Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 132657 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132657 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
“It won’t come to that,” she replied. “I get the feeling Jack will work with the prosecutor to get you immunity. You never killed anyone. Anyone you hurt was likely self-defense.”
She was leaving out so much. “And the drug running? The deliveries I made that I have no idea what was in the package?”
“Are peanuts compared to what you know about how the organization runs,” she replied. “You’re not going to jail. You’re not going to die. So it’s time you figured out how to live. You think I don’t know what goes on in your head? You might never have said the words to me because you didn’t trust me enough to show me your soul, but I still knew.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is,” she insisted. “Or maybe you don’t trust yourself. Either way, there’s a lack of trust, and that will kill any chance at a relationship. What I was trying to say is even though you never said it out loud, I know you think it should have been you. You think Tommy had more to offer the world, and if anyone could die and have no one notice, it’s you.”
She’d summed him up perfectly. “It never helps to tell the woman you’re in love with that you’re a worthless piece of shit. One tends to want to hide the fact.”
She laid back, her gaze going to the ceiling. “I can’t fix you, Jensen. Thinking you love me won’t fix what’s empty inside you.”
He wasn’t letting her off so easy. He’d gotten to know her, too. “Tell me you don’t think your sister is more important than you. If something happened to your sister, you wouldn’t want to take her place.”
She was silent for a moment, and he worried he’d lost her. “Of course I would. Greer is… Well, she’s ridiculously talented. She got all our mom’s artistic skills. She’s smart.”
“She’s not smarter than you. Maybe she’s better at you in art, but she’s not smarter. I would bet she can’t sit down and figure out a puzzle the way you can. I bet she doesn’t throw her damn body into battle the way you do,” he replied.
“Yeah, and while Tommy might have been smart, he was naïve and he was stubborn,” a familiar voice said. “You told him not to take those loans. You sat him down and found a school you could afford for him. Harlow, did you know he offered to pay his brother’s way through college?”
Harlow sat up, the sheet right below her breasts as she turned to Niall, who stood in the doorway. “No. He only told me his brother went to college and took out some predatory loans.”
“Which I wouldn’t have let him sign if I had been around.” He should have kissed her instead of talking. Now he felt weird because he was naked and Niall was here.
Did he feel weird? Or was it weird that he didn’t care, and that’s what he was worried about. Or not worried about. He wasn’t sure, and honestly, he didn’t want to think about it right now. Fake it ’til you make it. Wasn’t that his motto when it came to becoming walking vengeance? He was such a douche, but it was true. He’d decided to play Punisher and he’d done it by sinking into the role and not coming out of it until he met a gorgeous girl with electric blue hair and eyes that brought him back to the real world. Or showed him that there was another, better world. What if he sank into this role? What if he tried?
“Like I said,” Niall continued, “Tommy could be stubborn. He wanted to be a doctor.”
“Yes, I knew that. He was smart,” Harlow agreed. “But he still got caught by Hamilton.”
“He thought he knew what he was doing,” Niall explained.
Jensen shook his head. “He was ashamed. He knew damn well something was wrong with his new job. It was why he tried to hide it from me. It took me a while to untangle what happened to him. According to my brother, he was just working to save up money for medical school. What I realized was he was trying to pay off his loans at first, and then he was underwater with the cartel Hamilton was working with. His undergrad degree cost one hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars. I paid fifty of it. So my brother’s life was worth seventy-three thousand dollars. I thought my life was worth way less. I meant to stay in the Army until I retired because it was the only place for me. Lately, I’ve been wondering about that.”
“Lately?” Niall asked, moving to the bed. He sat down but not before he laid a kiss on Harlow’s forehead.
It was intimate, being in this room alone with them. It felt…right. “Well, since last night. I’ll admit that until last night I was very focused. I was close, and I didn’t want to think about anything except achieving my goal. Now I kind of question the goal. Turns out I don’t particularly want to go to prison or die.”