Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 77118 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77118 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I had too much ink for the grocery store.
Too much of a distaste for authority for the prison.
Not a kind enough attitude for the diner.
And, well, too many minor run-ins with the cops to have them let me work there.
I’d been casually considering getting a license to drive a school bus. But, well, I didn’t exactly trust myself not to curse out the little shits if they got fresh with me.
So, yeah, the bar it was.
I had unique experience to bring to the job, too.
Daughter of a raging alcoholic, I’d been mixing drinks since I was in elementary school.
The bartender at the time had tried to trip me up, tossing out obscure drinks, thinking I would have no way of knowing the ingredients. Being only nineteen and not legally allowed to drink yet myself.
He’d been forced to hire me when he couldn’t come up with a single one that I didn’t know by heart.
I had been working there all of two weeks when the door opened, and in he walked.
All that charm, all that sexy, all that danger floating around him, summoning me closer.
Let’s just say that as a mostly unsupervised child and, later, teen, I’d dated a lot by the time I was nineteen.
Boys. Boys my own age. Ones who’d twisted my tits and plowed into me for a whopping thirty seconds to two minutes before coming.
You could say, I was a girl on a mission.
To find a man.
One who could give me more than what I was used to.
And Czar had been twenty-five at the time, more than man enough to my thoughts back then.
To his credit, while he’d casually flirted with me, because I was sure the man was incapable of not seeming like he was flirting by virtue of his charm alone, he hadn’t exactly flung himself at me, even asking me when I was clearly trying to throw myself at him, “Are you even old enough to be talk to me?”
Let’s just say that young Nyx, yeah, she was a determined chick.
I brought him drinks.
I stroked his ego.
I ran my fingernail down his arm, over his chest. I pulled his necklace out from under his shirt, demanding to know what it meant as my fingers stroked it.
My skin sparked at the way a muscle ticked in his jaw, the way his eyes went heavy-lidded and heated.
“What time do you get off here?” he’d finally asked after four nights of my relentless flirting.
“Two-thirty,” I told him.
“Yeah? You need a ride home?” he asked.
I didn’t have a car at the time. I’d been using my mom’s old busted-ass one for a while until the engine had finally blown. I was hoping to have enough from bartending in a month or two to get something used to get me around.
Until then, I was hoofing it.
“That would be better than walking,” I told him, feeling a thrill in my stomach, knowing I had him.
“I’ll meet you out front then,” he said.
And so he did.
My pulse skittered and my heart flip-flopped.
I was so excited that I hadn’t even realized at the time how unusual it was for a guy his age to be driving a car like he drove.
Sleek.
Black.
Damn near purred when he turned it over.
I’d learn later that it was a hundred-thousand-dollar car.
At the time, I just knew it was hot.
And I was in it.
And, for a moment, I wasn’t the poor girl with the drunk mom and absent dad.
I was a girl who had the hottest guy in town driving her home.
“Baby girl, this is the park,” Czar told me when I told him to park the car.
“I know,” I agreed, giving him a warm smile.
The fact of the matter was, there was a little trailer park on the other end of the park, just ten little mostly-falling apart single-wides that everyone kind of forgot existed, hidden away behind a thick row of trees that the township had brought in and planted to hide the park from the prettier area of the suburbs.
“You don’t have a home?” he asked, concern creasing his somewhat stern brow.
And, God, that just made me want him more.
I didn’t think.
I just reached across his body, finding the button to make his seat scoot back, pushing it until it wouldn’t go anymore, then climbing up on his lap, hiking up my skirt, and sealing my lips over his.
That was the first time in my life that I got fucked and enjoyed it. Came, even. Twice, actually.
I think young, infatuated me, had maybe been in an orgasm daze or some shit for those first few weeks, even months.
I was oblivious to all the red flags planted all over the place.
The nice car, the designer clothes, fancy jewelry, the endless wads of cash he always had on hand.
It probably didn’t help that he spent a lot of that cash on me. Buying me clothes and jewelry, shoes, tattoos, anything my heart desired.