Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 138522 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 554(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138522 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 693(@200wpm)___ 554(@250wpm)___ 462(@300wpm)
“I will,” Abbie says. “Thank you, Cat.”
We disconnect and while I’d love to revel in the connection between her and my sister, my mind moves elsewhere. “Grayson’s well established in the Hamptons. He’s a force to be known there. Does your ex know him? Is this a problem we need to sidestep?”
She gives a delicate little snort. “Kenneth doesn’t align himself with people he sees as bigger or better than him and Grayson’s one of those people. That’s why you don’t see him in the Hamptons. He doesn’t want a chance to look bad and he wants people who want something from him, to have to chase him.” She glances over at me. “You said you own a place down there?”
“For a few months now,” I confirm. “I started going down there to deal with some of Grayson’s business, and it grew on me. I’m not afraid of being accessible.” My mind goes to every time I made sure a client, and a client’s enemy, knew how ready I was to take action. “In fact, I prefer people understand just how accessible I can be,” I add, “which is why my father pulling this crap makes no sense. He knows I don’t play these games.”
“My ex flies off the deep end,” she comments dryly. “He pushes and he gets angry. I’m sure he demanded you be dealt with and dealt with now.”
“Yeah, well, my father is no one’s little bitch.” I pull us into the driveway of the chopper service. “No matter who the little bitch is that pays the check.”
“You’re calling my ex a little bitch?”
“Yes. Problem?”
“No. He is a little bitch.”
I laugh with the awkward sound when she says those words.
“But what’s your point, aside from his obvious little bitch status?”
I’d laugh again if she hadn’t just sobered me so damn fast. What is my point? A problem is my point. “That he knew I’d shut this down. It doesn’t feel right. I’m missing something.” And I don’t like it, I think, parking the car and glancing back to find Dexter resting in the backseat. We need a crate to travel. We don’t have a crate.
“That document had to be served to me, not you,” Abbie says, pulling me back into the bigger problem “And had you not been with me, I’m embarrassed to admit that I wouldn’t have given you a chance to explain yourself. I wouldn’t have even told you about the document.”
“We’ll work on trust,” I say, eyeing her. “We are working on trust, but you would have figured it out when you calmed down and looked closer at the document. Even if it took you until you got an attorney, you would have figured it out. My father doesn’t do things that can be fixed.” I face forward, my hands on the steering wheel, chasing a bigger picture. What is my father really up to?
“I get it, you know,” Abbie says. “My father and I don’t get along at all. We don’t talk.”
“No,” I say, my jaw clenching. “No, you really don’t get it.” It comes out short, hard. Brutal almost.
“Sorry, Gabe. I didn’t mean to seem like I get it completely. Just that I know what it’s like to not like your father.” She reaches for the door and gets out. I don’t move for about three seconds. My father’s brutal. My father’s a killer. I don’t know how to explain that to her without her seeing a little too much of me in my answer. Fuck.
I climb out of the car and waste no time rounding the trunk to catch her before she enters the building, and I can’t talk to her. I grab her arm and pull her around to face me. “He’s—not someone I want you to understand. I’m glad you don’t. That’s what I should have said.”
“I crossed a line,” she says. “I assumed I knew more than I did and I just—”
“You didn’t cross a line. There are no lines with you, Abbie, and that’s new to me. I’m used to shutting people out.”
“Why? Why do you shut people out, Gabe?”
She hits ten nerves that collide and explode inside me. “Why do you, Abbie?”
“Life touches us and we respond to what it’s made us feel.” Her fingers touch my jaw. “Life touched you like it did me.”
But no one has touched me like she has. Her fingers fall away from my face. “Maybe one day you’ll trust me enough to show me the man beneath the smiles.”
I catch her hand. “Are you suggesting you’ll stay around to find out?”
“Maybe if I believed you’d really show me that man, I would. Right now, I don’t believe you will and I’m not willing to be as vulnerable as you make me to have this be one-sided.”
“I want to know the woman beneath all that red hair.”