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)
“Since we were in the carriage. Our moms were best friends.” Andrew leaned back in his seat and rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb. “So you’re the one, huh?”
“The one?”
“The one who has my boy all knotted up into a pretzel. I’ve never seen him this way. Usually he doesn’t remember the name of the woman he’s talking to.”
My face fell. Andrew noticed and put his hands up. “That wasn’t supposed to come out like that. He’s not a jerk or anything. Well, he is a jerk, but not because he treats women badly and can’t remember their names. He’s a jerk because he held me down and shaved half of my moustache during my Top Gun phase.”
I smiled. “It’s fine. I get it. Wilder hasn’t tried to hide who he is.”
“That means he likes you. Most guys who like a woman try to put their best foot forward, show them their good side. But not Wilder. If he cares about you, he’s protective—even wants to protect you from him. He gave me a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t take the job before we started working together.”
A woman knocked on the open office doorway. “Mr. Emerson?”
“Andrew, please.”
“Your first appointment is here. I put him in the conference room and gave him some coffee.”
“Thank you, Laura.”
Andrew shook his head. “One thing’s for sure, life with Wilder is never boring.”
“I bet.” I smiled. “I’ll let you get to your appointment. Wilder said he had some press releases he needed a copyedit on?”
Andrew searched around the piles of papers on his desk and pulled out a pack of stapled ones. “Thank you for doing this.”
“No problem. I have two meetings this morning, but I’ll get them back to you as soon as I’m done.”
“Thanks a lot. It was really nice to meet you, Sloane.”
“You, too.”
I went back up for my meetings, and then it was almost one by the time I got back downstairs with the edits. Wilder hadn’t been kidding—his friend wasn’t great at grammar. I’d made a lot of corrections.
Andrew was on the phone when I walked in, but he smiled and held up one finger. “Sorry about that,” he said when he hung up.
“No problem. Here are your press releases. I made some changes.”
He looked down and smiled. “The mighty red pen. Thank you for this.”
“Anytime.”
“Did you eat lunch yet?”
“Not yet. I wanted to get that done first.”
He nodded toward the door. “Me neither. Can I buy you lunch to say thank you?”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Come on. I’ll tell you about the fall of seventh grade when Wilder started wearing his dad’s shit—cologne, sweaters—to come off more mature when he hit on our thirty-year-old math teacher. He was thirteen at the time.”
I laughed. “How can I refuse that invitation?”
Andrew grabbed his suit jacket from the back of the chair. “You can’t. Let’s go.”
* * *
I snort-laughed and covered my mouth. “I’m definitely going to sip his drink the next time I see him drinking out of a can. If he likes cosmos so much, why didn’t he just make a batch and drink it out of a red plastic cup?”
“We were fifteen. He thought he had to act like a tough guy, and tough guys drank beer on TV, not red drinks in martini glasses. So he’d dump out the beer and pour in girly drinks—cosmos, Malibu and pineapple—I wouldn’t be surprised if he had hard Shirley Temples in there sometimes.”
“I guess it’s a good thing he grew up to be so brawny, since he has a penchant for things that might get him teased. Lucas already spilled that he likes mud masks and watches reality TV.”
Andrew held up a finger. “He’s also a closet Swiftie. He’ll deny it, but the dude knows every word to ‘Shake it Off.’”
My phone buzzed, giving me a fifteen-minute reminder about my afternoon meeting with the boss. I wiped my mouth with a napkin. “Gosh, I didn’t realize how long we’ve been siting here.”
“I’ve got enough material about Wilder to amuse us for days,” Andrew said.
“I bet you do. So we might need another lunch sometime.”
He grinned. “It would be my pleasure.”
I’d started to slide out of the booth when Andrew reached across and touched my arm. “Hey, I feel like we’ve had a lot of laughs at my friend’s expense. So give me one minute more to tell you a few things about him.”
“Okay…” I settled back into my seat.
“I couldn’t afford to go to Yale for undergrad. My family is comfortable, but not eighty-thousand-dollars-a-year comfortable, and I also have four siblings. Ivies are competitive. All the kids have better than a four-point-oh, so there aren’t many academic scholarships. Then at the last minute, a scholarship came through—a full ride. I thought it was strange, but I wasn’t looking a gift horse in the mouth. Two years ago, when I started working for Wilder, I was looking through some files for paperwork I needed, and I found a file with the name of the organization that had given me the scholarship. Wilder had taken some of the money his mother left him and set up a charitable foundation just to pay my tuition without me knowing. He knew I’d never take the money from him if he tried to give it to me directly.”