Hooked #3 (The Hooked Romance Series - Book 3) (9 page)

Sometime at around one or two in the afternoon,
after I had run my thoughts into the ground too many times, forcing myself into
a sort of frenzy, my phone began to ring. My eyes widened. I reached for it,
realizing in that moment that I truly didn’t have the strength to avoid him;
that if it
was
him calling, I would answer and give my
entire life to him.

But it wasn’t him. It was the bank.
About the loan.

“Hello, Molly? Molly Atwood?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Right.
Well. We wanted to call and thank you for already paying back that loan. What a
marvelous turn around. This is really going to benefit your credit.”

I raised my eyebrows, turning my head out to the
balcony toward the sun. What? “I’m sorry? Paid back the loan?”

I had received the loan and it sat in my bank
account, waiting for me to do something with it—to create with it. However, I
had to create with the loan before I would be able to make any money to pay it
back. That would be—oh—five years from now.
Maybe a little
more.

“The loan has been paid back to us. Thank you.”

And the bank manager, a bit confused by my words,
hung up the phone. I stood, perturbed. What the hell? Had there been some sort
of mistake? I was continually stressing about paying that loan back; I was
putting serious pressure on myself. Here I was, struggling with the fact that I
had an extra 10,000 dollars in my account—something that I would ultimately
have to pay back with interest.

But now I didn’t have to.

I walked out to the balcony and gazed out at the
city before me. I sat on the ground, watching the cars shuffle past. Boomer
sauntered behind me and started crying at my back. “I know,” I murmured to him
as I scratched his ears and head. “I know.”

I remembered those days, just a few weeks before,
when someone—someone who had ultimately been Drew—had stood on his balcony,
talking about me with Marty. “That girl he had slept with.” I wondered if Drew
was talking about me in that manner, now. “That girl he had taken to Iowa.
For a scandalous vacation and a Jacuzzi fuck.”

I knew it was unhealthy to think this way; I knew it
wasn’t appropriate. But this time, as I sat out on the balcony, I was
completely alone. I heard no voices; I heard nothing that took me away from my
loneliness. I remembered that feeling of waking up beside him, of waking up in
someone’s arms, and I longed for that once more.

I didn’t need money. I didn’t need sex. I simply
needed someone I could call my own—someone who called me his. Because of my situation,
because of my lack of money, because of my lack of—everything, really—I
couldn’t comprehend a time when I would be ripe and ready to be somebody’s
somebody.

My head in my hands, I felt the city collapse around
me in a sea of darkness and little twitters of stars. Tomorrow, I continued to
tell myself—because I was the only voice in my head, the only voice in my
world—was another day.

Part 4
of Hooked comes out February 13
^th

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This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2015 Claire Adams