Second Chance Mess (Bad News Billionaires #1) - Lucia Jordan Page 0,28

as soon as it happened. Brooke and I are in such a good place right now, and this issue is over. I just don’t want to upset her over nothing. I feel like it will do more harm than good, even if I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I don’t know, man. I really feel like it’s the wrong move not to tell Brooke. If she finds out about it from somewhere else, it’ll make you look guilty, and it’ll make you look like you lied again and got turned on by the same woman that almost caused you to lose Brooke in the first place.

“The only reason I even got turned on my that touch was that I had been thinking about having sex with Brooke. I can’t lose her again, Max, I think I’m in love with her.”

Max smiled when he heard my admission of love for Brooke. He had known if even before I admitted it to myself. “You’d better not screw this up with her,” he said. “I like Brooke, and I really think you two need each other.”

“Yeah, I think we do, too. Which is why I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that I don’t lose her.”

“Okay, guys,” Brooke said as she came back around the corner with three steaming cups of hot coffee. “Who’s ready for some caffeine?”

We took our cups from her and set them all down onto the table. Before we got back to work, I grabbed her by the waist and wrapped my arms around her and kissed her. After she got over the initial shock that I had kissed her in the office in front of Max and anyone else who might have walked by, she relaxed, and I felt her body melt in my arms as she kissed me back and put her hands against my chest. When we let go, we both saw Max with a wide smile as he looked at us.

“I love you guys together,” he said.

“So do I,” Brooke said as she smiled contently and came to sit back down next to him.

This was how I wanted every day to be; with me and Brooke and Max, all sitting around the office, enjoying creating new projects together. This was why I couldn’t let some ridiculous photo shoot and some offensively obsessed woman ruin what I had going on here. I had way too much to lose. My company was going great with this new contract, my relationship was going great with Brooke, and Max had just agreed this morning that he would stay on-board with the project to completion instead of just doing the one or two builds that he had first committed to.

He was getting ready to take another wandering trip in his van off into the wilderness somewhere in the country for a few months, but I had convinced him to stay. Well, actually, I think it might have been Brooke who had convinced him to stay. I think seeing the two of us together made him happy, too. There was just a good feel in the company overall now, and I didn’t want it to end.

“So when does the promotional material from the shoot come out?” Brooke asked.

“The photographer is going to submit the few best shots to the client for approval, and then they’ll get to work on creating the final image products. Probably should only take a few days.”

“Cool, I can’t wait to see it! How was the other model?”

Max looked up at me, disapprovingly. I knew what he was thinking. He thought that now was my one and only chance to tell Brooke what had really happened at the photo shoot. He was right; I should have.

“She was fine,” I said.

“What did she look like?” Brooke asked.

For a minute, I wondered if she had heard that it was Chelsea, too, and that maybe this was some sort of test that I was failing miserably. But then she went on to talk about how she thought a redhead would have made a nice contrast against the greenish mountain landscape on the backdrop.

“She didn’t have red hair,” I said. “It was black.”

“I suppose black hair would look nice too.”

Then I realized like an idiot that she would see that it was Chelsea once the client’s material was published.

“It was actually Chelsea,” I said. “The client requested her, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.”

For a minute, Brooke paused, and I knew that I should have told