Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
The last thing I needed to do was to get sentimental over some random chick I was never going to see again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rynn
“Rynn!” Josie, my best friend slash employee slash right-hand-girl slash my voice of reason hissed as I sat in front of her desk, legs kicked up on the edge, sipping a much-needed Big Gulp of soda. One of my—admittedly, many—vices.
“Oh, come on. Fucking a guy against an abandoned building is hardly even the most shocking thing I have ever done.” I mean, were we forgetting that time I went streaking through a casino to draw the cameras and security guys in my direction so they never suspected why I had really been in their establishment? Men tended to lose all their common sense at the sight of a little T&A.
“You don’t even know his name!” Josie insisted.
Josie was the antithesis to me.
Where I was tall and bottom-heavy, she was short and sporting a rack men would cry over and dedicate sonnets to. Where I was dark-haired and allergic to all things color, she was a strawberry blonde who loved bright, feminine shades. Where I was often uninhibited, brash, and bold, she was straight-laced, shy, and careful.
We made a great team.
But I was ninety percent sure that if she started to go gray before the appropriate age, every single silver strand would be thanks to me.
That was what I brought to a friendship.
Stress.
But a fuckton of fun stories.
And the absolute best places to eat and drink.
Not that Josie indulged much in booze, but when she did occasionally let loose over bottomless cherry-lime margs and chips and salsa, she always enjoyed some story of my antics from before her time.
She’d only come into my life two years before. And let’s just say that there was a lot of debauchery in the years prior to that.
It was hard to believe it had been such a short partnership. I didn’t know how the hell I’d functioned without her in my life.
Josie was the much-needed tether that kept me from being swept away with any random bad idea.
“Yeah, that was a little unlike me,” I admitted.
I mean, no. I wasn’t someone who held themselves back from enjoying adult glandular-to-glandular contact. I had no shame when it came to my sexuality. That said, yeah, I did always know the names of my partners. In fact, because I was busy and didn’t have a lot of patience with finding partners, I usually ended up having friends-with-benefits situations. I had two previous boyfriends that I always go back to when I needed a quick tour of the sheets. It made life easier that way.
“Did he catch your name?” Josie asked, still hung up on the name thing.
“No,” I admitted. “He did ask,” I clarified.
“And you didn’t tell him?”
“Josie, I jumped on his bike and implicated him in my crime,” I reminded her. “The last thing I need is for him to actually know who I am, and have him coming around and asking questions.”
“I guess that’s true,” she agreed, looking a little crestfallen.
Josie was of the hopeless romantic class of people.
She cried over rom-coms and those really dramatic, drawn-out-over-ten-seasons love stories on TV. She always had a romance novel in her top desk drawer since her job didn’t require a lot of her during the day.
I knew that she had her heart set on a happily-ever-after of her own. And, because she loved me, one for me as well.
Even if I was decidedly less romantic.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I had some love stories I enjoyed. Gomez and Morticia were couple goals if I’d ever seen them. But I’d just… never been in love, y’know? And if you reach the old age of twenty-six without ever being in love—even young, puppy love as a teen—you start to question if it really exists at all, or if it was just something novelists, producers, and poets all made up out of some sincere wish that it were real.
So, yeah, I wasn’t planning on some man to sweep me off my feet.
And my version of a happily-ever-after was me on the balcony of my penthouse with a margarita in my hand, watching the sunset after a long day of doing something mildly crazy, and not having to work anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my job. I just didn’t want to do it forever. And since a lot of what I did relied on using my physical appearance as bait or a distraction, I understood that there was a clock on how long I could do it anyway. I figured I had until my mid-thirties to build my nest egg.
I mean, sure, I planned to be a banging hot old lady in the nursing home, but let’s face it… guys are nothing if not predictable. The second they spotted a set of crow’s feet, they were looking for someone more perky and bouncy and not at you anymore.