Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
“Are the pictures from yesterday everywhere?” I asked, biting my lip.
I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. But someone had definitely taken pictures of what had happened. Not to mention, my tear-stricken face. Gavin and I had been on Page Six for our official engagement announcement. Of course the vultures would be more than happy to see our downfall.
Katherine and English exchanged a look.
I groaned. “Is it that bad?”
“I suppressed them as much as I could,” Lark said.
“Same. I did all I could,” English said.
“But you’re news,” Katherine said with a shrug. “Hard to quash real news.”
English flipped through her phone until she found the offending pictures and then let me see.
“That’s the best of them,” English told me.
If this was the best of them, then we were fucked. I hardly recognized myself in the horrible image as I’d rushed out of Percy Tower yesterday morning. I passed the phone back to English. No use in looking at any of the others. It was weird enough to be treated like a celebrity just because I was marrying a King. Well, that hadn’t exactly happened, had it?
“Lovely,” I mumbled.
“What did you expect?” Katherine asked me.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Katherine arched an eyebrow. “That’s a first.”
I scowled right back at her. “This isn’t one of my stories.”
“No?”
Lark nudged Katherine. “We’re on her side.”
“Yeah, Jesus,” English grumbled.
“I’m on her side, but I’m not going to pretend like nothing happened. This is a hundred percent a classic Whitley story. Complete with a public argument and ending in a dramatic demolition of your relationship.”
“That is not what happened,” I snapped at her.
“No? What happened?”
I stumbled over my words. That was what had happened. I’d blown a gasket. All of my fears had escalated into the worst possible scenario, and I’d set the world on fire. Like I always did. Why did I have to do that?
“I don’t know,” I said, backing down from Katherine’s intensity. “You’re not wrong.”
Katherine smiled triumphantly. “Well, don’t tell us that. Tell him.”
I blinked up at her rapidly. “What? Who?”
Then, my friends grinned devilishly and pushed me forward. That was when I saw him. Gavin King. He stood at the edge of the fountain in a shirt that was too big for him and pants that might have been a little too short. Despite the disheveled appearance, his gaze was steady. And it was fixed purposely on me.
“I hate you three,” I told my friends.
“We know,” English said.
“We love you too,” Katherine said.
“Always and forever,” Lark agreed.
I left my friends behind and strode over to Gavin. The man I’d thought would be my husband only a day earlier. Until everything had crumbled to ash.
“Hi,” I said hesitantly as I met him.
“Hey, pixie.”
I stifled a grin at the nickname. “What are you wearing?”
He fingered the too-big button-up with a shrug. “I haven’t been home. I stayed with Locke and Maggie, and he let me borrow his clothes. It turns out, Olympic swimmers have broader shoulders than the rest of us mere mortals.”
“Who has ever called you a mere mortal?”
He sighed. “Well, I fell from Olympus yesterday.”
I glanced at my feet and kicked a loose rock. “Why didn’t you just go home?”
Gavin took another step forward, putting two fingers under my chin and lifting it for me to look up into his endless emerald eyes. “As if I could go back to a place that held every memory of you. As if I could smell my sheets that still had your scent on them. As if I could lie there alone when I had every intention of bringing my wife home to that bed.”
I swallowed at the intensity in his statement. “Gavin …”
“Wait,” he said quickly. “Let me go first.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Okay.”
“I was wrong.”
“About what?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Asking you to be my fake girlfriend.”
I stared at him in confusion. “Um … okay?”
“I should have asked you to be my date to the wedding from the start. My real date to the wedding. And then seduced you into falling for me the old-fashioned way so that you’d be my real girlfriend all the time. I shouldn’t have put any tricks on it, and that was my fault.”
“I don’t …”
He barreled forward over my uncertainty. “Because I wanted you to go to that wedding with me. Just you. It’s not that I didn’t have any other options. I did. I could have taken anyone that I wanted, but the idea of that was abhorrent. I’d stopped dating the previous year because every person I’d met over the years bored me. Well, everyone but you.”
I blushed at that assessment. “Why didn’t you say that then?”
He laughed, as if the very thought was absurd. “Say that to you? Whitley, the very thought of being with me three years ago had sent you running for the hills. Literally. The Hollywood Hills, halfway across the country.”