invited her,” Crimson answered. “She was about to go on a run with her dad and to save her from that torture, I told her she could stay with me.”
I looked more closely at the girl. “Do you often go on runs with your dad?”
She shrugged. “Well, I do run. Sure. But I can’t run nearly as fast or as far. So when I’m done running—my dad feels very highly about young kids being active—I sit on the bleachers or something and wait for him to get done. Me staying home means that he got to go run where he wanted, not at a track so he can keep an eye on me.”
That was actually kind of sweet.
The man, Slone, I’d learned was a professional football player for the Longview Liners, one of the newest teams in the NFL. Though, they weren’t so new anymore. It’d been about a decade since they’d formed, from what I’d overheard my brother say yesterday upon meeting him and his teammate, Titus.
Titus and Slone couldn’t be more opposite.
Slone was big. And when I say “big” I mean, holy hell, he’s massive when you even look at him from ten feet away, big. I imagined standing next to him would feel like standing next to a tower.
He wasn’t fat, though.
Far from it.
I could tell by just looking at him that he was in shape. Really good shape.
When everything had gone down with my sister, he’d been off like a bullet from a gun. Something I hadn’t expected from such a large man.
Then there was the tanned skin and his dark brown hair that was in one of those Viking style braids down the back of his head—something I found extremely sexy. I had a thing for the show Vikings, and other than the missing blonde hair, Slone could totally pull off the whole medieval lettering tattoo on his forearm that said “Briley” in cursive letters.
Meanwhile, Slone’s best friend, Titus, was the exact opposite of everything Slone was.
Tall, dark, muscular and trim everywhere. The man looked like a walking, talking muscle, yes. But he also looked like more of a bullet to Slone’s battering ram.
He was loud and boisterous and doted on his daughter.
But it wasn’t a quiet kind of love like Slone doted on his daughter with.
In the hours that I’d known them, I’d been unable to look away from Slone and his daughter all night.
The girl sitting in front of me now, looking up at me with brown eyes the color of melted chocolate, with her same-colored hair falling into her face and partially covering her eyes, looked nothing like her father.
In fact, she had more of a paleness to her that signified some sort of Irish or Slavish descent.
Then there was Slone. He had a perfectly tanned skin tone that denoted him of Italian descent. That forever tanned look that I usually had, too.
Though, I couldn’t be any further away from blonde if I tried.
I had curly black hair, pale green eyes that I was told on a daily basis was creepy by my family, and a body like a dump truck. At least, that was what my first boyfriend, who just so happened to still work for the circus, told me.
“You have very green eyes,” Briley noted.
I smiled. “I do.”
“She has creepy green eyes,” Hades corrected. “Our mother has those creepy eyes, too. I’m just glad that we don’t share the same eyes.”