Page 93 of Broken Brothers

“Yeah,” I mumbled, even though I knew only half of that was true.

Morgan seemed to pick up on my hesitation, because he looked at me askance. My attention, though, was taken up by something else.

Normally, I didn’t give a shit about Facebook other than to check it maybe once every blue moon or so. But today, a notification popped up containing a name I hadn’t seen in ages, a name that elicited old memories I thought I had left behind.

“Chance?”

I heard Morgan, but I ignored him. I opened up the friend request to see who it was, thinking that maybe it was a coincidence. Their name was common enough.

But, no, it was definitely them.

“Chance? What’s going on? What haven’t you told me?”

Sarah Hill.

Staring at the grown woman on the screen and the name that had permanently etched itself in my mind ten years ago felt like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Sarah Hill… the name might as well have been what Eve was to Adam.

Sarah Hill had started me entirely on the journey that I was now on, and I didn’t just mean with women. She was the one who made me ashamed to be a Hunt. She was the one who made me feel like I was worthless for being adopted—not because of her, interestingly enough, but because of her rich father.

It seemed like she had never lost her taste for the classy lifestyle, either. She was impeccably dressed in all of the photos, as if every shot required her to look like a model. Her photos had her everywhere from a boat to a skyscraper in Shanghai to swimming off the coast of New Zealand where she had spent the last several years of her life.

But looking at the woman before me… I was stunned. She was beyond hot. She was beyond beautiful. Oh, she was sexy, all right. She had curves that made me feel like twelve years old all over again, but she was never dressed in such a way that anyone could accuse her of being a slut or just a tad too whorish. She looked every bit the part of perfect woman.

Even as I heard Morgan speaking to me, I couldn’t pull myself away from the woman on my phone. This was Sarah Hill? She was great before, but now…

It almost felt too good to be true.

But if there was anyone who was too good for reality, yet lived in it anyways, it was Sarah Hill.

Sure, maybe the emotions of my youth were coloring who she really was. Maybe the rose-petal imagery I had of her from my barely pubescent days remained, and it wasn’t so easy to shake off. Maybe I was seeing her in such a glorious light because I was on such a high from my business and romantic revitalizations.

But anyone who saw what I saw would have to know that this was a real person who was unrealistically beautiful.

And best of all… it slowly came to me what this meant.

Sarah had left me because of what it meant to her father for her to be with someone who wasn’t a purebred billionaire. Sarah had left me not of her own volition, but because of the control of her father. Sarah had even said as much that when she was out of her father’s grasp, she would come to me and we would be together.

Now, suddenly, that dream was feeling an awful lot like reality.

This was…

I couldn’t even put it into words. What it felt like to wait for a full blown decade to get my chance with the dream girl, having all but given up on the dream many years ago… only now it was coming back.

Well, slow down. She just Facebook friend requested you. Seriously, you think because someone sends you a friend request it means you’ve gotten in her pants? Slow your roll, Chance.

Still, for once, I didn’t want to slow my roll. For all that had gone right in the past couple of weeks? It would be counterproductive to slow my roll. Let an immovable object stop my unstoppable roll. Then I would wake up and reassess.

Until then, though?

I happily clicked Accept, thinking of what this would mean for anyone who remembered Sarah Hill. OK, let’s be honest, no one gave a shit about who friended who on Facebook except for desperate people with their desperate target. But right now, all thoughts were fair game.

Only when I put my phone down—and only because I wanted to snap back to reality and save some of the fantasy for later—did I slowly come back to the real world. Claire and I werestill very casual, even if things got complicated from a business perspective. Layla Taylor, the girl who had screwed me over… only to turn out to be controlled by forces she couldn’t escape, was someone I had sympathy for, if not some distance. Sarah Hill was nothing more than a digital bit of information on Facebook.

Right now, realistically, I had one girl I was having sex with regularly. I had another I could be if I decided to go back. And I had a third I fantasized about.

Still, compared to where I stood just a little over a month ago, not too bad.

“What do you mean?”