Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65335 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 327(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 218(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65335 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 327(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 218(@300wpm)
Ayana wiggles her brows at me. “Watch this. I’ve been practicing.”
For someone who just had a baby four months ago, Ayana is back to being her petite self. You can hardly tell, aside from the fact that she’s rocking some serious boobage now. Ransom quickly walks over and puts his hands on her hips as Ayana gets set up.
“I think we need to adjust your stance. Like this. Maybe a little bit like this too.” He kisses her, hard and long and lingering, and I’m sure there is tongue involved.
I clear my throat. “Ummm, kay, if you’re both done sucking face, can we go back to talking about how I need to have lunch or dinner with Lennox because I need this? I seriously need this. I’m twenty-three, I don’t have my license yet, and I need to be independent. I’m so tired of public transportation. Please, please, please.”
“You’re going to do fine,” Ayana turns and says over her shoulder. “Just fine. You’ve been practicing for like a year. You’ve got this.”
“Knowing me, I’m going to run the car up on the curb during the parallel park or go the wrong way down a one-way street or…I don’t know. Freaking drive into the side of a building or something.”
“Yarp!” Ransom grunts as he backs off so Ayana can actually focus on golfing instead of trying to score with him. “If that’s a problem, maybe you don’t need to get your driver’s license.”
“Ransom!” Ayana hisses. She’d been teeing up the ball, but now she turns, her hands on her hips, club and all. “No one is going to drive into buildings. Cass is a great driver. Yes?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. Self-doubt? I have plenty of that and a good reason for it. I’ve basically been a walking disaster since I could…well, walk. “The only times I’ve ever had any kind of decent luck, it’s always been after I’ve been with Lennox. Last year, when he kidnapped me by mistake, thinking I was you, and his granny made him buy me fries and cherry pie to make up for it, I won a hundred bucks on a scratch-off ticket a few days later. After we had that picnic and the swan boat ride with all of Ransom’s brothers and his granny as a welcome to the family for you, and you brought me too? I finally got a freaking job, and it was actually the one I wanted!”
Now I’m a marketing master who can sell the shit out of any cookie cutters, and I swear it was good luck. The time after that? I called the radio station and won a gift basket. And the time after that, when we went for lunch with you and Ransom, and Lennox tagged along? I was in an elevator at work, and the thing got stuck, but instead of crashing to our doom, we were saved by some very nice firemen who extracted us just fine. I mean, not that it crashed or anything, but it could have. Elevators are serious shit. They are not to be messed with. Then, when we went to a movie that night, and Lennox tagged along, I got a bonus at work for designing that set of dinosaur cat mashup cookie cutters at work.”
“Sounds like a lot of coincidences,” Ransom cuts in.
“You don’t know that!” I practically shout. “You don’t know how unlucky I am! Nothing has gone right for me in life. Nothing!”
“Hey!” Ayana pouts. “You met me, didn’t you?”
“Okay, nothing besides you. I swear you’re the one thing that stands between me and the ultimate disaster most of the time. You know how unlucky I am. Tell Ransom how my first serious boyfriend was only going out with me because he made a bet with his asshole friends that because I’m blonde and, uh, curvy and—”
“Insanely beautiful, a knockout, a total ten….” Ayana adds.
“That’s too kind of you, but I don’t know. They bet that because I looked like a bimbo, I was one and that I’d sleep with him by the end of the first date. I didn’t, but then they kept making bets, and he kept dating me, and—”
“Sounds like a real asshole,” Ransom grouches as he cracks his knuckles. “Want me to destroy his life with my…uh, bare hands?”
Why do I get the feeling he was going to say considerable skills? Right, probably because I’ve been to his and Ayana’s house many times, and I’ve seen their crazy security, the wild baby monitor they have going on, and one time, when I was going to the bathroom, I snuck down the hall and peeked into Ransom’s office, and there was a crazy amount of tech stuff in there.
I don’t really know much about what Ransom and his family do for a living because Ayana has been super evasive, bordering on secretive about that, but the whole home office that looked like a millionaire’s techy playground leads me to believe they’re into IT or something—some kind of tech. I haven’t really asked, and Ayana hasn’t volunteered. The one time I did ask what Ransom did, she said it was better that I didn’t know, kind of in the same way that I shouldn’t ask questions about her dad’s biker club because sometimes it’s just better if you don’t know things. Not that the club is into anything bad or anything like that. It’s not. It’s just…some people like their privacy, I guess, and I do respect that. Ayana’s been my friend for a long time, so I understand boundaries and unconventional upbringings.