Anyone But Nick (Anyone But... #3) - Penelope Bloom Page 0,23
this was good. Even if it was painful to make a fool out of myself again and again in front of him, at least it was helping to simplify the situation. After all, I wouldn’t need to worry about developing feelings for him if he didn’t want anything to do with me in the first place.
Except there had been something in his eyes that didn’t quite add up. In his office, it had seemed like he was actively trying to put distance between us. Then, just minutes later, I’d sensed something else.
Thug came up to me and headbutted my thigh until I relented and scratched his ears. He sat down contentedly, apparently assuming the scratches would continue.
“You’re a manipulator,” I said to him. “Aren’t you? Can’t get by on your good looks, so you have to resort to psychological warfare. Well, don’t get used to it. I’m going to find somebody to take you off my hands as soon as I can.”
Unsurprisingly, Thug was not impressed by my tough-guy act.
When my thoughts went back to Nick—which seemed an inevitability lately—I wanted to groan with frustration. Why couldn’t he just make it simple? Either he was interested, or he wasn’t. Either I’d landed this job because he thought I was qualified, or it was because he was trying to get into my pants.
Nick was painfully attractive, but the idea of him giving me a job just to try to sleep with me made my stomach turn over. For more reasons than one, I desperately hoped that wasn’t the case. Then again, with the way he’d shut me down in his office, it felt more like he was trying very hard to keep out of my pants.
“Why are men so complicated?” I asked Bone Thug.
He tilted his goofy protruding teeth up at me and then sloppily licked his lips.
Nick was hosting the party at his house, but calling the place a house felt as inadequate as calling a gunshot wound a “boo-boo.”
It was a mansion in every sense of the word. The driveway sloped and curved down toward what appeared to be a massive garage below. Huge, perfectly squared-off hedges stretched out from either side but didn’t completely conceal the watery glow of a pool in the back. And the building itself was a glass-and-steel masterpiece with so many architectural flourishes that I probably could’ve spent hours just admiring the outside. It all looked sparkling and new, because it was. Houses like this hadn’t existed in West Valley before the King brothers brought Sion here. He must’ve paid a fortune to have the construction fast-tracked, because I would’ve thought something this massive would take years to complete.
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, seeing Nick’s house in person made him feel even more like some larger-than-life figure. On one hand, I couldn’t help realizing he was exactly what most guys would be if they had a magic genie lamp and unlimited wishes. He was shockingly handsome, rich, and intelligent. I played pretend at being perfect, but Nick was nearly the real thing. So why should I have been so surprised that he passed on me all those years ago?
I’d still spent seven years brooding over the way it had all happened. Seven years of unintentionally elevating him to supervillain status. A few months of being ignored by him while watching him gallivant around town with his brothers had only helped push him even farther up the evil totem pole. And now he was adding emotional whiplash to his bad track record with me to round it all out.
The only problem was that obsessively thinking about Nick for seven years had apparently had some unintended side effects on my brain. Instead of doing what normal people did and moving on long enough for the flame to grow cold, I found it still raged inside me. I liked to think it was an angry kind of raging, but I was starting to see the danger of feeling any emotion so powerfully for so long.
It felt like all that energy could just as easily get redirected if I wasn’t careful. One wrong look, one flirtatious comment, or one innocent touch could be enough to set me down a dangerous path with him. I was already feeling it in how much unwarranted focus I was putting on a few interactions with him, how I was endlessly turning the conversations over in my head and trying to read his intentions.