Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 135847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 679(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 679(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Yes. When he wanted to be, he was just that charming.
This would normally sound good, no, great…and it was. For the interview.
What had me tripping was because I’d poked around in his love life, and although I wasn’t fond of the playful smile he’d had on his face when he looked right at me while he spoke, the bombshell he landed couldn’t be missed.
This happened when he’d said, “I like women with initiative and intelligence and courage. I like women who know who they are and what they want, and they don’t go in for any status quo. I like women who have scruples and believe in something. I like women who can stand up for themselves and what they think is right. And right now, I seem to be into blondes with light blue eyes. Though I enjoy companionship, that’s all it’ll be. I’ll never get married.”
He’d offered it, and I’d be shit at my job if I hadn’t jumped on it.
So I did.
“You never intend to get married?” I asked.
“Nope,” he answered.
“Is it an issue with the concept of marriage, perhaps religious, or the government’s involvement?”
“None of those. I’m just not the marrying type.”
“So you simply wish to remain unattached,” I surmised, though my inference was clear.
Unattached meant he would always be open to playing the field.
“No. I’m busy. I’ve always been busy. I’ll always be busy. And the manner in which I’m busy isn’t a typical kind of busy. My day starts at six, or earlier, and it could end at three in the morning because I need to be on a call to Tokyo. When you’re never in one place for longer than a couple of weeks, and usually it’s a lot less than that, it makes commitment difficult. And for me, that’s not going to change. You can’t force your partner to give up what they might want in their life to follow you around. You can’t force your spouse, who went into it with you to belong in a partnership, to be the only one holding up their end of the deal because you’ve got your mind on a hundred different things, and she’s only one of them. I have change I want to make, and that requires dedication. You can’t marry a woman when you’re already married to a mission. I’ll not put a woman through that.”
“You’re only thirty, Hale,” I noted. “That’s a long time to stick with ‘never.’”
There was steel in his tone when he replied, “Maybe so, Elsa, but I know who I am. I know what I want to do. And I know what I don’t want. As such, I know my mind is not going to change. Not about this.”
Another very handsome, very famous man made this same assertion: George Clooney. And then he’d found Amal.
I knew this. I knew I should remark on it.
I was too flustered by learning this about Hale to do it.
So not only had I blown that part of the interview, I had to take time to reflect on why I did. Why Hale asserting he was never going to commit to a woman threw me so off balance.
I was thinking these things while scrolling through some stills Zoey took of us for marketing purposes, doing this not seeing them, when Chuck announced, “We’re packed. Headed out.”
I looked to him. “We still on for tomorrow at ten?”
We had to put the interview together. We also had to move out of the space in Brooklyn to the one in Manhattan. This we would do starting at ten tomorrow.
“Yup,” Chuck agreed.
“Drop the raw on the cloud. I’ll get to work on it this afternoon,” I told him.
“Gotcha,” he replied as he and Zoey disappeared around the glossy wood paneling at the main elevator to get to the back, which housed the much larger freight elevator.
“Want me to call a Lyft?” Fliss asked.
I nodded to her.
And then my world tilted on its axis.
It started when Hale leaned on the back of one of his sofas, arms crossed on his chest, legs stretched in front of him, and he inquired, “What time do you want me to pick you up tonight?”
“Ummmmmm…” Fliss hummed loudly…and weirdly.
“Sorry?” I asked Hale, confused.
“For dinner at your parents’,” he explained.
I stared at him.
Then I looked to Felicity.
She had straight, black hair that fell well past her shoulders, ragged bangs cut close to her hairline, an eyeliner wing that would force most makeup TikTokers to weep with envy, and not an inch of her skin, except her neck and face, was not tattooed.
And right now, telltale pink was staining her intentionally very-pale cheeks.
“While I was working on Hale, after he told me he was free, I kinda shared, you know, that it’d be super cool if he played your fake boyfriend tonight for that family dinner that Oskar is going to be at,” she confessed.