Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 71226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 356(@200wpm)___ 285(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Prologue
My name isn’t Tom, but I’m Petty AF.
—T-shirt
Ramsey
I sat in the college campus coffee shop and waited for Nadine to show.
She was a professor at the University of Arkansas where she taught sociology.
She, of course, was late.
Really, really late.
I glanced at my watch again and realized that she was so late that it likely meant that she wasn’t coming.
How surprising.
It’d been the same old song and dance ever since I’d found out that she was pregnant.
I’d been pretty neutral about finding out that she was pregnant.
It wasn’t like I wanted kids—I was in the fuckin’ military for Christ’s sake with no end in sight—but I wasn’t opposed to having them.
When I’d found out, I’d said that I would be there every step of the way.
Only, she hadn’t wanted me there every step of the way.
She’d wanted me gone and never missed an opportunity to share that she didn’t want me there.
I’d had to fight for everything that I got timewise with my kid, and she literally fought me at every turn.
Hell, I hadn’t even realized she’d had Dean until three weeks later.
Which fucking sucked, because I’d missed having time off with him before I’d had to go back to work.
I’d gotten to see him for six short hours before I’d been forced to return to the base, where I’d then been sent out on a mission.
The next time I got to see Dean, he’d been two months old and terrified of me.
Apparently, Dean had never been around another man.
I’d learned from a private investigator that Nadine had been a lesbian, and she’d wanted a child. But she and her girlfriend had been too poor to go the route of in vitro. They’d tossed a fucking coin to find out who would be pregnant, and Nadine had won.
Nadine had gone out one night with her girlfriend’s permission and had fucked the first dumb bastard that gave her attention—that dumb bastard being me.
They had intended to never tell me, but Nadine and her girlfriend had had a stroke of conscience and had thought…we should tell him. But he’s military, so he probably won’t care anyway.
Well, I had cared.
I’d wanted to be a part of my son’s life.
But it’d become so increasingly hard to do that that I’d had to leave the military.
I’d gotten a place in Little Rock and had fought to see Dean.
Only, more often than not, Nadine violated court orders and never showed up for our court-mandated swaps.
I saw Dean so rarely that the kid freaked way the fuck out any time I finally got him.
And, since Nadine was still breastfeeding, I never got to keep him long enough to get him used to me.
I was just a random man who took him from time to time.
But today, that would change.
Today, we were going to discuss what the rest of our time looked like.
I now had a court order from a judge that declared that I would be given every other week with him. From now on, we shared fifty-fifty custody.
To say that Nadine was pissed would be an understatement.
But this time, she couldn’t go about violating court orders, or she wouldn’t be seeing her kid at all.
Those were the judge’s exact words.
Which she hadn’t liked hearing.
Today, we’d be meeting to discuss what this fifty-fifty custody looked like for us.
Except, she hadn’t showed.
She was now two hours late, and I was on my fourth cup of coffee.
I stood up to get a refill.
“You drink anymore,” the cute brown-haired girl with her nose buried in a nursing book called out as I passed. “You’re never going to be able to sleep tonight.”
Little did she know that I had trouble sleeping, but it had nothing to do with the amount of coffee I consumed.
I’d clocked the woman the moment I entered the store.
She was sitting in the usual booth that I preferred, which was in the corner of the room with my back to the door.
She’d been scanning her surroundings so much that I would’ve guessed she was ex-military if it wasn’t for the youthfulness of her face.
She was twenty-one, max.
“Yeah, I’m sure it won’t help,” I admitted as I walked away to get another refill. After the barista handed it back I stopped at the young woman’s table and said, “You should take a break. No way you can retain the information you’re cramming in there without one.”
She looked up and smiled, and my heart arrested in my chest.
Damn, she was pretty.
Short and curvy, she had tits for days, long brown hair that fell in waves around her shoulders and to the tabletop in front of her, and gray eyes the same color as mine.
Damn, she’s pretty.
I’d been trying not to look at her so closely this entire time.
“I’m about to leave,” she sighed. “It’s getting dark, and I don’t like walking home after dark.”