Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 95609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95609 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 478(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
That sends a thrill of pure horror through me. Ivy has skills. “She did what?”
Harper shrugs. “She failed. Said they’ve got a surprisingly good firewall, and Heath said a whole bunch of stuff about how he would visit her all the time in prison and maybe try to sneak a file into one of Lydia’s lasagnas. Then Ivy didn’t know what kind of file he was talking about, and it got weird. It always gets weird around them. It’s the whole mad-in-love thing. So that’s why I went to your mom, and she got me this temp job. This place is even more amazing than I remembered. Of course, it’s also falling apart. I’ve already had to work on plumbing and the HVAC unit, which was not installed properly and is going to ruin the crown molding. I’m ninety-nine percent convinced it’s original. When are you coming home?”
Mom hadn’t mentioned she’d gotten Harper a job, but then we’d all been in a hurry to get out of the park when the filming was over. “What did my mom tell you? She was there for the elimination ceremony. Did she tell you that Luca went back on the agreement the director made and kept me?”
“Oh, she did not put it like that,” Harper explains with a grin. “She said you were so beautiful that the king couldn’t help himself. He had to keep you. She also said it came down to you and some ho-bag moron who complained about gluten in tortilla chips. Her words, not mine.”
My mother takes allergies seriously, but she would think someone with a serious gluten problem would know corn contained none of it. Not that it matters. Janice had so many other problems. “The man didn’t take one look at me and fall all over himself. That was me. He’s keeping me around because he knows me. I’m like his emotional support contestant.”
“I don’t know,” Harper hedges. “Your mom told us he stares at you like she stares at Tonya’s coconut cream pie.”
I shake off the visual that hits me. Luca doesn’t know my mom. And my mom has no idea what’s going on with me. “I think I’m the only person he knows. He’s not some crazy player, from what I can tell. He’s not doing this because he’s trying to find love.”
“Then why would he do it? Is he looking to hook up with a bunch of women?”
I shake my head. “Not in any way. He’s even instituted a rule that he won’t kiss anyone on camera until he picks the one.”
“On camera? What about off?” Harper asks.
I can feel myself flush. “That’s none of my business. What he does off camera.”
Intelligent eyes narrow. Harper has the scent now. Sometimes she’s like a predatory cat scenting blood. “You told me he didn’t kiss you the other night.”
“That is true.” Let it go. Let it go. I sing the song in my head like a mantra.
“Ani, has he kissed you since then?”
I’m a terrible liar. I’m really bad at it. Ivy can lie like a champ. She can make up the craziest story, and never once wavered when our parents would get mad that we missed curfew or got caught with a bottle of purloined booze. Harper was a cool customer. She would back Ivy, and we would almost be there. We would be so close to getting away with whatever we’d done. Then whichever parent was interrogating us would find the weak link.
Me.
“He did.” She doesn’t even wait for me to confirm. She knows because I’m sure I’ve gone super pink. Like bubble gum. It’s the curse of my Nordic skin. “He kissed you. Oh my god. Did he even wait until the elimination ceremony thing? Or did he kiss you immediately after the cameras turned off? How did the other women handle that? They must hate you.”
Only the truly heinous ones. I’m not normally hateable. “They don’t know.”
“He found a private place?” Harper is relentless. “It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of privacy. I thought they filmed everything.”’
“Well, uhm, you’re going to find this interesting from an architectural standpoint.” She is going to take this way too seriously. “There are tunnels that connect the hotel across the street to this mansion.”
Her jaw drops. “It’s from Prohibition. I’ve seen it in some of the older buildings, but I never imagined it would be here. This place was owned at one point by the George family, and there were absolutely rumors about them running booze during the 20s. And the hotel was a speakeasy.”
Excellent. I’ve got her on historical buildings. I’ll take that for a thousand, Alex. If she’s telling me about the history of the mansion, she’s not probing for more information. “That’s fascinating. I bet they’ll let you walk in the tunnels if you tell them you need to fix things.”