Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 115833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 579(@200wpm)___ 463(@250wpm)___ 386(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 579(@200wpm)___ 463(@250wpm)___ 386(@300wpm)
I didn’t want to be there, but EJ was my teammate and one of my closest friends, and he’d sent me an invite. Plus, I had nowhere else important to be. If I weren’t at the party, I’d have been at my condo, curled up in bed with all the lights out.
I couldn’t do this party alone, though. I hit up my boy Javier Valdez and told him to join me. He wasn’t fond of parties, and I knew he’d have rather been home with his three-year-old daughter, Aleesa, but it was a Saturday night, and his nanny of the month often kept an eye on her every other weekend. This was one of her on-duty weekends, so he had no excuse to bail.
I looked at Javier, who was frowning, with his arms folded loosely across his chest.
“You can at least pretend you wanna be here,” I said, nudging him with my elbow.
“That is the point. I do not want to be.” His accent was thick as he glared at me with dark eyes.
Javier Valdez was an Argentinean six-foot-five recruit for the team. He’d been popular in his home country, and the NBA had noticed him. The Ravens had signed him four years prior, and he was one of the best centers in the game.
Ever since I’d met him, he’d been a generally serious person who hardly joked around, but we got along pretty well. When his wife died, though, the word serious may as well have become his last name.
He hadn’t been the same since Eloise passed. I could count on one hand how many times I’d seen him smile the past year, and all those smiles had been given to his daughter.
“I would rather be at a bar or something, catching a fútbol game,” Javier went on. “EJ is always inviting weird people to these parties.”
I took a look around as the lights flashed neon colors through EJ’s dumbass fog machine. I didn’t know half these people. The women were half-naked, and the men were desperate for their attention.
A cloud of weed smoke passed my nose, and I smashed my lips together. There were a few other teammates here and some B-list celebrities, who had people with cameras following them around for the perfect photo op.
“We’ll give it ten more minutes, then we’re out. I’ll hit up EJ, let him know we’re about to bounce.”
Javier nodded, satisfied with my response. I unlocked my phone again and shot a text to EJ with our ten-minute countdown, then swiped to the Instagram app.
A photo appeared on my feed of me and Davina standing in front of her work building. At the sight of it, my heartbeat quickened.
I sat up taller and swallowed as I brought the screen closer to my face. In the picture, I was shaking her hand—a sign that we’d closed a new deal. I’d met Davina the morning after our little dinner, just before my flight, and I remembered her hand being soft and delicate in mine and the way her eyelashes fluttered as she peered up at me.
I didn’t know what the hell it was about that woman, but she made my body do weird shit. I mean, she was so simple, and perhaps that’s what it was that I was attracted to. The simplicity.
She had a nice smile, wasn’t too heavy on the makeup, and she was herself. In a world full of bullshit and plastic, it was a nice reprieve to be around a female who was her authentic self. If she didn’t have those rings on her finger, she would’ve already been mine.
I couldn’t believe I’d missed the rings when I first saw her in the office. Or maybe I was just being willfully ignorant. Seeing them at Silver Wolf was a wake-up call that filled me with disappointment. I never would’ve asked her to dinner if I’d known she was married. I could get down with a lot of things, but fooling around with a married woman wasn’t one of them.
I tapped the photo, and her username popped up: thatvinachick. I gave it a tap and a follow, then did something I never did with any other female. I started a message.
You look good in that pic of us. Glad we’re working together.
I hovered over the Send button before giving it a swift tap. I don’t know why I bothered sending it. I guess it felt necessary—like something I needed to do to prove to her how important this opportunity was to me too. She was passionate about her company, and I was glad to help . . . or maybe I was just looking for another reason to talk to her again.
Willfully ignorant.
Despite knowing she was taken, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. It was frustrating as hell. To her, that dinner was probably nothing more than a business transaction, but I’d felt a connection there. I wasn’t tripping. I’d been sure she could feel it, too . . . but she had a man, so that was that.