Total pages in book: 171
Estimated words: 164705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 824(@200wpm)___ 659(@250wpm)___ 549(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 164705 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 824(@200wpm)___ 659(@250wpm)___ 549(@300wpm)
“Sleep well?” I sing-songed.
“Sure. You?” He took a sip of his macchiato, already returning his attention to his laptop.
In hindsight, I should’ve seen the obvious signs.
The meat. The plane. The way he glued himself to work whenever he babysat me. Oliver wanted as little to do with me as possible until I got my memory back, but I refused to make it easy for him. Not because he’d lied to me about our engagement, making a total fool out of me. But because I remembered what he did to me. Every. Cruel. Thing.
The way he took my virginity and ditched me. That walk of shame down the cobbled Parisian road, mostly naked, with just a thin hotel robe strapped around my shoulders. The stares, the whispers, the refusal to let me into boutiques. The hot tears that followed.
Ollie’s sudden silence in the aftermath. No calls, texts, or emails. None of the gifts he used to send me on his travels. I’d showed up at this very home, in front of these very iron-wrought gates, only to be rejected. Again.
Then, those Instagram exchanges. So public, almost like he’d wanted to rub it in my face that he’d cheated on me.
And most of all, I remembered how this continent never quite felt big enough for both of us after what happened. I chose to live in Los Angeles because it was the furthest place in America from Maryland, short of Alaska and Hawaii.
Still, I saw his face. All the time. In gossip magazines, and social columns, and even congressional hearings. Oliver was everywhere, no matter how hard I tried to erase him from my life.
This time, he would be the one trapped. Unable to get rid of me.
“It was a little hot.” I scrunched the cups of my bikini top until the triangles barely covered my nipples, determined to give him a taste of his own medicine. “I think I’m going to sleep naked tonight if you don’t mind.”
Oliver choked on his coffee, spraying half of it on the screen of his expensive device. He grabbed a napkin and dabbed the corners of his lips. “Are you allergic to clothes now?”
“Now?” I peered up at him beneath a curtain of lashes, blinking innocently. “I’m a proud nudist, Oliver. It’s a way of life for me. I remember that very clearly. I never walk around the house with clothes. They make me feel …”
He groaned. “Sane?”
“Confined.”
“Either your tits will be confined, or I will be – when I murder everyone who looks at you naked.”
“You really shouldn’t be so jealous. I remember most of my college days, and I slept with a lot of guys. At least two hundred, by my count.”
“Didn’t you have a long-term boyfriend?”
“Grant. Grant Dwyer.” I sighed, pretending to be deep in thought. “Now he was a true gentleman. Not like the other guy.”
“The other guy?”
“Vance Smith.” I scrunched my nose, conjuring a fake memory. “We met at a gas station.”
“Where every reputable first encounter takes place.”
“About three weeks later, I dumped him because he demanded that I get rid of my vibrator collection.”
“He what?” Oliver seemed more horrified than I did, granted I knew this was pure fiction. “That’s like firing his sous chef for helping him cook.”
“Meanwhile, Grant was a dreamboat. A total revolutionary. He agreed to an open relationship.”
“An open relationship,” Oliver deadpanned.
“Yes,” I lied. “I must’ve slept with hundreds of men in the three years we dated. He even watched a few times. Too bad he needed to move to a remote village across the world to save baby seals from oil spills. Grant is an environmentalist, too.”
“You were in an open relationship with an environmentalist, who abandoned his degree to save baby seals from oil.”
“Yes. Isn’t he a dreamboat?”
“He’s something,” Ollie muttered into his mug.
I advanced toward his precious coffee machine, a sophisticated model that must have cost five figures. Stretching onto my tiptoes, I reached for a mug in the overhead cabinet. My breasts swayed with the movement.
Oliver twisted around, visibly flustered. “Do you want me to make you coffee?”
“It’s okay, I’ve got this. You sit and rest.”
“Careful. Mom got that custom-made for me in Italy. It’s the only machine of its kind and irreplaceable. The manufacturer shut down years ago.”
I waved him off. “You’re such a worrywart.”
He turned back to his laptop. I grabbed one of the valves in the coffee machine and twisted it the wrong way, purposefully unscrewing it. It fell off with a clank.
“Oh, shoot.” I tsked, slapping my thigh. “I broke the coffee machine. You don’t mind, do you?”
If he looked closer, he’d realize that it would take ten seconds to screw the valve back on, but he didn’t. Smoke practically oozed from Ollie’s ears. He remained rigid, facing his laptop, probably because he didn’t want to yell at me.