Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 22950 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 115(@200wpm)___ 92(@250wpm)___ 77(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22950 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 115(@200wpm)___ 92(@250wpm)___ 77(@300wpm)
Sympathy fills my chest for Ezra. He can’t help being menacing. He’s probably used to using his size to his advantage in prison. Now he’s home and it’s a disadvantage. That has to be awful and confusing. I glance up to find him looking at me with a furrowed brow.
“You really want me gone, princess?”
No. “I think it’s for the best.”
His throat works. “Permanently?”
I take a deep breath and move away, belting my robe for the ninth time since coming downstairs. “Like I said,” I whisper, looking down. “You won’t be able to make me happy.”
He tilts my chin up until I’m forced to meet his gaze. “When I was twelve deep inside you, Ophelia, you told me I was booked solid. All yours. Remember that?” His breath tickles my mouth. “Did you mean it?”
“No,” I manage, the lie sitting like acid on my tongue.
“Bullshit,” he bites off. “I’m going to learn your secrets.”
“You’re going to wish you didn’t.”
Leeza wrestles her son away from me. “Please, Ez. I need this job.”
I watch a reluctant, pissed off Ezra leave with a yawning pit in my stomach.
Within seconds, I miss his touch. Will I ever see him again?
The look he sends me before walking out tells me yes.
I’m not getting away from him that easily.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ezra
There’s something Ophelia isn’t telling me.
When she walked into the kitchen and saw me standing there, her eyes lit up with joy before she hid it. Ever since she told me to leave, that I can’t make her happy, I replay that moment in the kitchen over and over just to stay sane. And it’s not easy keeping my head right when I need her this much. I’m not the kind of man who lets the arrival of another man make him run and hide like a pussy. If I didn’t think it would get my mother fired, I would have taken Ophelia upstairs to her bedroom, regardless of her father’s impending arrival.
I tried to go back to Queens and regroup. I did. But I found myself back on the Upper West Side, standing in the shadows across from Ophelia’s sprawling townhouse. The need to see her is all encompassing. Invisible hands strangle me around the neck. I won’t get a decent breath until I’m looking at her. Or more likely, until I’m drilling her sweet little cunt and I give her that second orgasm she was deprived of two days ago.
My lips peel back in a snarl just thinking of her unsatisfied. It’s eating me alive.
Her father left hours ago in a limousine and now that she’s home alone, it’s taking everything inside me not to kick the door down and kidnap her. To take her somewhere we can be alone and uninterrupted, so I can find out what she isn’t telling me. I don’t know why my instinct that she’s keeping something to herself is so strong, but I have to believe in it.
Otherwise she’s telling the truth and she doesn’t want me around.
Needing to get closer to her, I wait for a wave of taxis to zoom past, then cross the street. There’s a stone staircase leading to the entrance, but the steps are bathed in light and I don’t want to be seen, so I move along the right side of bottom of the staircase—and that’s when I see her through the sliver of glass along the front door.
The glass is slightly beveled, but I would recognize her face in a sandstorm. What I don’t expect is to find her scrubbing the entryway floor on her hands and knees.
What the fuck?
Not that I don’t hate the idea of my mother performing manual labor, but I’m pretty sure scrubbing the floor falls to the maid, not the resident millionaire.
Hell. If she left with me, she’d have to scrub her own floors, wouldn’t she?
At first.
I would bust my ass to give her a better life. I would do whatever it took so she could sleep in silk sheets, eat at the finest restaurants and sun her beautiful ass on international beaches. I wasn’t always a fucking criminal. Once upon a time, I had aspirations of being more. A lot more. I was working my way up through the ranks of one the biggest car parts manufacturers in the United States. I might not know much, but I damn well know how to make a car purr like a kitten and that earned me a spot in the boardroom, a place I never thought I’d be.
A couple of good calls and smart decisions later, I was poised to become a partner.
That’s when I found out the company was importing a lot more than car parts.
And I did something about it.
Something I would do all over again, even though it earned me seven years in hell.
I wasn’t the only man at the company who was blindsided and I’ve been in contact with my former colleagues. We have a plan to build a bigger operation—a more honorable one—this time around. It might take years to see that vision through and I know it’s goddamn selfish asking Ophelia to leave her ivory tower for me, to be patient for a man with a prison record and a mouth like a sailor, but I can’t imagine walking away and living the rest of my life without her.