Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 76381 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76381 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Yeah,” I said, jaw aching from clenching it.
“Are you going to give it back to her?” he asked as I followed him back out into the main room.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If I give it back to her, she will know we were here, and that they are gone. And we don’t know where they went. Which might… set her progress back. But I don’t want to lie to her either.”
“Maybe you can ask her shrink,” Raff said.
I mean, maybe that wouldn’t technically break the therapist/client thing, since I was just asking for advice on how to handle a situation with Vienna.
“Worth a try,” I agreed.
We didn’t find anything else of note in the house, so we made our way back out, frustrated and disappointed.
Me, because I didn’t get my revenge.
Then, I imagine, because we were almost a day out of our way now.
Ten days was a short ass trip for us.
It took, on the low end, forty hours to get from Shady Valley to Golden Glades. But with a third person along for the ride, we were able to do much longer days, each of us driving a solid six hours each, then crashing at a motel for the last six, everyone decompressing.
Still, it was cutting it close, considering we had two gun shows to hit up, and three different meet-ups off of online ads to do as well.
But I’d been the one to put my foot down about not being away for any longer than that. I mean, Vienna hadn’t gone a single night without me since we met. Longer than ten felt impossible.
Even if I felt a little guilty that I was rushing Colter’s first road trip and visit to our sister chapter.
The only thing making me feel slightly less guilty was the talk with Morgaine I’d had before I left. Where she’d insisted that maybe this was a good thing for Vienna. To learn to self-soothe, to feel safe without me literally right there all the time.
And since I was constantly worried about her healing journey, I took those words to heart.
I knew she was safe with my brothers there at the clubhouse. And the girls had promised to spend as much time around as possible, a few of them working out a schedule, so that one of them was always sleeping over in case she needed someone.
And she had Coach to help her decompress if she got too stressed. Not to mention her therapist.
She was going to be okay.
But I was still in a hurry to get back to her.
We hit up one more gun show as we made our way back to Shady Valley. An unplanned stop simply because we’d dumped all of our collected guns off in Golden Glades, and both Raff and Colter had insisted that it would be good to come back to Shady Valley with a fresh stock, that it would allow us not to do another road trip again so soon.
But to make up for that lost time, I insisted we drive all the way through the final day, not rest at a motel as usual.
All I could think about was getting back to her. To seeing her shoot me that smile she worked so hard in therapy to actually mean again. To hear her twinkling laughter as someone said something funny to her. To watch her curl up on literally any seat in the house to read her books. To feel her against me when she needed some comfort. To have her silky hair sift through my fingers.
Fuck, I just wanted to be near her again.
The absence was a pain right under my ribcage that intensified with each passing day apart.
With each mile marker we passed on the way to Shady Valley, I felt the pain start to ease. Until, finally, we were pulling down the main road, and I was barely paying attention to the lights and road signs as my gaze went to the clubhouse, watching it get closer and closer.
Raff or Colter must have told someone that we were in town, because I barely put the car into park before the front door was flying open.
Then she was running out, her copper hair flying out behind her.
If I didn’t already know I had been slowly but surely falling in love with her, I would have known it right then as my heart expanded in my chest.
I rushed out of the car just in time to catch her as she flew up into my arms.
Holding onto her just as tightly as she held onto me, I whirled her in a circle, hearing a little squeal escape her even as I noticed something about her. Something different.
Her scent.
She didn’t smell like the girly shit that Colter and Morgaine had gotten her.
No.
She smelled like my soap.
Like she’d been using it while I’d been gone, wanting my scent all over her to remember me by.