Elias (New Adult Romance) (West Bend Saints Book 1) by Sabrina Paige Read Free Book Online

asshole, as my brothers and I called him- brought in our meager income mining on our land, until that went to shit when I was in high school.
    I wasn’t about to bring a girl like her home with me to see my family’s clapboard house, that was for damn sure, even if the asshole wasn't there anymore.
    “Well, we’ve got how much longer until we get to West Bend?” she asked.
    “About an hour or so,” I said.
    “Then you’ve got about an hour or so of a captive audience here,” she said.  “Considering you had your tongue down my throat before, I’d say we’re pretty well acquainted enough for small talk.”  She winked at me, and it made me laugh.
    “All right,” I said.  “What do you want to know?”
    “Who said I wanted to know anything about you?” she asked.  “I’m a fucking movie star, and you don’t want to ask me anything?”
    The same damn words out of someone else’s mouth and they would have sounded stuck up and bitchy and just plain tacky .  But there was this... lightness about everything she said, this playfulness about her.
    I laughed.  "You are full of yourself, aren't you?"
    “Just direct,” she said.  “I don’t see any point in beating around the bush about it.  There’s obviously something worrying you about going home, and you’re clearly man enough to tell me if you don’t want to discuss it.”
    “I don’t want to discuss it,” I said.
    “See how easy that was?”
    "Okay, princess," I said.  "Where'd you grow up?  Hollywood?  You think you're going to be able to hack it in rural America?"
    She looked down for a minute, and I hoped she weren't going to start fucking crying again.  But she didn't, just took a bite of a French fry.  "Golden Willow, Georgia," she said.  "I know small towns.  I think I'll manage just fine."
    "Huh."  I hadn't expected that.
    "Surprised?" she asked, her smile more of a smirk.
    "Didn't expect you were a country girl," I said.
    "Not all of us movie stars grow up rich, you know," she said.  "I wasn't always a princess."
    "You're not really what I expected from an actress."
    "Glad I'm not disappointing," she said, munching on the end of a fry.  "I'd hate to be a cliché."
    I watched as she took a bite of her burger, and she turned toward me, her hazel eyes bright, hair messily sticking up on the ends.  "You're definitely different, River Andrews," I said.  "That's for damned sure."
     
     

 
    “You’re sure this place is discreet?” River asked.  “This is someone you’ve known for a while?”
    “You sound like we’re visiting a whorehouse or something,” I said.  “It’s a bed and breakfast.”
    I deliberately failed to mention that I wasn't friends with the owners, and that people from West Bend may not exactly be particularly happy to see one of the Saint brothers show up, dragging with him a movie star demanding to stay incognito. That’s not the kind of problem you just dumped on people who thought you were the scum of the earth.
    Not that I knew the people running the bed and breakfast anyway.
    Not personally.
    That's not to say we didn't have history, a sordid history.  But I didn't know what else to do with River.  All I could think about was the look that would inevitably cross her face when I brought her home to my house.
    No thanks.  I sure as fuck wasn’t a masochist.
    And I sure as fuck wasn't bringing her home.
    Not to my house.
    Not to my mother.
    Not to my brother.
    "You sure we shouldn't have called first?"  she asked, giving me this weird look.
    "I'm sure it's fine."  I said.  I wasn't.
    River met me on my side of the vehicle.  Her hand went up to my shirt, where the collar would be, her fingers lingering at my neck line.  The way she did it, the way she paused there, reminded me of a scene from an old movie, the way a woman would adjust the tie of a man.
    "Well," she said.  "I'm guessing this is goodbye."  Up on her tiptoes, she touched her lips gently to the side of my face.
    "I'll