Every Part of You: Takes Me (#5) by Megan Hart Read Free Book Online

pocket and dialed. It only took a minute or two to report a trespasser, and he was promised a patrol car would be by shortly. Calmly, he disconnected the call. “Get out now, before they get here.”
    “What’re they gonna do? They can’t make me leave my own house; you don’t have a restraining order or something like that. I have every right to be here in my own house.”
    “It was never your house! It was always her house! You just came around in between fucking my mother and sleeping on your friends’ couches.” Elliott sneered. “This was Molly’s house. Now it’s mine. And I will take care of her until she dies, because I owe her that. I don’t know what angle you’re playing, old man, but you’re not getting a damned thing from me. Or her.”
    “She wants to come home,” the old man said. Sly. Furtive. Bold enough to lie and think he could get away with it. “She told me so.”
    Elliott closed his eyes against a rush of dizziness. “Molly can’t tell you anything. Even when she can talk, she can’t be held responsible for what she says. And if you cared about her at all, you’d want her to stay where she can be kept comfortable and safe.”
    “I got nowhere to go!” his father shouted. “Okay? I got nothing and no place. They tell you when you get out there are programs, places that will hire you, but a man can’t live right on what they pay there! I can’t get a job without an address. I can’t get an address without a job!”
    “Not my problem.”
    “You’re an ungrateful little son of a bitch, ain’t ya?” His father turned his head and spat an enormous glob of greenish-gray snot onto the floor.
    The chair, out of place. The cupboards left hanging open. The dishes in the sink. The stink of the old man who clearly hadn’t showered. The affront of it, all of it, was nothing compared to the outrage Elliott felt at watching his father spit on the clean floor.
    “Clean that up,” Elliott said carefully.
    The old man’s eyebrows lifted. Deliberately, he hawked back another mouthful and spat it next to the first. “No.”
    Later, Elliott would be unable to remember throwing that first punch. He could’ve blamed the liquor, but the truth was the rage had overtaken him and made him blind. When the cops arrived and pulled him off his father, he looked at the blood on his fists and felt the rising heat of the bruises on his own face from where his father had gone after him with as much zeal as he’d been given. The two of them had been bleeding, knuckles split, lips busted, noses squashed. And all Elliott could say when the cops asked him what had caused the trouble was, “He spit on the floor.”
    He spit on the floor.
    He’d made everything filthy.
    And the bastard still had the gall to laugh when the cops hauled both of them away.
    *   *   *
    There was an advantage to heartbreak, and that was that being unable to sleep and getting up at the ass-crack of dawn meant she had time to do all those things she’d always put off because she didn’t have time. Like lining her drawers with paper and cleaning out dozens of old e-mails and using a toothbrush on the grout of her shower. The last had her biting back a sob, though, since spending that much time and detail cleaning was totally something Elliott would have done, and Simone didn’t want to think about him.
    The problem was, of course, as it always was, that she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
    By the time she had to leave for work, Simone had cleaned everything in her apartment that could be cleaned. Then she’d made some things dirty just to spite herself. She’d also pulled up her resume and fiddled with it while she researched job-hunting sites.
    It had been a productive morning that left her exhausted and ready to crawl back into bed, but she knew better. If she didn’t pick herself up and keep going, she’d spend the rest of the day in there and be unable to sleep tonight. Again.
    Fuck that.
    She showered. She