Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
“Would you stop interrupting me?”
“Stop saying crap that makes me feel the need to interrupt you.”
Huffing, he bypassed me on the steps, then stopped in front of me and turned around, placing the sprawling city behind him. “I fucked her on date three. And that’s when she went insane. I’m talking updated her profile to say we were in a relationship. Put me in a group chat with her parents and told them she’d finally found a guy who would choke her in bed.”
I felt my expression go deadpan. Because had this beautiful, tattooed, pierced-dick man just said he’d choked a woman in bed? Forget the whole part where he’d said she’d told her parents—in a group chat—but Vance Morgan, the hot guy who gave incredible life-altering kisses, was a choker?
With a stern look, he pointed at me. “I see the look on your face, and before you say anything, I did not choke her, choke her. It was more of a play choke.”
“That’s disappointing.” Smiling, I lifted a brow and stepped around him.
“You would be into that.”
What I was into, I was afraid, was him.
Chapter Sixteen
BLAKE
We took the metro across town and had dinner at a restaurant with a name I would never, in a million years, be able to pronounce. The filet mignon had melted like butter in my mouth, the chocolate mousse had been utterly divine, and the one glass of wine—one glass because I did not need a repeat of last night—had the perfect combination of black currant and plum with a hint of earthy notes. The conversation had been… perfect. Easy. Natural. And to add a little more kryptonite to my already-faltering heart, when his alarm had gone off in the middle of dessert, he’d apologized for needing to make a quick call to remind his grandmother to take her medicine. His timer was to remind his grandmother to take her medicine! There wasn’t an ounce of asshole in the man, and there wasn’t an ounce of willpower to resist him left in my body.
Vance held open the door to the restaurant for me.
“That may be the best meal I’ve ever put in my mouth,” I said, stepping underneath his arm onto the dimly lit sidewalk.
“If you’d come on this trip alone, you wouldn’t have eaten at that restaurant, would you?”
“Why do you say that?”
An electric scooter whizzed around the corner, and Vance grabbed my waist, snatching me out of its path and into his side.
“Because it had white tablecloths.”
My steps slowed, his arm all too natural around my waist. “How did you know I have an aversion to white tablecloths?”
“‘When You Aren’t Meant for the Finer Things in Life.’”
That was the title of an article I’d written four months ago when I’d gone to Los Angeles and tried Catch 22, a five-star Michelin restaurant off Rodeo Drive. The food had been amazing. So amazing that as soon as I’d finished dessert, I chucked my napkin to the table, grabbed my phone, and went to post a rave review. I was so into making sure I’d picked the perfect word to describe the smokey flavor of the rainbow trout that I hadn’t noticed the napkin I’d absentmindedly tossed onto the candle had caught fire until a charred leaf from the flower arrangement had dropped to the table.
It’s amazing how quickly a restaurant can go up in flames. The entire ordeal had me swearing off any dining establishments with white tablecloths for the rest of my life. And I had made that clear in my write-up. “You read that article?”
“I read all of your articles.”
Something tightened in my chest. “Why?”
“You’re an amazing writer.”
Maybe it was the soft violin music floating from one of the ivy-covered terraces, maybe the glittering lights of the Eiffel Tower peeking over the rooftops, or the thrill of knowing we had no business giving in to this at all, but everything about us at that moment felt right.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
His arm remained around me as we strolled underneath the romantic lampposts. When we came to a crosswalk, Vance turned us away from the tower and held up his phone to take a picture. He took his time lining up the shot. The tip-top of the glowing Eiffel Tower peered out from the gray Parisian buildings behind us.
Click.
“We look good together,” he said.
And even my cynical ass had to admit we did.
He took my hand in his before we crossed the dimly lit street. “Want me to send it to you?”
“Yeah.” And then, just as quickly as the feeling of how right this all felt had settled in, so did the panic. It was like we were hurtling down a Pacific Coast highway overlooking the ocean at one hundred and seventy-five miles per hour without brakes. And while the joyride was exhilarating, the pessimistic, bad-luck-tainted side of my soul knew that at any second, we were launching through the guardrails. There was no way this would not end in a fiery explosion. Boom. Ka-pow. Heart and pussy blown to smithereens.