Total pages in book: 18
Estimated words: 16853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 84(@200wpm)___ 67(@250wpm)___ 56(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 16853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 84(@200wpm)___ 67(@250wpm)___ 56(@300wpm)
“This is bullshit. I can’t believe I trusted you.” I told him things about my family, hoping he’d understand that I had good intentions for his little girl, but this is how he repays me for turning in my father.
“It’s the smartest thing you could have done,” Mr. Black says.
“I don’t see how losing my heart and soul could ever be a good thing.” My body ached inside to the point that it was hard to stand. A knock on my open doorframe sends our attention to the door.
“It’s time to go, Jake,” Aunt Lucille says, coming into my room. I nod, doing my best to hold back the pain and rage. I hadn’t expected Dean Black to be standing in my bedroom waiting to speak with me before I left, but he showed up at the last moment. She steps back away from the door, sensing the tension. She’s going to be taking me to my grandparents’ home in New York to live with them. I’m not interested in any of it.
“Take this. If your love is as genuine as you believe it is, this should hold you off. Remember, the hardest part of loving someone is wanting the best for them even when it’s not the best for you.” Fuck if he’d know anything about that. He’s married to the love of his life with a horde of babies and has a perfect existence. I’m being forced away from my future.
He hands me a worn shoebox with drawings all over it. There are hearts and lipstick kisses on it, and it says, Lea & Jake 4ever inside the hearts all around the box. I know it’s something that she wrote on and has clearly opened a hundred times. I’ll treasure it and remember every day that I had her love, but will she still love me when I come back for her?
Why did he give this to me?
Lea
The day my heart broke.
I stand on the sidewalk, watching as a car pulls out of the neighbors’ driveway. My heart crumbles to pieces as the passenger in the backseat stares at me with a promise in his eyes. I replay the words he told me on my tenth birthday in my head. “You’re my girl, and I’ll love you for the rest of my days, Lea.”
Jake’s aunt is hauling him away to live in another state with the entire family we had no idea he had. That damn evil wench was stealing him away after all these years. They should never have brought him in the first place, dumping him on his father’s doorstep and into my path, only to rip him from me. Granted, it was his mother who did it before she died, but still, it’s not fair.
I’d fallen in love with the boy next door, and now he’s gone to live a different life and will obviously find someone else to give his heart and body to. We’ve only shared the tiniest peck on the cheek, but he promised one day I’d be his wife. He’d sworn that to me on my tenth birthday when he declared that I was his.
I thought he was silly back then. Now, my heart knows that he was just waiting for me to grow up. Tears fill my eyes, but I can’t let anyone see that my heart’s broken. No, I push them away and storm back inside our amazing home where my wonderful family lives—our perfect family where everyone and everything is just effortlessly put together—but my heart is in pieces.
The boy I’ve loved since before I even knew what it meant has been taken from me to live somewhere else. Drying my face, I hide in my room until there’s a knock at my door. “Sweetheart, can we come in?” my mother asks.
“I’m not in the mood to talk,” I grumble through my pillow, wanting them to just leave me alone.
“Then we just want you to listen,” my father says. I don’t want to speak to him or hear what he has to say most of all. This is his fault. All of this is his fault. He’s the reason Jake is gone and living away from me and he did it on purpose, and my heart can’t reconcile that right now no matter what excuse my father has. It was all my fault after he found my shoebox full of Jake trinkets and notes I wrote to him but never sent. I’ve kept them over the years and have read them many times, wondering if he really felt the same.
“No, thanks.” I ignored my parents for a few minutes, and then they finally walked away after a moment.
Chapter One
Jake
Present Day
“How was your first case?” I’ve taken on corporate law with my uncle and his firm at the ripe age of twenty-two, because nepotism is one hell of a thing and I’m a gifted bastard on a mission. Having graduated law school just six months ago, I’m a genius with only one thing on my mind, and that is achieving success so that I can get back to my true heart’s desire, Lea Black.