Twenty-three-year-old Riley Eames is still haunted by the heartbreak from three years ago. After the unexpected encounter with rising Hollywood star Ashe Hunter, will she finally open up or will her heart stay tormented by the past?
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After bei...
The events in this 2-part short story happen after the chapter, DENIAL AIN'T JUST A RIVER IN EGYPT. So if you haven't read it yet, go and read it and come back.
I published this on Wattpad last year as a separate book and decided to include it here in the Loving Ashe book because people who hadn't read Loving Ashe would read it first and there went the spoiler. So if it sounds familiar, it probably is because you read Barbed Wire the first time I posted it.
Oh, and my total inspiration for Gareth is Devin Paisley :)
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: I know he's not a popular guy, but sometimes even the unpopular guy wants to have his say, and here, he gets his time in the spotlight. This short story is a major spoiler and may also be triggering (cheating) and polarizing - so you've been warned.
This is written from Gareth Roman's point of view so the tone is so much different from Riley's point of view. Please remember that there are 2 parts.
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He shouldn't be there. He knows it's the worst thing he could do, but he has to know.
He has to know that she had nothing to do with it. That it wasn't her idea of a cruel joke to move her baby sister out of the apartment that she had shared with him three years ago, leaving her with only a mattress and $20,000 in cash to help set her up elsewhere. He wants to know that if it was her idea, it had never been her intention to lead her baby sister to spend all that money on heroin that would almost kill her.
For his peace of mind - which he knows is quite a rare thing for him these past five years - he has to know.
And that's why he's standing in front of a $7 million three-story brownstone with an English basement and its separate entrance to the lower left of him as he's at the top of the steps, waiting for someone to open the door. He knows its worth. He's checked.
The door opens and she's standing there, her eyes widening as she registers who he is, before frowning as if wondering what he's doing there. She's wearing a sleeveless dress that hugs her at the waist. His eyes move down to follow the curve of her skirt as it flares along her hips, reaching just below her knees. He realizes how he misses the sight of a woman in a dress instead of the majority of the yoga pants-wearing lot of them. Maybe deep inside he's just old-fashioned, he muses then, a funny thing to call someone who's screwed half of the female population with a pulse. Or maybe he's just sick of the yoga pants craze that's been going for years.
