Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77106 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I pointed, and we walked quickly toward it.
“Here,” he said, his voice softer as he gently pulled Lainey from his shoulder and set her in my arms. “Get her in her car seat.”
I didn’t stop to question him. I just did as he said.
While I was busy with that, he must have reached for his phone, because I heard his voice as I was adjusting Lainey’s straps.
“Ah, yes, hi. Um,” he started, his voice pitched a little higher to, I assumed, mask his identity. “Yeah, so I was walking to my car from the bar over on Stark, and there’s a man in the lot next to, er, the textile factory. And he seems in bad shape. Think you gotta send him an ambulance. Yeah, real quick.”
I could hear the operator asking something else, but he was already ending the call as I quietly clicked the backseat door closed.
“Can’t they trace your phone to you?” I asked.
“Not if it’s a burner. Gonna give me a ride?” he asked, nodding toward my car.
It was the least I could do.
We climbed in.
“Where am I going?”
“Right now, just drive. Get the fuck outta here, but calmly and casually. Don’t be looking all freaked out or speeding. We’re just a young family, driving home from some event. No biggie.”
Right.
Okay.
Yeah.
I could do that.
“You good?” he asked a few minutes later as I drove back in the direction of my motel, since I didn’t know where he lived.
“I think so,” I said, hearing the sirens off in the distance and saying a prayer that they could get to the guy in time.
“You can drop me there,” he said, nodding his chin toward a convenience store up ahead.
“I can drive you home.”
“Nah, don’t worry about me. Get the baby home. Get yourself some sleep. I can make my own way home.”
The guilt was immediate, but I tamped it down as I turned into the well-lit lot and pulled into a spot.
“Wait,” I called when he opened his door and climbed out.
“What’s up, baby?”
God, the casual way he threw that word around must have melted panties. Mine felt halfway there already.
“Thank you.”
“For what?” he asked, shrugging. Like it genuinely was no big deal. Saving our lives. “Get yourself and that baby home safe, alright, Zo?”
Before I could say anything else, he gently closed the door, then hip-checked it to make it click.
Then the guy just… swaggered on into the convenience store like nothing at all had happened.
“Okay, baby,” I said, forcing myself to reverse out of the spot instead of sit there watching Coast walk around the store. “Let’s go home and try to forget this whole thing ever happened.”
As if that was even possible.
I obsessed about it until I fell asleep.
Then I dreamed of piercing blue eyes and hands all over me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Zoe
“That’s a sweet baby,” I cooed at the Golden Retriever strutting around next to the stroller, his little tail waving softly side to side.
Everything in the world seemed new and exciting to him, despite being the ripe old age of nine. And everyone he came across was his-long lost best friend: other dogs, people, a random squirrel just trying to dig up a nut.
But there was no one in the world Blue loved more than Lainey. Not even his dog-mom. And she knew it too.
“I feel like this is his way of telling me I need to settle down and have kids,” she said when Blue rushed out the door to run up to the stroller and stare lovingly at my baby.
“If you need to be de-influenced, I changed my shirt three times today because I was spit up on. This was my last clean shirt. And if you can’t tell from that sour smell emanating from me, there’s more baby spit up on this one too.”
“Yeah, but look at her,” Blue’s mom said, giving Lainey the goo-goo eyes.
Blue was our newest walking buddy.
We were up to four walks a day now. And my aching legs reminded me of that every night when I lay down to try to sleep.
Lainey had a little pink fan I found at the dollar store clipped to the side of her stroller to move some air for her on the really hot days.
As for me, I sweated. A lot. Like through my bra and underwear kind of sweating.
And Blue? Well, Blue was allowed to take a dip in his little doggy pool in the backyard when we got back from our walks before I ushered him into the house, where he would trot down the hall and into his very own bedroom. He had a twin-sized bed with bone-patterned sheets, a basket piled sky-high with toys, and an insulated and freezable dog bowl that kept his water cold all day—and cost more than my whole wardrobe put together. There were also prints on the wall above his bed. One for every year of his life, taken on his birthdays in front of what I assumed was a dog-safe cake with his mom beaming next to him.