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)
“I got your ticket already,” Catie said after he’d run the gauntlet and emerged mostly alive.
“Thanks. You want extra-buttery popcorn and a lemonade?”
“Yep.”
Ward, the asshole, decided to join him at the concession stand. “You and Catie, huh?” More fake smiling, his mouth full of teeth and his hair a flawless golden blond. “Never saw that coming. She always used to say she didn’t see the appeal.”
Danny figured that “casual” comment was meant to hurt, but it didn’t. Because before this, he hadn’t seen Catie as a possible girlfriend either. She’d just been Catie, who annoyed him. “Guess she changed her mind.”
Keeping it light in the interest of not ruining the night, he said, “How’s it going with you? I saw you hooked up with that radio DJ.” The relationship had been splashed all over the media—funny how Ward’s private life always sprang a leak.
“Oh, that’s over. I’m free and single again.” A biting smile. “Catie’s looking great.”
“She sure is.” And if this wet noodle of a man thought she’d be fooled by his manky ass a second time around, he had another think coming. Holding back the words because he wasn’t about to give Ward the scene he wanted, Danny grabbed a giant tub of popcorn for him and Catie to fight over, two lemonades, then made his way back.
Catie was standing alone. “The others decided to go on up and grab our seats. You know the seat poachers like to try their luck.” She took the tub of popcorn.
Danny decided fuck it with being mature. “Why is Dickwad here?”
She snorted at his alteration of Ward’s name. “Apparently he’s friends with Jen’s new boyfriend.” After a few kernels of popcorn, she said, “Here he comes.”
Thankfully, their tickets put them at either end of the long row.
“I think he was hoping to hook up with you.” Danny scowled.
“Man is dreaming.” She shuddered. “I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot barge pole.”
Grinning, Danny slouched down in his seat. “So, Star Gen or Glory Sky?”
That argument, into which they dragged in both Veni and Jen, took them into the trailers, which they all shut up to watch, in agreement that trailers were to be savored. Ward the Dickwad, of course, was chatting away at the other end. Idiot.
But an idiot who’d lost Catie, leaving her free for Danny to claim.
His stomach did that flip thing again. Claim was a helluva strong word. Not a burn-up-in-a-hot-second kind of word. No, it was the kind of word that meant sticking and was related to other words like forever and commitment.
Exhaling quietly, he reached for the popcorn.
His hand bumped Catie’s.
Instead of play-fighting with her, he picked up her hand and kissed the salty tips of her fingers. She stared at him, her eyes visible in the light from the screen. Had they been in the very back row, he’d have kissed her, but since they weren’t, he smiled and leaned in to whisper, “Round five?”
He felt her jerk… before she whispered back, “Forty minutes to end of movie. Ten to shake everyone off. Twenty to make it to your place.”
His cock pulsed.
Their plans, however, were thwarted by a sudden group enthusiasm for Chinese food after the movie. No way to cut and run without being rude as hell—and also scuppering his chances of winning over her girlfriends.
So it was that Danny had to eat Chinese food while his brain plied him with erotic internal movies of a naked Catie undulating underneath him—or on top of him. He wasn’t fussy, liked her every which way.
But sexual frustration aside, he had a great time. Catie’s friends were good people—hardly surprising, given who she was as a person. And they seemed to like him back, which made him relax in a way that was dangerous for all that it implied. If this was a fleeting thing, then it didn’t matter if Catie’s friends liked him.
It matters now.
After that firm admonition to the part of him that was beginning to panic at the idea of this ending as fast as it had begun, he dug into the food. Laveni, Catie’s BFF since always, had made sure to be seated next to him at the round table, and she asked him several pointed questions under the cover of the conversation.
He managed to wriggle around most of them with responses that betrayed nothing private. But her last one made him realize the other woman had figured out the truth, knew that their relationship was nowhere close to fake.
He went motionless.
“You know she’s wonderful, right?” Veni said, her eyes huge and dark brown in a gently rounded face under a mass of black curls and her skin the same shade as Danny’s.
“Catie,” Veni continued, “drove an hour and a half through heavy rain one night to pick me up after I finally left my abusive shit of a boyfriend and found myself out on the street with a backpack and no money.”