My Ex’s Dad (Scandalous Billionaires #1) Read Online Lindsey Hart

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary Tags Authors: Series: Scandalous Billionaires Series by Lindsey Hart
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Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 75289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 376(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
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I can’t buy myself a different childhood. I can’t change how my parents raised me. I can’t go back and undo the fear of a scared teenager and make him listen to someone else besides his parents. I should have fought harder and in a vastly different way for Reginald, but I can’t buy that time back either.

The only thing I could offer Amalphia is a night or two or maybe a week of passion. I could make her feel good, and I know she would give back a hundred times anything I could find to give her, but it would never work. My parents would lose their minds, and I have a professional image to uphold. I’d be kissing my relationship with my son goodbye forever.

“Your relationship with Reg?” I scoff, spiraling down into the darkest depths of having to resort to talking to myself. “What relationship?”

A bulging bright pink duffel bag gets added to the pile. And then another box.

My throat closes up, and my chest gets tight. She has to be just about done packing by now.

I press my palm to the window and continue my downward trajectory of lecturing myself out loud. It’s only weird if there’s someone else to hear it, right?

“You’ve tried all your life to earn the right to be a dad. Did you ever stop to think that maybe you were doing it wrong? You didn’t like the way Amalphia was treated, and you hate the way you were played and cheated and forced to accept crumbs of nothing at all. You did nothing wrong, but you’ve accepted that this is your life. Congrats.”

I wish I could tell myself to shut the fuck up without sounding unhinged.

“You’ve tried so hard to live this life for everyone else, and now you’re alone and cold, and you haven’t even ventured to think about love since you were a teenager.”

Even then, I didn’t have the faintest notion of what it was, and I still got jaded. I knew about trust, and I knew how easy it was to break and get broken.

“What if you just didn’t give a fuck what people thought?”

Shut up.

But what if I stopped doing all the things that haven’t worked and considered the one thing in the world that might actually go right if I gave it a chance?

Amalphia steps out of the pool house and closes the door. My calculations outside of a business environment have traditionally been a dumpster fire, but by my calculations right now, I have five minutes to stop her before she loads all that stuff into her car and drives away. Once she leaves, I know she’s not going to come back. I could go to Harrisburg and beg, but it won’t make a difference.

I scramble through the room, half in blinding pain. The sun has all but scalded my retinas, my brain is a mushy migraine mess, and my body is not nearly one hundred percent. I’m running on the last dregs of what little energy I had this morning.

Still.

This is the first time I’ve felt a spark of clarity in years.

I fumble down the steps, grasping the railing to keep from faceplanting. I don’t need to make like a toboggan and slide down face first to eat the floor. Speaking of eating, I smell the soup right away. The special, amazing, thoughtful chicken soup that Amalphia made from scratch just to try to entice me into eating. The burner is turned off under the large pot. She made sure the house wasn’t going to burn down.

She bathed my feet, for fuck’s sake.

She did all of this for me and so much more.

I burst outside and holler her name. “Amalphia!”

She yelps and drops the box she’s carrying. It smashes on the concrete with a sickening crunch.

Shit.

So, tell me all about how you were going to stop fucking shit up again.

I feel like I’m going to pass out just from running across the backyard, but I keep going until I’m standing right in front of her. She’s frozen, the box at her shoes, one of the bottom corners dented.

“I don’t want you to leave. I’m sorry.”

Her pretty eyes well up with tears, and she sucks in a shaky breath. I can see her mentally arming herself, trying to be tough enough to just get through this. She gives me a watery smile I don’t deserve. “I know, Warrick. I know you’re sorry, but don’t worry. I’ll be okay. This isn’t your fault. Reg is just Reg, and life is just life. You’re a good man. You don’t have to convince me of that, and you don’t have to apologize.”

“I. Don’t. Want. You. To. Leave.”

“I. Know. That. Everything. Will. Be. Fine.” She enunciates the words back, parroting mine just about exactly. She’s trying to get me to hear her.


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