Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
What could have driven him to act so rashly? He loved his job. The book he was editing for Opal was his next big thing.
My gaze dropped to the counter. He’d taken the ring. I’d not even heard him come inside last night. Unlike Ransom I had given Arden a key so it would be easy for him to enter but I should have heard something. I hadn’t told anyone that since no one had known about the ring but Jellie and now Ransom. Maybe I should have. Dawson had said his parents weren’t accepting his reason for leaving so abruptly and they were demanding an investigation. However, with him leaving a letter, emailing his boss, and even handling his lease, he didn’t think that would happen. Arden was an adult, and he didn’t have to check in with his parents. The belief that he was in trouble with something illegal had been tossed out there. But really? Could I have not known something like that about him? It was hard to wrap my head around.
Everyone at Wilson Roe was in an upheaval. I was the only one of his authors who knew he was gone since I was the only one that I knew was questioned. Our dating hadn’t been a secret. They were trying to decide how to tell the others and reassign his current manuscripts to other editors. I’d personally made sure Opal was handed over to Rebekah Kahn. She was one on the rise, and in my opinion, she was better than Arden. But he’d been determined to hold Rebekah back. She wanted to prove herself, and she’d make sure Opal’s book was perfect.
I had to call Jellie and tell her about all this. Swinging my gaze to the clock on the oven, I realized she’d still be at work. I’d call her later. Right now, I thought I needed to open a bottle of wine. I did not care that it was only four in the afternoon. Slipping off my shoes, I went to get the corkscrew from the cabinet where I kept the bar items displayed.
The ding of my phone, alerting me of a text, however, had me turning back to pick it up.
Ransom: You follow the distillery’s Instagram account.
I bit my bottom lip and leaned a hip against the counter. How had he figured that out? They had over two hundred thousand followers. Had he looked me up on Instagram? Deciding not to be weird about it, I’d respond the way I would have before he came waltzing into my apartment last weekend. We were the same now as we had always been.
Me: I’m worried about all the spare time you have.
I smirked, then hit Send. There. That was the me he expected. Not the one who was slightly giddy over the idea that he had looked me up on social media. And not Juliette Romeo, the author. But me, Noa Raines. My personal Instagram had about twenty followers, and I had shared maybe fifteen pictures since opening the account five years ago.
My author account was run by me, but also by the marketing team at Wilson Roe. They posted way more than I did. I’d not used it to follow anyone in my personal life. I kept the two separate.
Ransom: Are you accusing me of slacking?
Me: How else would you know something so trivial?
Sure, I’d caught his gaze a few times when he looked at me while we sat across from each other at lunch, and the interest in them had sent my heart racing. But he did not once flirt. He’d been very blunt about what he thought about my body, but after that, he had kept everything friendly. It was clear that he wasn’t going to change things. And I understood. If we began to flirt, it would threaten the friendship we had. I could lose him.
Ransom didn’t keep women he slept with. I was the only one he had kept in his life because I was the one he hadn’t slept with. But, ugh, it was unfair too. The one man I’d fantasized about since I had been a teenager was the one I could never experience. And it would be good. No, it would be mind-blowing.
This was Ransom. Girls had talked about how hot he was and panted after him like dogs in heat when he was in high school. Apparently, he had a big dick with a piercing. I’d hung on every word in class one day when two girls were whispering about it. One had given him a blow job in the locker room and made sure everyone knew.
Ransom: Just doing a little research.
Me: Is that what we are calling stalking these days?
Ransom: Ah, if I were to stalk you, you’d never know. This is just curiosity.