Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Her heart felt like it was about to burst with the news.
But she ended up saying not a word about it.
Not to Dionne, not to anyone because honestly...
What was there to tell?
She’d met her sister’s friend for ten seconds at a country club she couldn’t afford to eat at, and she’d felt a thing, and the thing was too large and too sudden and too stupid to say out loud.
Katy Gates didn’t tell people things. She was the quiet one. The girl who sat in the back of the classroom and handed in her homework on time and ate lunch alone with a book because making friends required a kind of social bravery she’d never figured out. She got herself to school. She packed her own lunches. She’d been managing her mother’s bills since she was fifteen and Amy’s hands were too unreliable to hold a pen, and she was good at being invisible, and she didn’t fall apart over a man’s eyes and a two-word introduction.
Except she couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Not just his face, but how he’d taken her in.
The drop of his gaze to her mouth.
His pupils blowing wide before he’d shut it down.
She was eighteen and she’d never been kissed and she didn’t fully understand what she’d read on his face, but her body understood. Her body had cataloged every microsecond of that attention and was replaying it on a loop behind her eyelids every time she closed her eyes, and the replay came with heat, a low warm pulse in her belly that she didn’t have a word for because nothing in her experience had prepared her for a man studying her throat and making her feel it hours later in her own bedroom in the dark.
His name sat in her mouth for days.
Julian Ventura.
She said it once, alone in her bedroom, just to feel how it sounded, and then buried her face in her pillow because she was eighteen and ridiculous and this was exactly the sort of thing her mother had done and look how that turned out.
Amy had fallen for Harrison Gates the same way. Fast, total, with a certainty that rational people called reckless and Amy called love. Harrison had already divorced Phyllis by then, but that hadn’t stopped him from treating Amy like a convenience and Katy like a footnote. The smallest possible alimony. No birthday calls. No holidays. Amy’s heart had broken so completely that she’d spent years trying to numb it with things that came in bottles and plastic bags, and Katy had learned to cook dinner at nine and forge her mother’s signature on school forms at twelve and never, ever count on a man who made your pulse race.
She Googled him anyway.
Julian Ventura. Twenty-eight. Founder and CEO of Gubat, a gaming company that had made him a billionaire before most people his age had finished paying off student loans. An MMORPG empire that spawned book franchises and movie deals. The articles called him “reclusive” and “notoriously private.” One gossip piece called him “the most eligible ghost in Los Angeles.” There were almost no photographs. A conference panel where his face was half-turned. A charity gala shot where he was leaving the frame, seized mid-stride, his profile sharp against the flashbulbs. She’d studied that profile for so long her phone screen went dark and she’d had to tap it back to life with a finger that wasn’t quite still.
THE MONTHS PASSED.
The crush didn’t.
Katy went back to Haven every month for Dionne’s lunches and scanned the terrace every time. She wore the green dress that made her eyes something worth noticing and told herself she was just hungry for the cobb salad, which was a lie so transparent she almost laughed.
He wasn’t there in July. He wasn’t there in August. In September, she thought she recognized his profile near the valet stand, and her entire body lit up and then the man turned and it was no one, a stranger with the wrong face, and the crash that followed left her hollow for a week.
She went back to school that fall. Junior year, a year late, because she’d taken the previous year off to care for Amy during the worst of the rehab. The pills and then the withdrawal and then the long, ugly crawl back to something resembling a person. Katy had cooked and cleaned and driven her mother to meetings and held Amy’s hair back on the bad nights and lied to the school about a family emergency, which wasn’t entirely a lie. She’d lost a year. She didn’t regret it. Amy was clean now, one year and counting, a paralegal by day and a student by night, and Katy was proud of her mother in the fierce, private way of a girl who’d learned to parent her own parent.