Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 71497 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71497 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 357(@200wpm)___ 286(@250wpm)___ 238(@300wpm)
Toot growled. “I would’ve never done that to her!”
I shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t really matter now, does it? Because in the end, you did mess up. Royally. And she’s moved on. It’s time to move on yourself. Let her find happiness with someone else. Me. Because I’m all in.”
“You don’t know how to make her happy,” he snarled.
I snorted. “I can learn.”
Toot looked like he’d taken a bullet straight to the heart. “She’s my one.”
I shrugged. “She’s mine, too.”
I wasn’t quite sure when I knew that.
Maybe right that second.
Maybe I’d known it for a while.
Maybe it’d been from the very first second that I’d seen her.
No matter what the answer to that was, I knew I wanted to make her mine. I knew that I wanted to make babies with her. I knew that I wanted to introduce her to my nieces. I knew that I wanted her to meet my parents.
I knew that I wanted to live the rest of my life being her shadow, keeping her safe, and letting her know I was there to catch her if she fell.
I was so whipped, and I hadn’t even known her for a full month.
She didn’t have any clue the power she held.
That I was her loaded weapon. All she had to do was point me in the direction she needed protection from, and I’d wipe out everything in my path.
“I don’t…”
“You need to go,” Madden repeated.
Toot hesitated.
But then Brianna strolled through the door, took in the scene, and planted her hands on her hips as she said, “What’s going on here?”
The very last thing I needed was Brianna insinuating herself somewhere she didn’t need to be.
Toot looked at her, then turned around and rolled out of the gym, struggling with the door the entire way.
Nobody moved until he left, leaving us with Brianna now staring at me expectantly.
And, like normal, she had the most perfect timing.
I was pissed as hell, wanted to murder something, and she was sticking her finger in a raw wound and wiggling it around.
“What was that about?” she asked again, clearly not liking that we’d ignored her.
I didn’t answer, instead walking toward the bathroom without another word.
I found Cannel there, next to the two young women, talking about babies.
“…I want three. Possibly four. I want a reason to get a mom-mobile.” Cannel paused at the sight of me standing in the bathroom doorway. “Everything okay?”
I shrugged. “You mind giving us a few minutes?”
Both ladies immediately got up from the benches that encompassed the changing area in the bathroom and headed toward the door.
They hesitated the moment that they heard the next question.
“Tell me about Toot,” I urged, gesturing toward the ladies that were hovering in the doorway, unsure whether to leave or not.
“Beau,” she corrected me, as she always did, when she heard me call him ‘Toot.’ “Was my fiancé.”
“Was.” I nodded, knowing that part. “But what happened?”
I’d heard the nuts and bolts of it from Easton when I’d called him to get information on Cannel. What I hadn’t heard was when the engagement had ended, and why.
I mean, logically, I knew why.
He’d traded a friend of hers for ‘her’ and Cannel hadn’t liked that.
I didn’t blame her.
Fixing one wrong with another wrong most certainly did not make a right.
But…
“I met Toot when he was a fighter pilot,” she said. “I was in Florida for school. We met at a bar, and I loved how charming he was.” She paused. “But toward the end, I kept seeing a side of Beau that I didn’t like. How he was willing to literally do anything to make me happy. Bankrupt us. Steal. Barter. Hell, if it benefited me in some way, he would make the earth move just to make it happen.”
“And that’s bad?” I asked.
“It is when he starts going into debt when I didn’t ask for some fancy-ass ring when all I wanted was one of those rubber/silicone ones or whatever,” she admitted. “I’m a simple girl at heart, Will. I was born with five brothers. One of six. My parents both worked, but we were middle class at best. There isn’t a time in my life that I don’t remember us struggling in some way. Borrowing X so we could pay Y. Skipping a car payment so we could keep the lights on that month.”
I grinned. “Things were like that for us once upon a time, too. That’s why we moved away from here. My dad found a really good job out of town. That’s when things started looking up for us. So I feel you.”
“Beau came from money. He just had a really bad relationship with his father and refused to ask him for help. So he came up with these schemes, did things I wouldn’t have approved of, like gambling and fighting. Honestly, had I not been abducted…I doubt I would’ve ever married him.” She shook her head. “But when I got out, things had changed. I thought about Beau that entire year, and he sort of became my lifeline. My ‘I have to get back to him.’ And when I did finally get rescued…to learn what Toot did felt like I’d been lied to that entire year. That I’d held on to him so tightly for nothing.”