Free Dirty Sexy Sinner by Carly Phillips & Erika Wilde Page A

“They’re not going to ignore you forever, and I think they just need some time to come around.”
    She sounded so optimistic that he decided to remain hopeful, as well. He had nothing left to lose. “I suppose time is the one thing I have plenty of.”
    “Exactly,” she agreed with a bright smile as she stood, then looked down at her hands with a grimace. “I need to wash my sticky fingers before we go.”
    He watched her walk down a short hallway, his gaze drawn to the sensual sway of her hips and that pert ass he knew would be a distinct part of his fantasies when he went to bed tonight. Once she disappeared into a side door, he collected their empty paper cups and threw all of their trash away, then waited for her to return.
    As he stood there, he realized that over the course of their conversation, that constricting feeling in his chest that he’d been carrying around the past few weeks, since he’d learned of his illegal adoption, had decreased. It no longer felt like a crushing weight, and even some of his anger toward the situation had abated. He wasn’t a guy who was big on spilling his guts and airing dirty laundry, but then again, he’d never had someone who’d been so focused on him and genuinely interested in what he had to say that wasn’t work-related.
    In an hour’s time in Tara’s company, he’d given her more insight into his past, had revealed insecurities he’d carried around with him for most of his life, and laid out the entire foundation of his not-so-great childhood. Trusting someone didn’t come quickly or easily for him, yet he’d let his barriers slip with her, had shared deeply emotional things with Tara that he’d never even told his ex-wife because she’d never asked. And he’d never offered because a part of him feared she’d find him lacking, just as his father had.
    And fuck if that hadn’t happened anyway. In the end, he’d realized that Collette had her own agenda when it came to their marriage. She’d been enamored with his wealth, his success, and his social connections in Chicago. After two short years of marriage, everything had lost its luster, including him.
    But there was something about Tara that got him , in a way that no one else ever had. Maybe it was her connection to the Kincaid brothers and being privy to their turbulent past that made it easy for her to understand all the pain and grief their birth mother had caused, for his siblings, and for him, each in different ways. Or maybe it was those secrets of her own that he’d glimpsed that allowed Tara to relate so well to his predicament.
    Whatever the reason, he wasn’t ready to let her go just yet.

Chapter Five

    T ara let the cool water rush over her hands as she glanced up at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, thinking how so much of what Jackson had revealed about himself had resonated with her. She might not have been illegally adopted, but her childhood had been equally rocky, and it had led to an addiction to drugs as a way to escape the pain of never being able to live up to her parents’—her father’s especially—expectations. Learning of their daughter’s substance abuse had only compounded their disgrace and shame and condemnation, which in turn had given Tara even more of a reason to keep those opiates in her system to numb her upheaval of emotions.
    Instead of getting her the help she desperately needed, they’d kicked her out of the house and cut her off completely, because her strict, hard-ass of a father had zero tolerance for disobedience and no patience for mistakes or a lapse in judgment. And her mother . . . well, she’d been too timid and meek to contradict her husband’s orders. Even when Tara and her boyfriend at the time had ended up in the hospital for an overdose, and Michael had died of cardiac arrest that morning as a result of their excessive bingeing, her parents had never acknowledged her near-death experience.
    There had been no one to console her