Not You It's Me (Boston Love #1) - Julie Johnson Page 0,59
of them all.
Worse than my dad.
Worse than third-grade spitballers.
Worse than Rat-Bastard-Ralph.
He’s the Rat-Bastard-King.
The thought makes me want to cry.
As soon as the penthouse-access elevator doors slide open, I’m running. It doesn’t take me long to find my way through the marble-floored labyrinth of hallways, back to the main lobby. I spot the bank of public elevators I took the last time I was here and know escape is close.
Thirty seconds later, I fly past the front security desk, weave through the crush of commuters exiting the building on their way home for the night, and burst from the revolving glass door onto the sidewalk. I pull a gulp of damp, evening air into my lungs, the first real breath I’ve taken in minutes, and tell myself everything is going to be okay.
For a tiny sliver of time, I feel nothing but sweet, undisturbed relief.
And then the camera flashes start.
***
“How bad is it?”
“It’s—”
“Wait!” I interject, hands pressed firmly over my eyes so I can’t see Shelby’s face. Or her computer screen. “Lie to me.”
“It’s not that bad, Gem.”
“Really?” I ask, hope lacing my voice.
“No, not really. You asked me to lie to you, remember? It’s bad. Like, really bad.”
I fall back against Shelby’s couch — a musty, springless, uncomfortable piece she swears is an antique — and groan, loudly. Thank god she was home, when I got here. As a freelance graphic designer, she makes her own hours and, more often than not, she spends her days out of the midsize, recently-renovated house Paul purchased for her in the suburbs four years ago, doing Pilates or Cross Fit or hot yoga or god only knows what other kind of torture.
The one time she’d dragged me to the gym with her, I spent forty minutes flirting with a personal trainer named Drake and bouncing on the exercise balls like a five-year-old while she did a zillion crunches with such determination, you’d think a drill sergeant was standing over her. She never even got winded. As for me, I didn’t get Drake’s number — despite some of my best moves, including (but not limited to) hair-flips and flirty smiles — and I didn’t get another shot, since Shelby never invited me to the gym with her again.
Shocking, I know.
“This is a disaster,” I mutter.
“Yep.” She sounds practically giddy. “There are lots of pictures of you — thank god you were having a good hair day — and they’ve all got delicious headlines like AFTERNOON DELIGHT — GEMMA SUMMERS SPOTTED LEAVING CROFT INDUSTRIES. It’s awesome.”
“Shelby!”
“What?”
“Nothing about this is awesome. I almost went blind from the camera flashes outside Croft Tower, I stubbed my toe on a fire hydrant while I was running away from the swarm of reporters, and the taxi driver I finally managed to hail charged me double because I made him take the long way here, so I wouldn’t be followed.” I sigh. “The story had finally died down, the paparazzi were just starting to leave me alone. And now…”
“Now, they totally know about your tawdry affair with the billionaire!”
My eyes crack open to glare at her. “It’s not an affair. We barely know one another.”
“You’ve kissed,” Shelby points out. “Twice.”
I blush. “Actually…”
“Ohmigod! Not twice?” she squeaks. “As in, more than twice?”
I groan again and throw my arm back over my eyes.
“You’ve been holding out on me, bitch!” Shelby latches onto my arm and pulls it away from my face. “Spill it like a glass of milk.”
I glance at her. “That’s not a thing people say.”
“I say it.”
“Well, it’s not an expression.”
“Ask me how much I care,” she demands. “No? Then spill!”
With a sigh, I tell her about the trip to Brett’s office, Chase dragging me out, and the elevator ride, without going into any details about the fact that, apparently, Brett is a certifiable lunatic. When I describe the elevator kiss, she sighs dreamily and starts to melt. By the time I get to the part about the gentle lip brush in Chase’s apartment, she’s practically dissolved into a puddle of estrogen on the couch beside me.
“Ohmigod,” she breathes, her eyes locked on mine. “YOU ARE TOTALLY HAVING A TAWDRY AFFAIR WITH A BILLIONAIRE!”
“Shelbs! Stop it.”
“What?” she asks. “How is any of this bad? A mega-hot, filthy rich, possessive-in-all-the-right-ways man is interested in you! Not a boy, like the string of losers you’ve hooked up with in the past…a man.”
“Thanks,” I mutter sarcastically. “You’re making me feel much better after my crap day.”