Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“I know.” That didn’t stop the ache of guilt in the pit of Ash’s stomach, or the ache for something else. Someone else. “I just can’t live like this anymore.” Shaking his head, he ducked around the door they’d left open, slipping outside into the night. “I gotta go.”
“Hey!” Andrew stumbled after him. “Hey—you’ve been drinking, you shouldn’t drive—”
Ash fished his phone from his pocket, and offered a faint smile over his shoulder. “I won’t be,” he said, and hit the first speed dial in his address book.
Before lifting his phone to his ear and waiting, heart in his throat, for the line to pick up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BRAND FORSYTHE WAS NOT IN the office.
He’d meant to be. He’d tried to be, for a few distracted hours spent rescheduling meetings and sorting young Master Ashton’s affairs so that his absence at the day’s meetings wouldn’t cause too much of a setback. Yet his entire world had stopped each time the office door opened, arresting on that unspoken hope that his brat of a young Master would come straggling around the door with a sheepish smile and a pout, that schoolboy sullenness that both wanted and rebelled against discipline.
Instead it was only Ms. Vernon, each time—so and so was on the line for Mr. Harrington, should she push next week’s meetings as well, was Ashton coming in today?
Brand hated that he didn’t have the answers.
But even more, he hated that he didn’t know where the young Master was, and right now there was nothing he could do about it.
He checked his phone a dozen times an hour—and more than once had to push it away from himself to keep from calling, sending a text.
But it would only make me run farther, Amiko Arakawa had said.
Brand didn’t want his young Master to run any farther.
He wanted him to come back.
So he could do his job and stop making Brand’s life harder, of course. It couldn’t be for any reason other than that.
For any reason such as sorting out what this craving was. This need, that had erupted so simply from one kiss and grown quietly under his skin until it felt as if it would take him over entirely.
He wasn’t sure what pushed him to break point. Perhaps yet another intrusion from Ms. Vernon. Perhaps another phone call full of demands he had no answers for, while he fought to keep his voice even and calm and soothing rather than clipped and sharp with a building temper. But somehow the massive glass-walled space was suddenly claustrophobic, and Brand needed to be out with a desperation that choked his breath from him.
He barely spared a moment to tell Ms. Vernon to hold all calls for the rest of the day before he spilled out into the afternoon sun. The air smelled like vehicle exhaust, the close pressing sweat of millions of people in an enclosed space, and the coming breath of winter. He breathed it in deep, standing there choking on each inhalation until they began to smooth and calm.
Then, slipping his hands into the pockets of his slacks, he turned down the sidewalk and let himself simply walk.
It wasn’t something he did often. He rarely had time, when his role required round-the-clock service—and in his lifetime with the Newcombs, he could recall approximately three times that he had taken one of his dozens of annual allotted personal days. He didn’t like feeling at loose ends. He never had.
Yet right now he needed the calm of doing nothing, while the weak and quiet sun beat its warmth down on his shoulders.
He walked for hours, following no set path…but as the sun was setting, purple and orange against a haze of clouds, he paused outside an open-front independent bookstore, bakery, and café. He followed the scents of baking pastries inside, and let himself wander the aisles, scanning titles, not looking for anything in particular. Yet when a shop girl, bright and perky in a red apron, approached and asked, “Hi there. Is there anything I can help you find?”…
…he lingered on her apron. Red. And on an impulse, asked, “Do you have any books about the Japanese concept of the red string of fate?”
She frowned thoughtfully, tapping her finger against her lower lip, then brightened. “You know, I think we just might.”
And that was how Brand Forsythe ended up settled in a chair at one of the sidewalk tables, legs crossed comfortably, sipping at an espresso and Yasuko Fujiyama’s The Red Thread of Fate: A Color in Love-Story open across his lap.
He wasn’t certain he understood the story, and wondered if something had been lost in translation—but he thought he grasped, as he spent hours poring through the pages, what Amiko had been trying to tell him. The story explained that each person’s soul was destined for another soul, and the gods connected them with a red thread of fate that was said to be tied around each person’s pinky finger and could never be severed. Some believed the string was tied on birth, and would remain through a lifetime—while others believe it carried through life after life, reincarnation after reincarnation, two souls destined to always find each other, even if in some lives tragic fate or circumstance might keep them apart.