Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 103530 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103530 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
“Go back to my room? Get some sleep before the boring get-to-know-everybody breakfast?” she said with a puzzled frown.
“After that. I mean, what we did was fun. But is there anything you’ve always wanted to do?” I paused. “Within reason. There’s some stuff even I couldn’t pull off in four days and be in a wedding.”
She laughed incredulously. “Okay. Yeah.”
“I’m not kidding.” I wanted badly to impress her. In a strangely competitive way. It was so juvenile. And a hell of a lot of fun. “Name a fantasy. I can make it happen by tomorrow night.”
“I know, you’re superrich.” She rolled her eyes.
I caught her hand in mine and squeezed it. “I’m serious. I’m offering you the chance to fulfill one of your wildest fantasies.”
“Wildest fantasy, within reason.” Her tongue darted across her lower lip. “I want to get caught. And I want the man who catches us to join in.”
“A man, specifically?” I considered. Who did I know in the area? Who could I get to fly in? It would be a little work, but I could pull it off. It would be worth it. “All right. Tomorrow night. I’ll make that happen.”
“Okay.” She took a few steps back, pulling her hand away. “We’ll see.”
“You’ll see,” I called after her as she turned and headed off down the path.
“Goodnight,” she called back.
“Goodnight.” I watched her go until the path bent through some hedges.
She never looked back once.
CHAPTER SEVEN
(Charlotte)
I was in line at the breakfast buffet when I overheard it.
“You would not have believed it,” Aunt Pam’s scandalized whisper carried much farther than the small group of senior female family members clustered around her. “They were so loud. So loud.”
I cringed inwardly. My whole fantasy of an audience wasn’t so hot if some of those people were from our family. I’d thought they were all staying in the villas.
“And it went on and on,” Pam elaborated dramatically. “Finally, I called down to reception. I said, it’s two in the morning, if someone does not get those children into their rooms and under control—”
“Oh, thank god,” I exclaimed before I could stop myself. I looked over at the aunts. None of them had noticed my outburst. I looked up guiltily at the man in the chef’s hat who held a spoonful of scrambled egg poised over my plate, a questioning look on his face. I cleared my throat. “Thank god they have eggs,” I blundered on. “Because I certainly wanted eggs.”
“Is this enough?” the man asked, clearly envisioning some kind of hellish scenario in which he kept piling mountain after mountain of eggs onto the plate of an overenthusiastic weirdo. I nodded gratefully, taking the eggs and moving along.
I didn’t even like eggs.
After last night, I’d woken up totally out of sorts. Had all of that happened? Was there a gas leak in the villa? The soreness in my thighs and lower back from being bent over a chair for close to an hour was one of the few clues I had that yes, my unbelievable night with Matthew had happened. It was the part where it was supposed to happen again that seemed impossible.
He wasn’t actually going to get a guy to come have sex with us, right? That was all bluster. It had to be.
“Hey, kiddo!”
I turned at the sound of my brother’s voice, all my thoughts about Matthew shoved sharply into a locked cabinet in the back of my mind.
“Hey!” I could only give Scott a one-armed hug due to the plate in my hand, but he made up for it by crushing me like a boa constrictor murdering its prey. I gasped out, “Fashionably late to your own pre-pre-wedding breakfast?”
“I wish I was still asleep,” he groaned. “Matt made me go to that resort party last night. He completely wore me out.”
There’s a lot of that going around.
“Oh? Late night, huh?” It couldn’t have been that late, because I’d been with Matt, too. But my brother was born sixty-five years old. Or so I’m told. I wasn’t around then.
“I didn’t get to bed until midnight,” Scott said, keeping his voice low as if it were a scandalous secret. “I haven’t been up that late since college.”
“You’re truly the most boring person alive,” I chided him.
“You look exhausted, too,” Scott observed as I held out my plate for bacon.
“Can my brother get a plate?” I asked the server, dodging the comment. “He’s the groom, it’s okay if he cuts in line.”
Another server handed a clean plate over the glass barrier, and Scott took it with a “thanks,” but he didn’t get any bacon. He noted my surprise and said, “Diet. I’m trying to stay healthy. You know. Forty is coming.”
“Yes, it is.” And I knew that he was careful about his health. Why wouldn’t he be, after all he’d been through?