Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 65083 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65083 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 325(@200wpm)___ 260(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
I suppress the urge to roll my eyes. “Excuse me,” I say to Gage, and let Scott lead me a few feet away.
His voice is stern. “I can’t have you consorting with people like this.”
“Consorting? Are you serious?” I knew he was concerned—okay, overly concerned—with appearances, but this is ridiculous. “People like what, exactly?”
“We have an image to uphold.”
I take a beat to wrangle my temper under control. “First of all, we’re in Las Vegas, where these people live, and you are a guest. Second, you’re being incredibly rude. And last but definitely not least, you don’t tell me what to do.”
He’s still holding my arm; he drops his hand like I’ve turned rancid. “If one visit to this city is all it takes for you to behave this way, then it seems the woman I thought I knew was only a thin veneer.”
It’s not a good look to wreck your own client’s wedding, so I manage not to punch his lights out. Have I really been that much of a doormat, letting this man dictate my priorities? I suspect the answer is yes, and it shames me.
“It seems the veneer is all you care about,” I tell him coldly.
His eyes turn equally icy. “I’ll see myself back to our room.” He walks out without another word.
Gage comes up beside me. “Are you all right?”
I blow out a breath and look at him. “Yeah. I think I’m mostly mad at myself. How did I end up with that man?”
I’m not expecting an answer; I’m just talking, thinking out loud. It’s as if our fifteen years of separation never happened, and we’re picking up in the middle of a conversation.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gage says. “He’s gone, and you’re here.” He tilts his head toward the dance floor, where a slow song has just started. “Dance with me?”
The emotional ground shifts under my feet. If Kai and I always fought, Gage and I never did. But we’re not kids anymore, and a slow dance with this gorgeous man would open the door to all sorts of danger.
I want to live dangerously.
I’ve spent my time with Scott being careful and safe and proper—always proper. I never let myself see the cage he’d put me in.
No, that’s not right. That I’d put myself in. I made my own choices.
It’s time to change things.
I follow Gage onto the dance floor and go into his arms again. He pulls me close and my nipples go hard against his chest, my pussy clenching with instant lust. Scott never evoked this kind of primitive response.
Closing my eyes, I do my best to eject Scott from my mind and stay in the moment as Gage and I sway to the music. Being pressed against him head to toe is doing strange things to my insides. Not just physical reactions, though my whole body is thrumming with need.
It’s the other changes that are getting to me.
It feels, rather alarmingly, as though Scott was right about one thing: like the person I’ve tried to be for the last fifteen years was never real, and her facade is breaking, cracking apart, falling off of me in big chunks.
If I open my eyes, I imagine I’ll see the pieces littering the floor around us.
“It’s been a long time,” Gage says.
I do open my eyes then, but I look up, into his face. “The longest.”
“I understand why you left; you didn’t have a choice. But it never felt right, you being gone.”
Now it’s my heart growing fault lines. Gage’s words have always held power, because he chooses them carefully and makes them count. “I never wanted to be gone. But once I was, it felt like I couldn’t come back.”
The hand that’s resting against my lower back tightens, as if in reflexive protest. “Why?”
There’s no accusation in his voice, but there is demand of a sort. He needs to know. “It hurt too much. I had to cauterize the wound to survive.”
The look on his face wrecks me. He shakes his head. “I hate that you went through that. We were too young to do anything about it. If we’d been a few years older, we could have gotten our own place, and you could have stayed with us.”
“That would have been amazing.” I huff out a laugh. “And probably a train wreck at least some of the time.”
He smiles. “Yes. But it would have been worth it.”
“Yeah. And in some alternate universe, we did that.” I let out a soft sigh. “In this one, not so much.”
His expression changes. “How long are you here?”
LEXY
I know what the answer should be: I’m just here for the wedding. My flight back home is booked for tomorrow. I didn’t leave any time for this reunion to happen, because I was too afraid of what I’d find.
I was afraid the boys would have grown up and moved on without me, built lives that held no memories of the girl who once lived down the street, and had no room for her return. That they would have gotten over me the way I never could get over them, no matter how I tried.