Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 70566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70566 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 353(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Sinclair would move on.
He was a beautiful, sexy beast of a man. He was hard around the edges, but soft when it came to his family and friends. He was tattooed, a biker, and a cowboy. When you saw that man in a pair of chaps and jeans…my god.
He’d fueled my every teenage fantasy.
He was older than me, sure, but I swear to all that was holy, that didn’t matter to me then, and it didn’t matter to me now.
Even mad as hell at him, if he crooked his finger at me, I’d have a really hard time saying no to him.
Any sane woman would.
All that messy, copper-colored hair, paired with his warm honey eyes, and fantastic jaw. Sometimes he’d have a beard. But when he deigned to shave, he’d have these perfect little dimples that all three of his kids shared.
“I’m sorry, Juliana.”
I mean, what else could I say?
It sounded like she’d fucked herself over.
Her life—raising kids and living on the farm? That was my dream.
I wanted exactly the life that she had.
And she’d just given it away.
It was terrible, but it was also a decision that she’d made without thinking it through all the way.
I watched something come over her then. Watched her transform from this broken woman to an angry one that had a new plan in mind.
And apparently that plan had to do with me.
“I heard Denver got your dad’s land.”
And there was that anger all over again.
“Yes,” I said, trying to sound calm.
“You know that he’s wanted that forever, right?”
I swallowed. “Yep.”
“You know that he worked his magic and made it happen. Cheated you out of it, right?” she asked.
I shrugged, not wanting to get into it any more than I had.
If I did, I’d break down on the street in the middle of the damn town and cry my eyes out.
I was tired of people seeing me cry.
“He is a bad person, Georgina.”
I winced at the use of the name that I hated.
The name that I shared with the woman I hated most in this world.
You’re not good enough to share my name. Lorena will do.
Georgina Lorena Cain.
Georgina, after my mother. Lorena, after my father’s mother.
Those nasty words that my mother had said to me a few days before she’d gone back to California for movie deals and better shopping.
“He might be a bad person,” I agreed. “But I don’t want to deal with this anymore. Maybe it’s a good thing.”
And really, maybe it was.
As I drove through town to my house fifteen minutes later, I thought about everything that’d happened. Thought about what my future looked like for me.
At least I had some money coming off of the loans that I owed…
I arrived at my house and went inside, taking it all in.
The house had been released to me only recently.
I’d been forced to rent a short-term rental in town to have somewhere to sleep.
Which fucking sucked even more, because now I was having to pay for it on my credit card that was already leaning toward maxed out.
I needed a job.
Pronto.
I stepped over the creaky board in the middle of the living room and took a look around.
The place looked even more sad than usual.
I hadn’t lived here in years.
Dad had let it go downhill even more than it had been when I’d lived here.
At one point, it’d been a pretty grand place.
Mom had helped Dad pay for the three-story monstrosity before she’d left.
About four years after she’d disappeared from our lives, a fire had broken out in the barn, and it’d spread to the house. The whole left side of the house was uninhabitable, so we’d moved to the parts of the house that were.
Only, the failing structure on the one side had affected the structure on the other.
The house was on its last legs, and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it all fell down one day.
I eyed the couch that Dad had to buy used after the fire.
Everything inside the house was used.
Dishes. Towels. Furniture.
I spread out the towel that had always rested on the couch arm.
That was where Dad had liked to eat his food every night when he got done working. Or, in the later years, it was where he’d made his permanent home.
The cancer hadn’t been kind to Dad.
Prostate cancer was usually survivable for a long time.
Dad’s form had been that kind at first. The “good” kind. But something had changed, and that “good” had gone to ‘bad’ in the blink of an eye.
It’d spread to his bones and organs, and once it was there…
And wouldn’t it just figure that, after surviving cancer for years, Dad died of a home invasion?
And for what? A measly few bucks?
There wasn’t anything to this place. They could’ve looked at the outside of our house and seen that there was nothing inside to steal.