Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 103141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 413(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 516(@200wpm)___ 413(@250wpm)___ 344(@300wpm)
You’re going to ruin me!
Such a disgrace.
You’ve always been a disappointment.
Call me.
Why aren’t you answering your phone?
You don’t understand what you’re doing.
I’m sure that to him, I don’t understand what I’m doing. What other reason would I have for being with someone like Rian? I’m sure that’s what he means, but what he doesn’t see, what he would never see, is that Rian is a better man than he could ever be.
Rian, who loves me, just the way I am.
Fuck him. How dare he not give a shit about me, not want anything to do with me, and then he thinks he has the right to have a say in who I love? All because of what it will do to him and his career? The career he’s always loved a hundred times more than he’s ever loved me.
I know I’m not supposed to call him, but I can’t stop myself from picking up the phone and doing just that. It’s his personal cell that no one has the number to except people he chooses to give it to, so I know it will be my father who answers.
“Who is this?” he says instead of hello.
“It’s Abbott,” I say through clenched teeth.
“Jesus! Thank God. Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick about you.”
The audacity of his words feels like he threw acid on my heart. “Worried about me? You’ve been worried about me? You’ve never given a shit about me! Not once in my whole fucking life.”
“We don’t have time for this right now. You don’t know who that man is.”
“No. You don’t know who he is. Rian loves me. He’s a better man than—”
“He is using you, Preston.” I wince at his use of my first name, but still, his words stop me in my tracks.
Rian isn’t using me. I know that, deep down, I know that, but hearing him say it plays on all my insecurities.
“Rian loves me,” I say again.
His voice lowers, a tightness I don’t recognize in it when he says, “There’s more going on here than you know, son.”
I roll my eyes, not believing him. “Then tell me.”
“I can’t. Not over the phone. You’re going to get yourself killed. You’re going to get all of us killed.”
Something about his words stops my heart. Maybe it’s the true fear in them. I’ve never heard my father sound afraid—not once in my life. But the shake in his voice, the warning there, tells me that he’s very scared right now.
Is there more going on than I know? Probably, and I don’t think it’s coming from Rian.
Rian trusts me.
I trust him.
But I don’t trust my father as far as I can throw him. He’s got himself tangled up in something, something that has to do with Rian. “Tell me what you did,” I spit out, hand tightening on the cell.
“I can’t. Not over the phone. I already told you that. Come and meet me.”
“Where are you?”
“At the summer house,” he replies. We call it the summer house even though we rarely spent summers there. It had been my mother’s favorite place in the world, though—the Cape Cod house, surrounded by gardens and nature and outside of the business of the city.
I haven’t been in years, and the thought of being there again squeezes at my heart.
“I’m on my way,” I say.
“Come alone,” he says. “And don’t tell that monster where you’re going.”
I end the call, knowing that the only monster here is the one I’m going to see.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Rian
I’ve had a hell of a day.
We got a batch of bad drugs—something we thankfully discovered before putting that shit on the streets—an issue getting payment on some of our real estate ventures, and a visit from the police.
Things like that happen fairly often. Conan usually knows when they’re going to go down, and I hadn’t heard a peep from him today, but they were just trying to give me a hard time, trying to pretend they will be able to get something on me when they won’t.
It’s all part of the gig, but I can’t pretend it hasn’t felt like someone behind the scenes has it out for us today. Usually, those types of problems don’t happen in threes.
It’s early evening by the time I’m heading back to the house. I haven’t spoken with Abbott all day, and all I want to do is get home and lose myself in his body. Why do I ever have to leave his bed again? I would be a happy man if I could just stay there with him all the time.
I frown when I pull up at the house just as another familiar car is parking. My heart immediately drops seeing Cillian’s dark gray BMW stop behind me, followed by Tiernan’s.
Cillian and Ollie spill out of the front seat, Rory and Shai from the back. “What is it? What’s wrong?” I ask, rushing around my SUV to them.