Not The Boy Next Door Anymore: A Second Chance Romance by L.A. Pepper

Author:L.A. Pepper [Pepper, L.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

James

It was the middle of the night, two, three a.m. and there was not a chance I was getting to sleep tonight.

I tossed back the old quilted bedspread that grandma had said her mother made. That was going into the keep box.

In fact, since there was to be no sleep tonight it was going in there right now. I might as well pack up the apartment, starting with the quilt.

I got up wearing my boxer briefs and nothing else, and yanked it off the bed, folding it up less neatly than it deserved and dumping it into an open box.

I had no idea where I was going to keep all this stuff. I lived in a freaking trailer that I’d designed for efficiency in every last square inch of space. Hand built, using every lesson I’d ever learned in carpentry and engineering, sometimes Googled in the middle of a farcical build disaster.

There was no room in that life for my grandma’s old quilts and figurines and bookshelves full of Harlequin romance books.

I cursed under my breath and pulled my jeans on, heading barefoot through the old pre-war apartment with its fancy moldings and high ceilings and giant windows looking out over the street. Selling this apartment could help me get back on my feet and keep moving forward.

India had a buyer for this place. I might not even have to go through the bother of putting it on the market, and if they were valued employees of Joel and Poppy Bradford I had the feeling I could ask for a top of the market price and they would make sure the deal went through.

It could solve all my problems. I’d have enough to keep my bar open for a while. Although I’d still have my lowlife mobster family doing whatever it was they were doing in my basement.

Or I could take India up on her offer and become her kept man, allow her to pay for a much nicer establishment in a much better area and not have to worry about money for the rest of my life.

Now why did that option sit so badly with me?

I prowled on bare feet across the smooth wood plank floors and opened the refrigerator. The light inside illuminated the living room and the old flowered couch where I’d left stacks of my grandma’s old photo books.

I pulled out the container of beef with broccoli and oyster sauce that I’d ordered for dinner from the Chinese restaurant I liked on Broadway and snagged a Heineken, taking them both over to the couch to look through the albums.

They started with black and white photos of ancestors who were gone way before I came around, but then I got to pictures of my mother as a child and the grandfather who had died young of a heart attack, leaving my grandma a widowed single mother with no way to support herself until she managed to go to school to become a legal secretary. Pictures of

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