Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 186(@300wpm)
“You shouldn’t have snooped.”
“Well, I’m all spanked out right now, Jamie, so why don’t you tell me something?”
He stops whisking, putting the bowl down. When he rests his hands on the table, every muscle in his bare arms bulge. His chest swells. I keep my hands under the bar, where he can’t see them, so he can’t catch me fidgeting. “You’re so, so fiery.”
“And you’re so, so bad,” I counter, remembering how he looked when I said that last night.
“If you really want to know, ask,” he grunts, turning his back to me and switching on the gas stove.
“What is The Answer?” I ask as I look at his turned back, thick with layer upon layer of powerful muscle.
“Some shit went down as I was a kid. Jack—the man you saw in the photo—was sort of a father figure to me because of the aforementioned shit.”
“Very specific.”
He turns and glares at me. His blue eyes have effects on me they’ve got no right to. “I won’t tear open my chest and give you my heart on a platter. I’ll tell you about my work. I’ll tell you what led there. I’ll even tell you about the wallet, even if it makes you hate me, but not before. Not the flames.”
Before I can respond, he turns his back, almost as if he regrets saying anything. He pours the eggs into the pan and moves them around almost aggressively with a spatula—the flames. I want to know everything about him, especially when my body is still sore from our closeness, but I must pick my battles.
“Okay, Jamie. I understand.”
His back shifts up and down as he sighs. “After everything that went down, Jack wanted to teach me how to defend myself. He taught me how to shoot, hunt, and fight. I enlisted in the Navy at eighteen and became a SEAL. Those skills helped when Jack found his new gig.”
“Helping people for money?” I ask.
Jamie glances at me over his shoulder. “Yeah, but not how you think of helping.”
“Maybe I’m not as naïve as you think. Let me guess. You did bad things to bad people.”
“There was an underworld growing,” Jamie says, adjusting the heat on the stove and returning to me. He seems calmer now that he knows I won’t ask about the flames. That must involve his mom. He hasn’t mentioned her. “Ex-soldiers, law enforcement, vigilantes who were communicating via the internet. I never got involved, but Jack was in deep. It was how he made his living. Eventually, it turned from a loose collection of people to the website you tried to login into. After I retired from the SEALs, I joined up.”
“But who pays for this?” I ask. “I can’t imagine people spending…” I look around his huge apartment. “That much for people to make the world a better place.”
“Some might call that pessimistic.”
“Some might call it realistic,” I counter.
“In the beginning, it was small-time jobs. A thousand bucks here. A thousand bucks there. Mostly regular folks who couldn’t go to the police. These were intimidation jobs. Then Jack found some… unorthodox philanthropists. That’s what he always called them. Basically, they were rich people who were tired of their cities turning into hellholes. Now, people can pay via the website. Everybody is anonymous, but I know we have several millionaires on there, and I suspect a few billionaires, too.”
I sit back, my head spinning. “This is crazy.”
Jamie shrugs. “I thought the same, but when I do the work, I get the pay. I vet every single job. Every time, they’ve been scumbags.”
“Have you…” I swallow. “Killed anyone?”
He turns back to the eggs, angrily pounding them. “I was deployed in combat twice, once for a double. That’s eighteen months in total. Of course, I’ve killed people.”
He says it so casually. I’ve had to think about whether I could do something like that before. When we were robbed, or assholes in the neighborhood ran around the house, banging the windows and scaring us like it was a sport. I was never sure if I could.
“How many?” I ask.
He turns off the stove, leaves the eggs on, and stirs them again. “Overseas or here?”
My heart is pounding so hard. Did Mom know any of this? This is the same man who was spanking my belly recently, whose manhood was pushed against my clit, ready to take me. “Both.”
“It’s difficult to say overseas. Firefights are hectic. Seven for sure, and possibly more. Maybe five or six more. At home, eleven.”
So that means I’m talking to a man who’s possibly killed almost twenty-five people. He’s talking about it as though we’re discussing a sports team he’s not even interested in.
“And every one deserved it,” he grunts, walking to the cupboard, taking out a plate. Demon pads into the kitchen, pausing, ears flopping as he looks from Jamie to me and back again. I almost expect him to open his mouth and ask, Why are you up? “Morning, boy.” Jamie puts a plate in front of me, then grabs another. “So now you know, Lena. I’m a bogeyman. I’m a man who’s become rich from killing, threatening, and stealing. Do you want to run?”