Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 68143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 341(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
That was true, too.
The last I’d checked, Ben was on his seventh wife.
“I don’t know what to say to that,” I admitted.
“Nothing to say.” He shrugged and offered me his hand.
I took it, and he pulled me to my feet with very little effort.
His eyes connected with mine and he kept pulling me until we were pressed chest to knee.
“What are we doing, Gunner?” I asked carefully.
His eyes danced as he said, “We’re gonna race.”
Race we did.
Gunner beat me every single time.
The one time I had a chance was when Lottie darted out in front of Gunner and swung at his legs with her baseball glove. He vaulted her like a hurdle and kept running, still managing to beat me even though his daughter tried to take him out.
By the time we were done, both of us panting on the turf with pieces of black track on our sweating bodies, Gunner said, “Maybe now that we’re done racing, we can go eat the cold food in the truck at my place. After that, we’ll put Lottie to bed, and then you can rub down my sore muscles.”
I turned my head to look at him. “If anyone should be doing a rubdown of sore muscles, it should be you doing that for me. You barely even had to try today.”
“I tried,” he argued as he rolled over until he was hovering over me.
“Daddy, catch!”
I saw the ball heading right toward my face—my nose to be specific—but Gunner proved that his baseball skills were still very sharp because he caught the ball before it could make contact with my nose.
I gasped in a shocked breath. “Your daughter’s trying to make me need a new nose job.”
He tapped me on said nose with the ball before pulling himself to his feet, and bringing me with him.
“Lottie, my little Beanie Weenie, we don’t throw balls at people that aren’t lookin’,” he ordered sternly.
“Yes, Daddy.” Lottie had the grace to look contrite.
I tried to wipe off the bits of rubber off my sweaty body, but it proved pointless.
“Daddy, catch?”
“Don’t throw it at her,” I warned. “She can’t catch for shit.”
Gunner’s eyes flicked to me. “You know this?”
“Look at that little red dot on her forehead,” I said. “I tossed it to her lightly earlier, she bobbled it, and managed to smack herself in the face with it three times before it hit the ground. She did it two more times before I realized that rolling it was going to be our answer.”
“Noted.” He rolled the ball to her, then she tossed him a rocket.
He caught it, looked at me with wide eyes, and said, “Holy shit.”
Despite the flirting from earlier, both of us went to our separate rooms when we finished with dinner.
I shifted restlessly in the bed, my gaze going to the alarm clock that I’d had since I was fifteen, and I groaned.
“Shit,” I muttered darkly.
My bedroom door pushed open, and a sexy, half-clothed man filled the doorway.
“You awake?” he asked.
I scooted to the side and said, “Sure am.”
He walked up to me and dropped onto the bed like a tree.
I bounced so high that my body nearly fell right off the other side.
He caught me and pulled me in tight before saying, “You need a bigger bed.”
“It’s perfectly acceptable for a girl that’s my height and weight. Not for over six-foot behemoths like you.”
He turned over onto his side, and despite the darkness making it impossible to see my face, he said, “Thank you for taking care of my girl today.”
I snuggled deeper into my pillow before replying with, “It was a lot of fun.”
He was silent for a long moment before he said, “Think I could get you to do it again tomorrow?”
Eighteen
Sometimes I read a text and think, “what a psycho” and then hit send.
—Sutton to her mom
SUTTON
“Think I could get you to do it again tomorrow?”
I turned over onto my side to look at him. “Of course. What’s going on, though? You said you had a day off tomorrow when you were feeding us dinner.”
He hesitated for a few long seconds before he said, “One of my first hires, Yates, you met him. He has been calling in a lot lately, dropping the ball on the project that I let him lead. He’s been gone more than he’s been there, and I have a really bad feeling about him.”
“What kind of bad feeling?” I wondered.
He scrubbed at his face. “The kind where I think that he’s responsible for some of the leaked information to the Combs.”
My mouth dropped open, and even in the dark, he saw.
“Yeah,” he grumbled. “I know. I wouldn’t have believed it, but today while I was doing his job, I had a lot of time on my hands to do some thinking. And the only person who had any idea of how late I picked Lottie up, besides myself, was him. I remember for a fact that no one else was around, and the old guy they have following me around is easy to spot. He drives a Cyber Truck, for Christ’s sake. He’s hard to miss. So I know that he wasn’t there that day.”