Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 72822 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72822 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
In fact, I had one that I had to go welcome home in three days.
Most of these soldiers were young, but that made them no less deadly.
But these older men in the room with me, staring at me like I was amusing them, were definitely in their prime, right along with the soldiers I welcomed home every few weeks.
“I’ll send it to my woman and see if she can do anything. She only has the laptop with her at work, though. It might take her longer.”
Sam stood up and opened the door wide. “Janie!”
A woman whom I presumed was Janie came walking in with a sandwich in one hand, and a dill pickle in the other.
She was a gorgeous blonde with long, flowing hair, bright green eyes, and a smile that was stunning. She was slim on top, but her bottom half had a little more meat to it than the rest of her, making her hips flare wide.
“Yeah?” Janie asked, leaning forward to take a bite of her pickle.
It crunched noisily, and she looked sheepishly around the room, pausing only slightly on Rafe a little longer than the others, before returning her gaze to Sam.
“Can you do me a favor and bring me the report on a Drake Garwood?” he asked her. “Everything.”
Janie nodded and turned to go.
I watched her hips sway as she walked away, and I wasn’t the only one.
Rafe watched her, too.
Like a hawk.
But before Sam and the other two could notice, he returned his eyes forward.
And caught mine.
I raised my brows at him, and he gave me nothing in return. Not a smile. Not a shrug. Nothing.
Interesting.
Someone had the hots for the help!
Grinning, I went back to paying attention.
“In all honesty, I would’ve continued to keep my distance and only watched had I not witnessed that last night,” Dante said, looking at the photos. “I have a feeling he’s in it up to his eyeballs, and it won’t be long before he’s looking for alternate ways to get money.”
“The info we pulled on Drake was bad if I remember correctly.” Sam rubbed his forehead. “I can’t remember exactly, though. I might be getting him and another guy mixed up. But I remember pulling her. She almost didn’t make it. Wren, I think.”
Jack grunted. “It was Wren. She was the one who showed up sick as a dog, battling a fever, and so banged up and bruised that we couldn’t touch her anywhere without her crying out in pain.”
Knowing that Marianne had gone through that was making me sick to my stomach.
“Only one of our birds who asked to go back, though,” Max said. “That’s why I remember her so clearly.”
I had nothing to say to that.
Why would she go back if she was safe?
“They were exhuming the son’s body, and they needed her eyewitness account to charge the husband,” Janie said as she came into the room, looking down at the papers in her hands instead of at the room. She ran into a chair but didn’t seem to care as she stopped and continued to speak as she read. “The case was almost dismissed due to not being able to find Marianne. According to Marianne/Wren, she went back because she wanted her husband to pay for killing her son. Only the case was dismissed anyway due to lack of evidence found during the autopsy, as well as the fact that Marianne had been diagnosed as clinically depressed at the time, which Drake’s attorney used to get her testimony thrown out.”
I remembered that vividly.
It’d been a huge case, and it’d also brought Marianne home. I’d been both stunned to see her and ecstatic that she was back. She seemed to be back to the old Marianne, that was until she’d started spewing all those accusations about Drake.
They’d been so outrageous that I’d not taken her seriously. How could I? The man that she described wasn’t the man that I knew. That anyone knew.
Drake had never once shown himself to be anything other than a caring father and husband. He doted on their child, and he loved Marianne. He took care of her, and he supported her through her bout with postpartum depression.
Hadn’t he?
Was I wrong? Had I gone against my friend, thinking that she wasn’t in her right mind, only to find out that she had been right all along?
This was all so surreal that I was having a hard time making sense of it all, and I didn’t know what to think.
“Marianne was diagnosed with severe postpartum depression,” I found myself saying, my physical body in the room, but my mind had traveled back about two years into the past. “She told me once that she dreamed about killing her baby. Sending him to Heaven where he couldn’t be hurt anymore.”
The table quieted. “I always assumed that it was her, that it was because she… wasn’t well. I never actually thought that any of it was true. The wild accusations and the way that she had acted… knowing what I know now… I just… well, I feel like I betrayed her as a friend.”