Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65643 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 328(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 219(@300wpm)
“I’ll be waiting,” Garrett said quietly. The firelight flickered, the logs snapping and cracking and his hand closed around the back of my head and he pulled my face down to his in a long, smoldering kiss.
I sank into him. The thought flickered in my head that when I said I’d be home, I hadn’t pictured my apartment but rather, right here. This place. This couch. This man. Then his mouth slipped down to my throat, and I stopped thinking at all.
25
GARRETT
I’d celebrated a dozen or so birthdays with various women. Noemi, of course. We’d been so broke for most of them that getting a pie from the pizzeria rather than the grocery store was the height of luxury. One year we hadn’t been able to afford a dessert, too, so I’d stuck candles into the gooey cheesy center and nearly burned down our apartment when they listed sideways into the cardboard container.
Since Noemi, I’d never been with anyone I cared enough about to make much of an effort. I’d taken them to whatever the hottest restaurant in town at the time was and bought a generic piece of jewelry. Usually a bracelet. Necklaces hung too close to the heart, and earrings looked too much like a ring box. I’d made that mistake once. The woman had looked at me, eyes wide and gooey, when I pulled out the box, and I’d realized in an instant what she thought.
Never again.
That plan was a bust now. Andrew would be the one taking Destiny to the hottest restaurant in town. The thought was a hot poker in my guts, but at least he was taking her out the night before her birthday. That meant on her actual birthday, I was going to make her forget about whatever fancy bullshit place he took her to. I was still trying to figure out exactly where that would be, considering we couldn’t be seen together in public, but I knew something would come to me.
Right now, I had a more immediate problem. I didn’t know what the hell to get her for her birthday. I went to my standard jewelry store, but I couldn’t picture any of the bracelets on her wrist. Not even the diamond tennis bracelet the jeweler said was their bestseller.
“I want something that no one else has,” I said, dismissing it. If it was a bestseller, it meant there were dozens of women running around town with it on their wrist. I wanted to get Destiny something special. Something that showed her that I knew her better than that schmuck Andrew Quinn ever would.
I walked over to the earrings. There was a set of blood red rubies set in antique gold. They were brilliant, flashing, fiery, like her hair had been. Something about them–and the memory of her hair–made me smile, but I couldn’t decide. They didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen her wear, but they had a vintage, old Hollywood glamor to them I thought she’d like. I wished I could call Noemi. She had an innate talent for picking out gifts. She still did the Christmas shopping for my parents. This year it was a beautiful scarf from Paris for my mom and a first edition of Catch-22 for my dad. She’d know whether the earrings were right for Destiny or not.
“Would you like to see them?” the jeweler asked, following me over but keeping a discrete, unobtrusive distance.
I considered half a dozen ways to ask Noemi about the earrings without raising her suspicions, then gave up. “I’ll take them,” I told the jeweler abruptly before I could change my mind. I ended up taking the necklace that went with it, too. What the hell.
I couldn’t remember the last time I was nervous to give a woman a gift. Maybe I never had been. With Noemi, it was always easy. We either didn’t have any money to spare for a gift, or she told me exactly what she wanted. And none of the other women had mattered enough to put my nerves on edge like this.
I wrapped the box myself–at least, I stuck it in a bag and crumpled some tissue paper around it myself. Then I set it on the coffee table and built a fire in the fireplace. The perfect place to take her for her birthday had come to me on the way home.
I was going to take her to my hometown. I thought she’d get a kick out of my parents, and we could stay at the cabin I’d bought on a get back to nature whim I’d hardly indulged since. The best thing about the place was that the town made a big deal about not caring about celebrities. Noemi wasn’t the first or only girl to run away three hours south and light up the silver screen. Destiny and I would lay low, of course, but if someone happened to recognize her, well, it wasn’t like being recognized in LA.