Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 109299 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 546(@200wpm)___ 437(@250wpm)___ 364(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109299 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 546(@200wpm)___ 437(@250wpm)___ 364(@300wpm)
I’ve never said “spank me” to anyone. Not to Eric Patrick, certainly. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it never seemed like his thing? But that night, I wanted to say it to Banks. Because I wanted it. Because I felt his want. Because I felt both safe with him and turned on.
The irony.
I haven’t told a soul what happened that night, not even Bridget or Chloe. But if I don’t tell someone, it’s going to eat away at me the next few weeks during the shoot. I won’t be able to focus on work, or running this place, or making sure Haven has everything she needs.
“Grandma,” I begin, readying myself to speak plainly to the woman who took over the task of being my parent when my own died one night on a snowy road when I was only fifteen. “I met him before.”
She sets down her towel and leans against the counter. “The baking bodyguard?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice wobbly. “And it was a total mess.”
“Oh, sweetie. Why?”
“We met at a bar,” I say, then I tell her the whole story. Well, I give her the PG version. “And then we were going up to my room, and he never showed.” She blinks, eyes big and full of surprise. “But the clerk brought me a letter Banks left, saying he’d explain, and I felt so stupid. All I could think was it was something I’d said. For close to a month, that’s what I thought. He’d lost interest in me. Or he’d been lying to me. Or he was playing me. Or he was looking for an excuse all along and he found one. But it all came down to the same thing—he didn’t like me after all,” I say, my I can handle the world attitude sliding off my shoulders like a coat shed at the end of the day. “Because how could he truly be into me if he’d leave like that?”
“Oh hon, why would you think someone wouldn’t be into you?” she asks.
I give her a look. “Have you seen my track record, Grandma?”
“We all have track records.”
“But mine’s kind of a pattern,” I say, folding and unfolding the stack of cloth napkins on the counter. My ex isn’t the first man to go poof in a cloud of smoke. This guy I was seeing five years ago turned out to have been cheating on me the entire time before I found out when an alarm went off on Chad’s phone—pick up flowers for Samantha. His name was Chad, though, so it served me right.
“A pattern’s only a pattern till you break it. I had such a thing for bad boys in leather jackets when I was younger,” Grandma says, a little wistful, shaking her head in amusement.
“What’s wrong with leather jackets?”
“Nothing, but they were all bad men who didn’t know how to treat a woman till I met your grandfather,” she says with a fond smile for the man she loved madly for many years till he died of a heart attack when I was ten. “Didn’t mean something was wrong with me. I didn’t know what I wanted and what I deserved till I met Russ. So why do you even think it’s you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know,” she says.
I dip my face so she can’t see me. “Because I’m bossy and difficult,” I grumble.
“You’re not difficult.”
I latch on to what’s unsaid as I lift my face. “But I am bossy?”
“You are the boss. You run a business.”
I’m the girl who knows how to get things done. The person who doesn’t back down from a challenge. Banks said as much the night I met him. But maybe he didn’t like those things after all. “I’m not the sweet sister like Haven. I’m the know-it-all. I’m the too independent one. I’m the pushy one.”
“And I love you both madly,” she says.
I believe that with my whole heart, but I’m on a roll, dammit, and nothing is stopping me. “And then I think I was kind of mean this afternoon,” I admit.
“Why? What did you do?”
I wince. “I said to his face that he wasn’t my type.”
She gives me the look—the look that says you didn’t do your best. “Apologize then,” she says.
“I don’t want to.” I pout.
“You do have to work with him over the next few weeks,” she points out.
This whole situation gets messier by the minute. “I just want to move past that night.”
“And why can’t you? Is it because…he’s exactly your type?”
Way to see inside my soul, Grandma.
I close my eyes, a whoosh rushing through my body. That man drives me wild and turns me inside out. “It’s hard to be around him.”
“Because you want him to swoop you up and carry you up the stairs?”
My eyes fly open. “Grandma!”
“I’m seventy-five. I’m not dead.”