Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 94279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
The one on his very full lips.
Under his Romanesque nose.
Both of which were perfect, but you didn’t notice either of them because of the eyes above.
I took a deep, cleansing breath in, exhaling out anxiety. “This doesn’t change anything,” I told him.
Wilder shoved his hands into his pockets. “Of course not.”
“I’m still not going out with you.”
“Alright, but I will see you again very soon. And when I do, we’ll both be dressed up, and we’ll share a meal. Call it what you want.”
“What are you talking about?”
He took a piece of paper from his pocket, offering it to me. “All the weddings where we’ll be seeing each other. My father asked me to deliver you a list.”
6
WILDER
“Fuck it,” I mumbled to myself and closed the PDF.
Wednesday afternoon, back at my flat in London, I was supposed to be reading a thirty-two-page contract—one of the dozens of things I should’ve been doing today since I’d been out of the office for a week. But instead, I clicked back over to the email Dad’s assistant had sent this morning. This time, when the photos opened, I saved them to my hard drive, telling myself I might need them someday. For what? I had no stinking idea. But rather than trying to come up with an excuse other than I’m obsessed with a certain woman who tasted like cupcake, I used the time in a more productive manner: obsessing.
Sloane Carrick was a goddamn knockout—auburn hair, warm skin, green eyes, and a banging body, even under that hideous purple dress she’d had on. She might’ve run into me in that hallway, but I was the one who’d had the air knocked from my lungs. I flipped through the photos, looking for one where she wasn’t dressed like Barney, and stopped when I reached a closeup of her face. She was hamming it up, looking right at the camera, holding a shot glass in one hand and giving the finger with the other. Her fiery attitude made my dick twitch in my pants. I liked the photo so much that I tagged it with a little heart, so it would join the folder of my favorites.
Eventually, I tore my eyes from Sloane’s face and flipped through another hundred photos. The ones she wasn’t in, I glossed over. The ones of the bride, I couldn’t flip past fast enough. Toward the end of the collection, I paused at a group photo. It had been taken from above, so it took me a few seconds to figure out what I was looking at. The photographer must’ve been standing on a balcony or a second-floor deck, and the bridal party stood on the grass below, holding their flowers up in the air. It was an artsy shot, but my gaze snagged on Sloane’s cleavage, and I zoomed in for a better look. Two creamy mounds filled my screen just as my little brother, Lucas, wandered into my office. He parked himself on a chair and leaned forward to check out my monitor.
“Nice rack,” he said.
“Don’t be disrespectful, you little shit.”
I did realize the hypocrisy, as I sat at my computer ogling a woman, one door lock away from jacking off to these damn photos. But hey, I was the adult here, and it was my responsibility to teach my little brother some manners. I clicked the X in the top left corner and closed out of the photos.
“Who you wanking off to?” he asked.
“I’m not wanking off to anyone. I was doing some work.”
“What is it you do again? Because that’s what I’m going to college for.”
I shook my head. Me helping raise a fifteen-year-old hadn’t been on my or Lucas’s Christmas list, yet here we were. I leaned back in my chair, giving him my full attention. “How was school? What are you up to this afternoon?”
“Wesley is coming over. We’re figuring out what I’m going to do for my date tonight.”
I side-eyed him. “Come again?”
Lucas kicked his feet up onto my desk. “I have a date tonight.”
I smacked his sneakers off. “Who said you could start dating?”
“Dad and Brenda.”
I wasn’t sure that was true, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was. Lucas and I had different fathers, and his made mine look like father of the year. I’d never understood what Mom had seen in Lorenzo, Lucas’s dad, other than he’d once played guitar in a rock band. The guy was a bum, if you asked me, and now he was Lucas’s sole parent. My brother spent more time at my place than his home, especially now that Lorenzo had remarried. Brenda was younger than me. She was also a hippie who didn’t believe in rules or punishments, which had been one thing when Lucas was nine and ten, but now he’d learned to manipulate the situation.