Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
“Sure.” Hormones out of whack or not, she wasn’t about to turn down his cooking. “Let me get changed.”
“Is that normal?” he said when she walked out in jeans and a simple black sweatshirt.
“What?”
“Designers just pawing at you?” He was chopping herbs as he spoke; that meant they’d officially cleared all fresh produce out of the fridge.
“Danny,” Catie said with exaggerated patience, “your brother is an underwear model, and you front a campaign for athletic gear. You know exactly what designers are like.”
“Yeah, but no one’s talking about my boobs.”
“I’d be worried if they were.”
After shooting her a glare, he put the egg mixture into the pan and began to stir, and she realized they were having herb-scrambled eggs. Yum, she thought as she put in the toast. Which gave her the opportunity to not look at Danny’s gorgeous body. It was just a body. One she’d seen plenty of times before.
Only today it was making things inside her go zing!
“Seriously though,” she said, determined to keep things normal, “that really bothered you? To Jet, I’m nothing but a living hanger to showcase his work.”
“I mean… maybe if he was a woman it wouldn’t have, but that was a dude and he had his hands all over you.”
Catie didn’t quite know how to take that, and though she and Danny had never been less than blunt with each other, she was feeling off-balance enough as it was; she decided to sidestep it. “On another topic, have you seen the comments and likes on my post from last night? I think we broke the internet.”
Instead of the scowl she was expecting, he shot her a wicked grin. “We’re just getting started.” He held out a fisted hand.
Laughing, she bumped it, and if she felt a flash of heat on her cheeks from the small contact, well, she could ignore it. Her relationship with the Esera family was too precious to her to risk screwing it up by actually acting on this unexpected physical spark.
It would pass the minute they were back in the normal world.
* * *
Danny was seriously glad to get out of the apartment after breakfast even if it was into a frozen white world with air crisp enough to burn. It was hell being around Catie when his body had decided to go off the rails where she was concerned. It had taken everything he had not to reach out and run his fingers over the sleek lines of her abs, the silk of her skin taut over muscle she’d worked hard to build.
Again, he thought about calling one of his brothers. Again, he put it off.
The front desk attendant at the hotel gave him his abandoned tux with a smile, too well trained to ask any questions. The same couldn’t be said of the two teenage girls who were heading into the restaurant for breakfast with their family. They squealed when they saw him, then ran over to ask for a selfie.
Danny didn’t usually mind this kind of thing—he knew it was because of his current age and place in the sporting world—but the girls were also gushing about him and Catie, and it was just not what he needed to hear right then. But he wasn’t about to ruin their day because of his own issues; he posed for the selfie with a smile, then made his excuses and left.
The taxi he’d hired was still idling outside, and he got into its warm privacy with a sigh of thanks. That little interaction, he knew, was just the start. The New Zealand public and media weren’t as voracious as in other parts of the world, so it was unlikely he and Catie would be jumped by a photographer hiding in the bushes, but the interview requests had already begun to hit.
And given both his and Catie’s international profiles, some foreign press—or local photographers who sold to international press outlets—might decide it worth their while to stake them out in an attempt to get a lucrative shot. They’d be aiming for one that caught an intimate moment. Ugh. His sister-in-law, Charlotte, had a best friend who was married to a rock star. Some creepy fuck had actually put a camera in their hotel room, then sold the video!
He didn’t have that high of a profile or that type of tabloid interest in his life, but it had definitely taught him to be wary. He’d have to be doubly so now that he was with Catie. If that took booking future hotel rooms under a pseudonym, so be it.
He’d rather be paranoid than risk people hurting Catie by taking away her choice in what she wanted to share and what she didn’t. Like with her prostheses. She took them off at the children’s camp all the time when she gave talks to the kids. Never once, however, had she posted social media shots of herself without her prostheses.