Page 12 of Every Broken Promise
“Augh! Why can’t anyone around here call me Ak?” he said good-naturedly.
I looked at him blankly because I was not going to call him that.
Adam took another big gulp of my drink and then made a show of sighing as he set it back down.
“Thank you, darling. I really needed a pick-me-up.”
I rolled my eyes and decided to call it a loss.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
My stomach dipped.
“Come on. Give me the price,” I insisted.
Adam leaned on the counter with both hands and gave me a once-over. This time, it wasn’t flirty like before. Adam was a manwhore, and everyone knew a leopard didn’t change its spots overnight. Growing up with the Kane brothers, there were three things I could count on. One was that Ezekiel Kane put the B in brooding. Two was that Adam would always be in the middle of girl drama, and three—well, three proved to be wrong. The third thing used to be that Tyler Kane would always be there for me.
“Astrid, you’re family.”
“I’m not,” I corrected him right away.
This made him smile.
“You’re like a little sister. I can’t charge my little sister.”
I glared at him.
“Besides,Tylenolwould kill me if I charged you.”
There was no privacy in this damn place.
“You’re going to pay for this,” I warned him, which was ironic to say this since I wasn’t paying for shit right now.
The asshole just took another slurp of my used-to-be drink. Shaking my head, I marched back to my car.
“Remember to be back in three months!” Adam yelled after me.
I had been back less than twenty-four hours, and I already felt exhausted.
The next morning,I was exhausted. You know, when you replay a fight over and over in your head, and then you make up even more scenarios and have complete conversation breakdowns of what to do for each one of them? Yeah, that happened.
Completely normal stuff, right?
It was the journalist in me.
I told myself it was just the nerves of a new job and not because I was feeling remorseful over yesterday’s actions.
“Stop behaving like a bitch, Astrid. That’s not who you are.”
Never in our twelve years of friendship didheever call me a bitch, not even playing around. The Kane brothers might have lost their momma young, but Mr. Kane did a fine job with them. You did not call women bitches even if you were playing around. That just opened the door to other forms of disrespect.
“Stupid asshole,” I mumbled as I got up.
My first day of work would have been better if I had a coffee shop I could stop by.The Willow Grove Heraldwas in Willow Grove, and going to that quirky little coffee shop in Sunny Pines would have made me late. I did not have an extra twenty minutes to spare.
I walked out the door at the same time as our next-door neighbor did. I had to do a double take because I knew everyone in this town, but she was someone I had never seen before. If it weren’t for her fancy car sitting in her driveway, the designer clothing would have been a dead giveaway that she wasn’t from around here.
