Trickiest Job by Cleo Peitsche Read Free Book Online Page A

from going through the door? Over the years, I managed to channel my anger and indignation into resolve to survive.  
    Warmth starts at my back, shadows my arms as Romeo hovers over me, and I realize he’s wrapped his body around mine.  
    He’s barely touching me, but I feel his strength and power. His confidence feels big enough to envelop me, like a coat I can borrow.
    I tilt my head back. He’s so tall.
    In my whole life, I’ve never looked at a man from this angle. Maybe when I was a kid, but I don’t remember.  
    Even if it happened, it surely wasn’t as intimate as this.
    “Do you want me to open it?” he asks softly, and there’s such tenderness in him. This is the man who pins me down and fucks me and holds my ass open for other men? This is the guy who makes me suck the fat head of his oversized cock while Hawthorne spanks me?  
    But it is. He is. There’s so much more to Romeo than I ever imagined.  
    My fingers tighten on the handle, and I push the door open.  
    It smells like pine, like fresh air. I’m disappointed because I guess on some level I was hoping to catch a whiff of one of Mom’s floral perfumes—the more flowery the better, she claimed. It’s a silly expectation given that the smell faded away years ago.
    But I guess in my mind, my childhood is condensed into just a few memories, and most of them are from before . Before the day my parents walked out of the house and never came back.
    The relocated photos aren’t on the walls. There are a few boxes piled up under the writing desk—a desk that I think was never used for anything other than holding dirty clothes until someone took them away for washing.
    I put one of the boxes atop the desk and remove the lid.
    It’s not the missing framed photos.  
    I’m looking at stacks and stacks of snapshots. With a little gasp, I grab a greedy handful. My fingers can barely stretch around the fat, slippery stack.
    They’re from when Layla and I were small. A vacation at one of the Great Lakes, though I never knew which one, and I can’t tell from the scenery.
    As I flip through, I’m struck by how young my parents were, maybe around Romeo’s age. I shoot a glance his way and see him standing by the door. He doesn’t want to intrude.
    “Do you wanna see a picture of me as a kid?” I ask, because I’m giddy at the discovery.
    I’m sure he’s not interested, but he’s polite, so he comes over. “You really do look like your mother,” he says. “If not for the clothes and the hair, that could be you.”
    There’s no point in arguing, in pointing out that she was much prettier than her photos suggest.
    I spend a few minutes looking through another stack, then allow myself to choose five to take away. I expand that number to ten when I dig a bit deeper and find some photos from the summer before my parents died. I’m not stealing them; there’s a plastic box of memory sticks, and my sister can print as many copies as she wants.
    It’s tempting to take the memory sticks and leave her the photos, but deep down, I feel she has the greater claim on them because she’s been here the last seven years.  
    “Can you hold these for me?” I ask Romeo. “My purse is in the limo.”  
    “Gladly.” He steps forward and takes them, slides them into an inside pocket of his suit jacket. If ever there was a man I would entrust with my most valuable, delicate possessions, it’s Romeo.
    We walk out, and I close the door behind me. The sound it makes feels final.

Chapter 8

    We sit in the kitchen and sip coffee, and Miss Susan talks about some of the things I’ve missed over the years. Cousins married, household employees retired, neighbors divorced. Layla learning to drive.
    “Your grandfather isn’t a natural teacher,” Miss Susan says. She’s careful not to be too critical of him. That much hasn’t changed. “And he refused to pay for lessons, so Jeremiah taught her.”
    “Jeremiah? How is he?”
    “He retired a year ago,”