Yours: A Standalone Contemporary Romance Read Online Free PDF Page B

the adventure, not the myriad ways I’ve found to nearly kill myself. Not the skydiving, or free-climbing cliff faces, not the scuba diving and pearl diving and racing motorcycles and drag racing muscle cars and nearly wrecking a borrowed two and a half million-dollar Bugatti in Monaco, or….  
    Shit, I can’t list all the adventures I’ve had.
    No, it’s none of that.
    It’s the women.
    The way their hair would fall across their faces. Watching Leanne undress in the starlight on the deck of my boat, nothing but ocean for hundreds and thousands of miles in each direction. Pale breasts wet as we tumble naked in the warm midnight surf of a deserted Saint John beach. Waking up in the middle of the night on the Argentinian pampas in a tiny little pup tent and making Luisa scream so loud the fucking wolves answered her. Moonlight on auburn hair and blonde and red and purple—god, Viv was a wildcat, hair dyed purple and white for an upcoming college football game—pale skin and tan and golden and brown and every shade in between. Blue eyes and green and gray and brown.    
    A good way to die, indeed, reliving the best parts of my life, on top of a mountain.
    Except…the pain fades.
    The dizziness subsides.
    I can breathe again, sort of.
    Maybe I’m not going to die here, after all.  
    It takes a few more minutes, but I manage to sit up.
    At which point I realize my companions did indeed keep their word, having gone back down without me.
    This was a real mountaintop experience, let me tell you.
    Hah, I’m so fucking funny.
    But for real, though. It was.  
    But now I’ve got to haul ass and climb down alone and hopefully not die in the process.

    *   *   *

    Beverly Hills, California
    Ten months later

    I didn’t die descending Ojos del Salado . I made it down and managed to hitch a ride with one of the last vehicles leaving the area for the day. The weather was changing fast, so I was lucky I got out in time.
    I spent the rest of the following year making my way slowly up the western coast of South America, then along Central America, and finally North America. I’m home in Beverly Hills two months shy of my thirty-first birthday.  
    I’m only here because I made Mom a promise that I’d be back home for this one, and I do keep my promises.
    It’s boring as fuck.
    I find myself in the “garden”, which is a quaint term for the thousand-square-foot courtyard in the middle of the west wing. The space is exploding with greenery and flowers and palm trees and exotic plants of all sorts. There are benches and little wrought iron tables and chairs dotted here and there in cute little still life scenes.  
    I hate it.
    But it’s where Mom “receives me”, like she’s some goddamn queen or something.  
    “Your mother will receive you in the garden,” Javier says.
    Javier is the butler.  
    Yes, the butler.
    This is why I live alone on a boat, and why I’m usually thousands of miles away. Mom is so fucking pretentious. Cold and iron-hearted since Dad’s death, and I don’t know what she was like before that because I was six when he died. I do remember her smiling more and possibly drinking less, but my memory of childhood before Dad died is negligible.
    She runs his companies with a fist of steel and a mind like a bear-trap lined with razors. Nothing escapes her notice, or her ire. For me, she conjures up a thin façade of sympathy, because of my “condition”, which is yet another reason I live alone on a boat thousands of miles from this fucking estate.
    I’m sitting here, sipping on some ridiculously expensive scotch—which isn’t much better than my beloved Lagavulin, despite costing triple. Waiting. She always makes you wait…because she can.
    I hear her heels on the flagstones behind me. I stand up, preparing to greet her. I endure her stupid faux-European air cheek kisses— muah—muah . Like it means something. Who does that? Everyone in this goddamn city, that’s who.  
    “Hello,