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)
I also didn’t like him giving any attention to anyone but me.
Which was stupid, I knew.
But I’d had this claim to him for so long that it was kind of hard to turn it off.
We may have been husband and wife in name only, but he was still mine.
I’d called him mine for seven years.
I was a possessive bitch, what could I say?
“Is he doing better?”
Holly and I were okay to be in the room with him, but having three humans staring at him had Neo’s hackles raised.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Holly and I were talking, and we think he might do better if he isn’t cooped up in this cage anymore.”
“We were thinking we could put a muzzle on him,” Holly suggested, backing up so that she wasn’t also in Neo’s line of sight. “The muzzle is a lot less scary than it sounds. He can still eat or drink in it, but he just can’t bite.”
Gentry’s hands clenched. “And you think that this will help him for real? Why my place and not hers?”
“We’re thinking it might be traumatic for him to go back to the RV where he was taken from,” I admitted. “Holly admitted that you have a fenced-in yard.”
Gentry grunted. “I do.”
“And you could move your RV, too,” Holly added. “I heard you have a hookup for it.”
Gentry looked surprised that she would know and looked at me mulishly.
Gentry grunted. “I do. But I’ve offered it to her already.”
He had.
Once.
In passing.
Right after Neo was stolen from me.
Gentry hadn’t been happy to hear that the security at the campground was so subpar that no one had caught Neo being stolen.
But I’d turned him down.
I wanted my own space.
I wanted to be able to live and breathe like normal for the first time ever.
Being in Gentry’s backyard meant that he would always be there, never able to escape my constant thinking about him. I would see him every morning when he went in to work. Every evening when he came home. Every time he ran home for lunch.
That probably wasn’t the best idea in the world…
However, when I looked at my poor Neo, I realized that I needed to do something.
He couldn’t keep living like this.
“I guess that I’ll move the RV.” I paused. “If you can find me a truck to borrow.”
Gentry looked at me with surprise. “You can use mine.”
“You can pull a fifth wheel with your truck?” I asked in surprise.
“Not my department issued one, no. But the one I bought when I got here? Yes.”
I had yet to see him drive anything but the sheriff’s department truck. Honestly, I was surprised to hear that he had one. How had I missed that? More importantly, how could I stalk him appropriately if I didn’t know all the vehicles he drove?
I gathered my pride and said, “If you’ll have me, I’ll stay.”
His eyes studied mine.
The brown eyes were disconcerting since I knew what that gaze was supposed to look like.
Hell, everything about him weirded me out.
The man was supposed to have full sleeve tattoos and gray eyes.
Now he had unblemished skin and brown ones.
It was like he was a completely different person.
Then again, maybe that was a good thing.
Maybe he needed to be a different person.
Maybe it was time for me to become a different person, too.
I mean, what use was a new identity if I didn’t use it?
“I’ll come by tomorrow when you get off work, and we’ll get you moved,” he offered.
“How do you know when I’m going to be off?” I grumbled.
“I know everything there is to know about you, Herb,” he teased as he walked out. “Take care now.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t the only one who did the stalking.
Holly waited for the door to shut behind me before she said, “Who the hell is Herb? And why are y’all acting like you know everything there is to know about each other?” She narrowed her eyes. “And don’t give me that ‘we’re divorced’ shit. I know that’s not the case.”
I rubbed at the back of my neck before I said, “We were married. But we’ve never been divorced.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you saying y’all are still married?”
I answered her one hundred percent honestly with, “I have no clue.”
Ten
You don’t look a day over fine as fuck.
—Gentry to Sage
Gentry
I watched her try to work with Neo from the kitchen window.
It’d been a week since we’d moved her trailer over to the back property behind my house, and in that week she’d made almost zero progress with Neo.
He was out of his kennel, sure.
He wasn’t staying in her RV—that I made sure of when I gave her the ‘you can stay here but you have to be safe about this’ speech when she moved in. He was mainly in the backyard for now, refusing to go into his home we’d built him out of an old shed.