Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 65192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65192 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 326(@200wpm)___ 261(@250wpm)___ 217(@300wpm)
“So…this is a bad surprise, and I should have called first?” he asks. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
Sitting back on my heels, I pull in a shaky breath. I rack my brain for something semi-cool to say, something that might explain why he caught me crawling away from him like a dog who got caught eating tennis balls again, but all that comes out is a soft squeaking, gulping sound.
Sam nods. “Yeah. I hear you. It’s been a long time.”
“Six years,” I force out. “It’s like you dropped off the face of the earth after graduation. Your cell number stopped working and all your social media and gaming profiles went dark. You never even put up a Job Shop profile after college or anything. I thought you’d become an international criminal. Or a spy.”
His glittering eyes lock more firmly on mine, summoning a strange, fluttering feeling to my throat. “So, you missed me? Is that what you’re saying?”
My cheeks heat as I cross my arms over my chest. “I was worried. That’s all. I have a very full life and three wonderful best friends who are always there for me. I don’t waste time missing people who don’t miss me back.”
“Who said I didn’t miss you back?” he asks, his expression softening, making him look more like the boy I remember, the one who was always there with a joke or a bag of gummy worms or a game hack he’d only share with me.
The fluttery feeling in my throat moves lower, until it’s vibrating between my hips, causing very disconcerting sensations in my V-Card region.
And just like that, I know I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to say the quiet part out loud and make everything awkward as hell.
I try to stop myself, I really do, but before I can slap a hand over my stupid mouth, my lips blurt out, “So are you here for sex or is there another reason for this blast from the past?”
CHAPTER TWO
Samuel Salvatore Burgos
A man even more hopelessly
in love than he realized…
And just like that, I’m hard.
Ridiculously hard.
Embarrassingly hard.
But hell, I’ve been dreaming about this girl since we were teenagers, and my first look at her in six years was a sexy-as-sin view of the backs of her bare thighs as she crawled away from me on all fours. And now she’s looking up at me with that familiar, “don’t bullshit me, Burgos” look on her insanely cute face and I’m…
Well, I’m as helpless against her as ever.
Meanwhile, she’s as immune to my new charms as she was to my old ones.
In the six years since I hugged Jess goodbye at graduation and left for undergrad in the UK—hoping some distance from my first and only crush would convince my heart to move the hell on already—I’ve put on thirty pounds of pure muscle and grown into my bushy eyebrows. I’ve also gone prematurely gray, like my grandfather, leaving my temples and beard streaked with silver that my last girlfriend swore was the sexiest thing she’d ever seen.
I never imagined being a young guy with gray would be a turn-on for anyone, but I have no reason to believe she was lying. Whether I’m stepping into a bar or a business meeting, I see the way female heads turn to watch me cross a room. Women notice me in a way they never did when I was a lanky, code-writing obsessed teenager, and the fact that I’m worth a few billion has very little to do with it.
I’ve kept my success so quiet only my family and a handful of my original angel investors know that Best Nest is my creation. My app has revolutionized the online world, allowing users to avoid being tracked or targeted by advertisers, bad actors, or their own government, while customizing their browsing experience to a level no one could’ve imagined possible three years ago. But almost no one knows I’m the face behind The Paradisus Corporation, and that’s the way I like it.
I never wanted to be rich or famous. Initially, I just wanted to help people feel safe online and to eliminate as much of the toxic, soul-and-peaceful-society destroying bullshit on the web as possible. If you starve those sites of hits, they wither and die, just like a plant without water or sunlight.
A part of me hoped my crush on Jess might be like that, too.
That I’d lock eyes with her tonight and feel nothing but affection for an old friend.
Instead, my heart is slamming against my ribs, my cock is rock hard, and all I want to do is to scoop her into my arms and carry her back to my hotel room, where I will make it my mission in life to ring in her twenty-fourth birthday with a legion of orgasms.