Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 148473 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148473 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 742(@200wpm)___ 594(@250wpm)___ 495(@300wpm)
I step into the elevator. Right foot first.
The doors close and Maeve asks, “Was that your first sighting as an underwear model?”
“No.”
She shoves my shoulder playfully. “You never told me you’ve been spotted in the wild in your underwear.”
“Because I haven’t been spotted in them.”
Maeve holds up one finger. “Your honor, I object. Some might say that underwear in a Zoom call is indeed in the wild.”
“It was in my home, and they weren’t sponsorship boxers anyway,” I wave her objection off.
“It’s even more impressive that she recognized you before you started walking away.”
Groaning, I drag a hand down my face. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
“True. But back to these sightings. Do they come up to you and say Google is right. You have the best ass ever?”
Wait. She knows the Internet says that about me? I raise my face. “Been googling me, Maeve?”
“Sometimes I do,” she says.
I shouldn’t like that so much. I really shouldn’t. And yet…I do. “Well, don’t believe everything you read online.” Then I shrug casually. “But this one is true.”
“I know,” she says with a smirk, then nods toward me, like she’s checking out my backside. “Do you have fire-breathing dragon boxer briefs with you?”
“Maybe I’m wearing them right now.”
“Did CheekyBeast give you all its styles?”
“That is one of the perks,” I say.
I’m poised for her to let loose a sassy response, but her gaze goes thoughtful. “I know I tease you all the time, but that was seriously cute—how she knew you. How she’d given them to her husband. This might sound kind of out there…but it’s almost like they needed that in that moment. It’s like, I could feel them reconnecting right in front of us,” she says, her eyes lively.
I nod. “I could too.”
“Maybe it was all meant to be—us having two rooms in the date package from the auction.”
“Yeah, maybe it was meant to be,” I say, agreeing as I linger on those three words—meant to be.
Some things do feel that way. But if I believe in meant to be, then aren’t bad things meant to be too?
I shake off the darker thoughts. There’s no place for them. Not in this city where a good time is the only item on the menu. Where good times are meant to be.
The elevator shoots up twelve floors, then dings. We walk down the hallway to our room. I unlock the door, and we step inside. It’s a large room, with a king-sized bed and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a sweeping view of the Vegas Strip. Not ideal for a family of five. The room is decked out in luxurious shades of sapphire and silver, with plush furniture and a marble-topped bar in one corner. A bucket with a split of champagne sits in it. The hotel must have brought that up when we switched rooms with Jen and Hal.
Maeve drops her bag on the chair by the window and stretches. “Yep. This is what I need tonight,” she says, sounding relieved, but also a bit melancholy as she gazes at the view of the neon-lit Strip below.
Something in her voice catches my attention. “Did something happen earlier? Did you hear from your agent?” Last I heard Maeve was still waiting on that job.
She snaps her gaze back to me, her expression clearing. “No. Just that I have a lot to do when I get back to town. But I’m sure you do too. I mean, you do have a game in two nights’ time, and you’d better not miss it,” she says, waggling a finger at me.
But her tone’s too bright, too cheery. “I won’t. But is everything okay with you?” I ask, sensing that she’s holding back in some way.
Ah, fuck.
Is she holding back now because of the kiss last week? We never talked about it. We just went our separate ways. A knot tightens in my chest, and along with it comes a familiar twinge of worry. A twinge that rears its head every now and then and has ever since Nora died when I was twenty-two, a few weeks after I’d broken up with her since I’d fallen out of love. I’d tried to do it gently, to say I wanted to be just friends, which was true. She said she didn’t know if she could be friends with me since I’d broken her heart. But then, a few weeks later, she said she wanted to try. We were supposed to meet for lunch one Sunday—in an attempt to truly stay friends post-breakup. But before I even left my home to meet her, I learned that, during a regular training ride down through the Marin Headlands on her new road-racing bicycle, she’d been hit by a car.
Becoming friends with Nora was never going to happen.
A reminder that you never know what’s coming. And it’s important to talk through things, to listen to people, to hear what’s going on with them. When you don’t, you might regret it.