Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 72669 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72669 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 363(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 242(@300wpm)
I’d compare their hair. Their eyes. Their voice. Their personality. Everything.
And I always found them lacking.
I didn’t think it was fair of me to hold them to standards that they’d never, ever meet.
Nobody was Booth.
That was the bottom line.
And I was destined to be alone.
Bowe, however, didn’t feel the same.
He thought we could work…and he was clearly going to keep trying.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t looking forward to what it meant to have him ‘try’ to win me over.
Something he’d said he’d be doing.
Bowe wasn’t a bad guy.
In fact, he was incredibly attractive.
He was tall, Italian and stacked.
He had black hair, but I preferred brown.
He had deeply tanned skin, I preferred sun kissed.
He had a rich, deep baritone that was smooth like dark chocolate.
What I preferred, though, was deep, husky and rough. The type of voice that always sounded like it’d smoked a pack a day, but had never touched a cigarette in his life.
See, nobody would ever win.
I had what I wanted in my mind and no one else would do.
Nobody but him.
“Hey there,” Bowe said once I entered the main room.
I hid my grimace. Barely.
I smiled congenially at him but made no move towards him.
I wouldn’t be, either.
He took a step forward, my guess, to come to me, but I looked away and didn’t see any other progress.
Mostly because my eyes were trained on a man across the room.
The first time I’d seen those eyes, I’d been enraptured.
They were a rich green that really struck me stupid.
But then you got to the pupil in his left eye, and you never knew what hit you.
He had flecks of brown above and below the pupil in his left eye, which, from a distance, made that one eye look almost like a cat’s eye, with the thin, slit-like pupil.
It was amazing and truly one of a kind.
People used to call him freaky…and maybe to someone else, it would have been.
But to me, it was pure and utter beauty.
Booth stared at me as I stared at him, watching me with those eyes that looked to be ravaged with indecision.
“Fuck,” Mia hissed beside me.
I ignored her and placed the cookies down gently on the first available surface, which happened to be the bumper of the firetruck.
Then I was running, straight past the man that would never measure up, into the arms of the man that everyone would always be compared to.
“Booth,” I breathed, hugging him so tightly that I was sure I was cutting off any and all air flow to his body.
His arms went just as tightly around me, and we hugged for long, long minutes.
“Should we leave them alone?” I heard someone mutter behind us.
I held on tighter.
I didn’t care what anyone else did.
Not a single bit.
A throat cleared behind us, but I didn’t turn around.
Not until I was physically released from Booth’s arms and placed to the side.
“Uh, hi,” I heard.
I turned to see a gorgeous blonde woman standing in the mouth of the fire station.
She looked to be my age, maybe a little younger, and she had a young girl on her hip. A daughter, maybe.
“Hey hubby,” the woman said cheekily, looking back and forth between Booth and I.
My head turned, and the words she’d just said filtered through my head.
Hey, hubby.
My world dimmed, my vision thinning out until all I could see was grey.
The world went on around me as I walked away from the two of them standing next to each other and put one foot in front of the other. I managed to get across the room to the box of cookies I’d set down.
I could do this.
I could do this.
“You should’ve seen him qualify as he ran the obstacle course,” I heard Tai, my best friend’s man, say. “Downy taped him running it. It was like watching Captain America run it. He had the fucking t-shirt on and everything.”
I rolled my eyes.
It probably wasn’t that impressive.
But it was. I watched the video.
I didn’t want to.
But they’d put it on the big screen, and I’d watched the video instead of torturing myself watching Booth and his wife.
Anything was better than that.
***
Hours later, I was trying not to get too drunk in the bar area of Applebee’s.
I had to work tomorrow.
But my head didn’t care.
It was doing what my heart wanted.
Which was to forget.
My eyes caught on the young girl directly in front of me.
She was sitting at a bar sized table with both of her parents, and I guessed to be her boyfriend.
I didn’t know. The guy was weird. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of me all night, either.
“What do you think he’s staring at me for?” I asked my best friend, Mia.
Mia turned to stare at the seventeen-year-old cheerleader across the room from us, then shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you go ask her?”