Second Chance Mess (Bad News Billionaires #1) - Lucia Jordan Page 0,35

only one who can make the decision on what you want to do. I’ll stand by you either way.”

“I don’t want to lose Brooke,” I said resolutely. “It’s worth the risk; she’s worth the risk to me.”

“All right, man,” Max said as he held his glass up toward the sky in a toast. “We’re building Brooke’s house then. Let the rest of the pieces fall where they may.”

I lifted my glass to his, and the sound of our drinks clinking against each other echoed in the mountains. He was such a good friend, and I wouldn’t be able to pull this off without him. In the morning, I would go into the office and get everyone set up to be self-sufficient on the Spokane project for the next week. Then I would pull the sub-contractors that I needed with me and offer them twice what they were being paid on the Spokane project to come and build this house for me. Max would be back over first thing in the morning, and we would focus all of our efforts on this build and hope that nothing imploded along the way.

After Max left, the last thing I did, before calling it a night, was take a picture of the stars, Cassiopeia, to be exact. It came out beautifully, even with the crappy camera on my cell phone. I sent the picture to Brooke, along with a message.

I miss being under the stars with you.

Then I set my phone down and went inside to brush my teeth and get ready for bed.

When I was done, I picked my phone back up to set the alarm for tomorrow morning. I hadn’t expected to see a text there at all, especially not one from Brooke.

Me too.

I smiled and held those two little words close to my heart as I repeated them in my mind. She had answered me. That meant that she wasn’t ready to let go, either; it meant that what I was doing would work and that it wouldn’t be too much longer before we were back under the stars again together.

I knew that I’d screwed-up a lot with Brooke, but maybe that was supposed to happen as it had so that when we finally got to where we needed to be, all the messing up parts were done. I just hoped that she would be able to wait that long, long enough to see the manifestation of my love for her that I was building.

16

Chapter Twelve (Brooke)

I felt so foolish for having given Tim a second chance. I felt foolish even now for answering his text and wanting to give him a third chance. But there was just something between us that kept pulling us around each other like orbiting planets—a gravitational pull, a force of nature I couldn’t resist. I felt lost when I wasn’t with him, and like my thought were flying off recklessly into space. Maybe that was the sign of a doomed relationship, and perhaps I really just needed to move on. The problem was that I didn’t want to.

Kate got me my job back at the coffee shop, even though I had to grovel and beg the store manager to rehire me, which was humiliating, but I didn’t really care. I had bigger things to worry about than the opinions of a coffee shop manager who went into actual panic attacks when we ran out of the mocha sauce.

I spent more time hanging out with Nick and Kate. You’d think that we would end up going somewhere other than the coffee shop where we worked when we just wanted to chill, but it was easiest just to hang here after our shifts were over. Nick would come in just before closing, and we would stay and talk and make crazy latte concoctions, and then lock up on our way out. It was a good thing that most of the security cameras in the café were broken because I was pretty sure the store manager would fire us if he saw us sitting in the café hours after we had locked up the doors and helping ourselves to pastries from the case.

“I think you should meet a friend of mine,” Nick said to me as we had just finished inventing a new coconut lavender latte. “He’s a pretty cool guy, good-looking, and single.”

“No, thanks,” I said as I shook my head. “I don’t need a guy right now.”

“I think Nick is right,” Kate added on. “You should