Irreplaceable (Underneath it All Series: Book Three) (An Alpha Billionaire Romance) Read Online Free PDF Page A

counselor waiting for us in a sterile room, away from the public so they wouldn’t hear our wails. We’d dodged a bullet we weren’t even aware we should have been looking for. My mother, the squirrely cat with nine lives.
    “So, what happened?” I asked breathlessly. “The nurse on the phone didn’t give us too many details-”
    “I was hoping you could tell me,” Donna interrupted, pausing when we turned down yet another corridor. ‘Authorized Personnel Only’ was in big, red letters above the door and she tugged her ID card towards the reader. The doors creaked open automatically and she strode through like a woman on a mission. I noticed how the other nurses went from smiling and friendly to quiet and avoiding eye contact. I’d thought Donna’s vitriol was specific to my mother, but it was pretty clear now that her attitude didn’t discriminate.
    I tried to not marinate on the fact that my mother was in the hands of a tyrant that made everyone scatter like roaches when she entered the room. “You know way more than I do. The last time I saw my mother, she was cozying up to her slimy boyfriend.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the douchebag’s name. Not when the image of him touching Rose was burned into memory. Not when my gut was telling me that he had something to do with my mother being in the hospital.
    Donna finally slowed, but went from full throttle to a complete stop, almost forcing me to collide with her. “Does he drive an old Cadillac? Black and slightly rusted with gleaming rims?”
    “What?” I frowned. Black Cadillac, rusted exterior...that described my mother’s old car to a T, but she’d given it to the bookie to secure her debt. She barely had money for groceries, which meant that her gambling debt fell to me, or I risked some shady ass characters resorting to other means to intimidate and get their cash.
    My throat tightened. Means like, putting her in the hospital.
    Donna’s eerily blue eyes washed over my face and she crossed her arms impatiently. “What do you know?”
    I wanted to tell her everything, but I’d seen enough movies to know that they got it all wrong. In real life, the bookies weren’t buff and darkly attractive, threatening those who owed them money with bodily harm. In real life, they were normal people, drunk off the power of taking advantage of those with less than nothing and zero common sense. They didn’t bother with threats. They just showed up and asked for money and if you didn’t have it, they took collateral and used their fists or a weapon to drive home how serious paying the debt off was.
    I knew this because I’d been home sick when one of my mother’s ‘friends’ had kicked in the door. The chicken noodle soup I’d made for myself had spilled all over my lap. My mother had scurried in, snatching on her robe, her eyes rounding with horror. She’d begged him to come back to the room. That she didn’t want to talk about it in front of ‘the kid’. Not her daughter. Not her kid. The kid . The inconvenience. The unwilling audience when the man who looked just like one of the teachers from school, balding with gentle eyes, punched her in the face.
    He’d walked calmly to the back bedroom and when he returned, he was holding her flat screen TV. He loaded it in his car and disappeared again, reappearing with my mother’s jewelry box tucked under his arm. Before he left, he’d patted me on the head while I sat there, petrified and unmoving.
    He spoke to me directly. “I’ll let you keep the TV in the living room, because I’m a nice man. If I have to come back here, Colleen,  you will regret it.”
    I waited for what felt like an eternity, scared to move until I heard his car leave the driveway. I even counted to a hundred five times in my head before I croaked one word: Mom.
    I couldn’t remember the last time we’d touched, but she let me clean the blood from her lips and nose. I ended up making her soup and we watched daytime