Total pages in book: 238
Estimated words: 231781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1159(@200wpm)___ 927(@250wpm)___ 773(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 231781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1159(@200wpm)___ 927(@250wpm)___ 773(@300wpm)
I halt, looking around. The other cars are gone, and I don’t see Michael or the other woman.
“Hi.” I walk toward my car hesitantly. “I didn’t mean any harm. I was just looking around.”
They appeared to own the property now, and I guess I was trespassing?
But she just gives me a small smile. “You’re Emory Scott.”
I pinch my brows together.
“I recognize you from a photo I saw once,” she explains.
“And you are?”
“Alex Palmer.” She crosses her legs, leaning back on a hand. “A friend of Will Grayson’s.”
I tense, dropping my eyes down her form and taking in the fact that no man has “friends” who look like that.
“I saw that,” she teased.
“What?”
“That little…eyes-falling-down-my body-to inspect-the-competition-with-a-side-of-judgment look,” she said, rolling her neck with attitude.
Competition? Is that what she is?
I chuckle, digging in my pocket for my keys as I walk for the driver’s side door. “I wasn’t looking at you like that.”
“Checking me out, then?”
“Yeah.” I unlock the door and open it. “That’s it.”
“You back in town for good?”
“No.”
“Just visiting?”
“Yes.”
“And you stopped by the Cove?” she presses. “Why?”
“None of your business.” I stand inside the door, staring at her. “Would you get off my car?”
I mean, how nosy.
“I need a ride,” she tells me. “If you don’t mind.”
I pause. “Excuse me?”
“A lift?” she clarifies as if I’m dumb.
“I’m not a taxi,” I retort.
And… I don’t know you.
“Saucy,” she teases. “He was right about you.”
He? Will told her I was saucy?
Well, if that’s the worst thing he said, I suppose I’m lucky.
I open my mouth, dying to ask about him.
Is he in town? Is he okay?
Is he happy?
But I clamp it shut again, knowing she’s his friend, not mine.
Hopping off my hood, she hangs over the door, peering up at me. “You give me a ride, and I’ll pay for the pizza and margaritas,” she says.
Pizza and margaritas… Is she kidding?
“What do you want with me?” I ask.
She doesn’t know me, and I don’t for one second believe this is anything but a trick.
But then again…the only thing I believe about people is their worst, so...
“I don’t know,” she tells me, her voice softening. “But do you ever have that feeling that you need something, but you just don’t know what?”
She looks at me, a thoughtful look in her eyes.
“Like a drink or a good cry or to jump on a plane and see something new?” she continues. “But then none of those things are it, and you still can’t figure out what it is you need?”
Her words resonate with me more than she knows. The only difference is I know what I need. I just can’t have it.
“Well, when I saw you inside the park just before,” she tells me, “—and recognized you—I felt like we’d found it.”
We?
Why would she need me?
“Sticks is still the place to be,” she sing-songs. “The best pizza.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Not there. I don’t want…”
“To be seen?”
Pizza sounds good. And lots of margaritas sounds fantastic. My lonely hotel room back in the city seems dreadful now, but…
“I just don’t want to run into anyone,” I tell her. “Thanks, though.”
She holds my eyes for a moment. “He’s not in town right now. If that’s what you’re worried about.”
I look at her just long enough for her to take that as an affirmative and run around the front of the car to climb into the passenger seat.
He wasn’t in town? Where was he?
But it was none of my business. Whatever.
I sit down, seeing her pull on her seatbelt. I start the car, a little weirded out, but I have a feeling she doesn’t like the word no, and I’m not a fan of confrontation.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
I can give her a ride home, I guess.
But she just pushes her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose and replies, “Margaritas first.”
By the next morning she was dragging my hungover ass to the airport so I didn’t miss my flight. We had started at Sticks and taxied to Meridian City where we drank more at Realm, and then crashed in my hotel room.
I hated her and her amazing body and her pretty face and all the times I couldn’t help but think about how he’d touched her and held her. Yet I couldn’t hate her, because she was absolutely splendid despite how she’d struggled in life.
I’d woken up with a splitting headache, and then I hated her more for the hangover, but… she texted, she called, she checked up on me over the months until I was convinced that I might actually be likable.
Until I remembered she was Will’s good friend, and I was keeping a secret she might hate me for.
Will stood in the foyer facing me, his eyes on fire, and I wanted to take him to my room, close the door, and hold him forever, but he knew how this would end tonight.