Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Thus, I decided to take a breather.
Not a break. But a breather.
Already, I had work, orders, whatever was happening with Mr. Shithead, and finding a way to extricate myself as Gabriel Stark’s latest challenge at the same time figuring out a way to get him to confide what the hell happened that morning (an impossible task!), and not enough time to do all of that.
Furthermore, I didn’t want to get burned out.
My future goal: have my own kitchen or even a full-on bakery, and if not that, look at getting hired as the pastry chef for a posh outfit like Christopher’s.
I could not start hating what I loved and had a passion for because, well, because I let Kevin play me.
So I was in the midst of kindly but professionally letting down the people who had requested orders, all the while asking them to consider me for future ones, when there was a knock on my door.
Even if it wasn’t Gabe’s two sharp raps and him calling out, “It’s me,” a thrill raced through me that he said he’d be back tonight, and that might be him.
You are so totally freaking lying to yourself and it’s getting to be all kinds of exasperating, Dreamer scolded.
Someone needs a vibrator session to take the edge off, Logic suggested.
I sighed and went to the door.
I peeped through the peephole, and at the look I saw on Shanti’s face, I hurriedly unlocked and opened the door.
She burst in, crossed the room in a rush, threw herself dramatically on her back on my velvet couch and pressed one of my Home-Goods-on-sale toss pillows to her face.
Oh boy.
I closed the door and went to sit on my armchair.
My bestie was lean, but stacked, with booty, all of this somehow hiding she was average height and making her seem taller.
She usually let her hair go natural in soft, loose, kinky curls that framed her face in a beautiful, thick, lush, drifting halo, but sometimes she’d be in the mood for braids or extensions, though that wasn’t often.
She had delicate features, big eyes, and skin a couple of shades up from mocha.
It was her mom, Miss Tandi, who’d semi-introduced us.
See, they’d been at a farmer’s market (I used to do those on the weekends before my server gig with SC, and I was glad I didn’t do them anymore because for one person, that was a ton of work, oh, and, no shock here, I was with Kev for part of the time and he was always “too busy” to help).
Miss Tandi had bought a couple petits fours from my booth. Shanti was with her. As they were walking away, they ate them.
At that point, Miss Tandi stopped dead, turned, came right back, and bought me out of petits fours, saying to her daughter, “I’ll serve these to my ladies tomorrow when we have tea at my place after church.”
Miss Tandi, who could go for the gold in the Olympics when it came to chatting, kindliness and sociability, chatted kindly and sociably with me, and somehow that morphed to Shanti and me making a coffee date (“somehow” meaning Miss Tandi suggested we do that in the way moms had that was more a veiled order).
And the rest was history.
That was seven years ago, and at the time, I’d still been smarting at the loss of Jen, and ripe pickin’s for a savvy, sweet, edgy, together girlfriend, and Shanti fit the bill.
I still count that day at the farmer’s market as one of the luckiest of my life.
So now, with years under my belt with this woman being the sister of my heart, I knew what was going on.
“Let me guess. Titus,” I said gently.
“Krish and bun,” she mumbled from under the pillow.
Oh no.
“Crash and burn?” I asked, hoping I didn’t translate self-suffocation speak right.
She took the pillow from her face and slammed it into her belly.
“I asked him out for a drink,” she told the ceiling. “And the worst part about it was how cool he was in letting me down.”
I got up and headed to the kitchen, inviting, “Tell me.”
While I pulled out the Tito’s vodka, Fever Tree tonic water, and a lime (see? totally prepared for whoever would knock at my door), she spoke.
“He told me I was beautiful. He told me he thought I, and all the Angels were the shit. He told me he would totally go there, except he’s in the middle of reading the Rock Chick books.”
Oh no.
An aside: the romantic shenanigans of the first-gen crew up in Denver were such that they’d been written into books.
The only one of us Angels who’d read them was Harlow.
The rest of us avoided them because, from what we heard, including car bombs, grenades, businesses burning down, high-speed chases and assaults at haunted houses, we were terrified of them.