Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 250(@200wpm)___ 200(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49943 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 250(@200wpm)___ 200(@250wpm)___ 166(@300wpm)
I chewed and then shoved another bite in my mouth. Cheese dripped down my chin and I didn’t care. I muffled my groan this time but let my head fall back as I chewed the most delicious pizza on God’s green earth.
Then I hit a bite with prosciutto. And holy—
It wasn’t just salty processed meat like I was used to—there were so many flavors in that one little slice of heaven.
I took another bite, and another. And my stomach didn’t revolt. In fact, I’d never felt hungrier. After I finished the slice, devouring the soft, luscious crust and licking the oil from my fingers, I closed my eyes and sat basking in the sun.
For one brief but solid moment, I felt at peace all the way down to my center.
“Jesus, I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”
I frowned as my sun was blocked and I opened my eyes.
Milo was standing over me, and he did not look happy. “What were you thinking, leaving the apartment alone?”
I frowned and sat up, putting my plate on the tile beside me. “I told you in the note. I’m out for a walk. I didn’t think I was a prisoner.”
Milo breathed out hard. “You aren’t. But still, you should have one of us with you.”
Considering I’d just felt the first bit of peace in forever, he was pissing me off. “So you are my warden?”
“Fuck, Hope, no, that’s not what I meant.” He huffed out a breath as he picked up the empty plate and sat down beside me. Then he did a double-take at the plate. “You ate?”
“I was feeling good so I decided to take a walk.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Which I am perfectly free to do anytime I damn please.”
He held his hands up. “Okay, but why not take me with you?”
“Sometimes maybe I need some space!” I exploded. “All of this—” I gestured around but then my hand fell to my stomach and I lost some of my steam. He was bringing me back to reality and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. “It’s a lot sometimes, okay? I’m gonna need space to myself.”
He frowned. “Janus and Leander won’t like it.”
“Well, maybe I don’t always give a fuck what they like or don’t like,” I said vehemently.
Milo’s eyebrows went up at me, cursing. I was usually such a good little girl for them. Well, screw that. They would all run roughshod over me if I didn’t stand up for what I wanted. What I needed.
“They’re just protective,” he said, quieter. “We all are.”
I harrumphed and didn’t give him a response. Instead, I looked away from him and people watched the hubbub around the piazza.
He was quiet for a time and that was fine by me. I was happy to just drink in the sunshine.
“Did I ever tell you how we all met?” Milo asked, surprising me. None of them ever talked about the past, so I’d taken it as off limits.
I turned to look at him. “You met on the set of Who’s Counting Now?, right?”
He nodded. “I was older than them. On the show I was just the neighbor kid who’d come over sometimes to babysit. Comic relief.”
“You were good.”
He laughed and made a face. “No, I wasn’t.”
“For a kid, you were.”
He shrugged. “Sure, I could spit back lines and ham it up a little for the cameras, but it was never gonna go beyond kid tv show stuff. I was fine with that.”
“So you all got to be friends, right? And then your mom adopted them when their parents died?”
He looked at me sideways. “That was the story Mom spun for the tabloids, sure. But I was nine, and they were four. We were hardly friends. I thought they were annoying. But Mom was the ultimate stage mom. And she saw the writing on the wall with me. I was getting tall and awkward, aging out of the prime kid star roles. She loved being on set, even on days I didn’t have scenes. She’d help out with the twins in between scenes, so no one complained about it.
“It helped her case when she petitioned for custody after their parents died. There was no one else. Just one grandparent so old he had to be on oxygen all the time—hardly a candidate to chase after two rambunctious four-year-old boys. And there was my mom, ready, willing, and swearing she already loved the boys and they loved her.”
I blinked, totally immersed in the story he was telling. This was nothing like the sanitary publicized version of events.
“So they gave them to her, just like that?”
Milo shrugged. “It was Hollywood in the late nineties. There was plenty of B-roll of the twins with Mom. And she could put on such a good show in public.”
My stomach soured. “A good show?”