Page 97 of I Am Sin

She drops her hand from my face and then reaches into her pocket to grab her cell phone. “I’ll call my father. He’ll know what to do.”

All I can do is nod and leave Diana’s room so she can make the call in private. I saunter over to her living room and plant myself on her couch.

A few moments later she comes back out.

“An investigator is coming over,” she says. “He’s going to need to look at your phone. I’ll leave the room if you want me to, but you’re going to need to tell him everything.”

I nod. “Thank you.”

A smile spreads over her face.

“What?” I demand.

She slaps her hand over her mouth. “The smile isn’t because I’m happy you’re going through something difficult. I’m not, Dragon. I can see that you’re hurting, and I don’t like that one bit. But you said thank you.”

With a slow exhale, tension draining from my shoulders, I meet her gaze. “Yeah, I have a hard time with that.”

She crosses the living room and lowers herself onto the love seat. “I know you do. Why?”

I take a deep breath. “I’m not used to people being nice to me. I’m not used to people doing something for me out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s usually because they want something in return.”

Her eyes soften. “Why do you think that?”

I can’t answer that question because someone raised the way Diana was raised will never understand. She was raised with everything she could ever want, with two loving parents who would never think of sending her away.

She was raised with enough money to have everything she desired. Enough food. A life without bullies, without evil, without horror.

“You going to answer me?” she asks.

“I can’t. It’s beyond your comprehension.”

Her hands whip to her hips. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just mean there’s no way you can ever understand why I have a problem with gratitude.” I place my hand over my heart. “It’s not that I don’t feel it.”

She frowns. “You just can’t say it.”

I drop my hand to my side. “Seems that every time I said it in the past, it came back to bite me in the ass. Bite mehardin the ass.”

“I’ll never bite you in the ass.” Her eyes brighten. “Unless you ask me to.”

My cock responds to those words.

And that’s the last thing I need.

This—whatever it is—between Diana and me has to go on the back burner. It needs to be taken off the stove altogether. The phone call… Griffin… I need to find out what it all means.

Damn, I could sure use a fucking drink.

All these years, I assumed Griffin was dead.

She probably is. This could just be some cruel prank.

But no one knows. No one but my parents. My therapist. And Jesse.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she says.

I cross my arms. “Diana, I am no good for you, and we both know it.”

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