Dirty Sexy Alphas (Twenty Book Box Set) - Hannah Ford Page 0,101

hoping he had an answer. Some dream he’d wanted to pursue that had been sidelined by the time he spent growing Prestige.

But Landon’s dream had been Prestige. No one builds a company that fast without the passion for it.

“Not sure, truthfully. I’ll be here the next few weeks, to be close to Taryn. Once we go back home, I’ll decide what direction to go.”

Our drinks arrived, then, and Ben picked his up.

“To new beginnings,” he said, holding it out.

As the three of us clinked our glasses together, I couldn’t help but hope he was right.

I wanted this to be a new beginning.

Not just the end of something that Landon had loved—but maybe the beginning of something even better. I decided to say a prayer and believe in miracles.

Chapter 2

That night, I fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. It must’ve been after midnight when a shrill jingle broke the silence, jarring me from sleep.

“Hello?” Landon’s voice was rough in the darkness, the sleep not quite shaken from his tone.

I laid in silence, trying to make out the words on the other side of the line.

He sat up abruptly, so fast it made my heart jump. Something’s wrong.

“Which hospital?”

Now I was sitting, pushing my hair out of my face and pulling the blankets up to cover my bare body. Landon’s face was in shadow, the lights too dim to make out his expression.

Landon breathed out. “I’ll be at the airport in a half hour. Book the earliest flight out.”

And then the phone was off and he was looking at me. “It’s my mom. Something’s wrong and she’s in the hospital. I need to go back home.”

He was out of bed already, tossing his small bag onto the bed. My heart was in my throat as I watched him, a man who never lost control, moving a mile a minute, as close to panic as he’d ever been.

I slipped my shirt back on, walking to him. He was pushing my clothes around on the dresser, looking for his watch, and I put a hand on his arm, stopping him.

“Hey,” I said, and he stilled. “You okay?”

He stared at his bag, his lips pursed. “I screwed up, at the funeral, and I owe her an apology. Things can’t end on that kind of a note. I don’t know if she’s okay. It sounds like it could be a stroke. I need to go back and make things right.”

“I understand.”

He looked up from his bag, the intensity of the emotions in his eyes startling me. “Stay here, okay? Don’t go back to that apartment. If she’s okay, I can be back in a couple of days. I’ll call you after I see her and have a better idea of what needs to be done.”

“Okay,” I said, glancing at the clock. 1:14A.M. “Do you want me to go to the airport with you?”

“No, I’ll take a cab. The keys to the rental are on the table.” He looked up at me, the faintest of smiles on his face. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

I laughed. “That doesn’t eliminate much.”

He kissed me, long and soft before pulling away. “I’ll call you after I see her, okay? Get some sleep. And lock the deadbolt.”

I wanted to smile at his protectiveness, but I was too worried.

Moments later the door clicked shut behind him, I flipped the lock over, then climbed back into the big bed, curling around the warmth where he’d been, just moments before.

I stared at the sliver of starlight between the curtains, knowing there was no way I’d be able to sleep.

I was at my desk the next day, sipping at a mug of coffee and trying not to stare at my phone. Landon’s last text had me distracted.

She’s in for a CT now.

His mom had had some kind of a stroke, though they weren’t sure how serious. He’d been assured that his mom should survive it, but that wasn’t saying much. Some people were never the same after a stroke.

I knew what he was thinking—that if she didn’t recover, he’d hate himself for the rest of his life for the things he’d said to her at the funeral, for the way everything had been left between them.

I wanted to be there for him and instead I was sitting in a lab thousands of miles away, staring at my notebooks. We’d figured out the error in calculations, but that meant redoing ninety percent of our log sheet. The ripple effect of a simple error was giving me