Trouble with the Fake Boyfriend (Rock Bottom #3) - Holly Renee Page 0,26

with a smile on his face and water trickling down his neck. “What? What will you do?”

“Something.” I pointed my finger at him, but he only laughed.

He wasn’t scared of me in the least.

He started paddling, moving us away from our boat, and I laid back, not helping him at all.

There were at least ten other boats tied up alongside ours and probably forty people swimming and hanging out on the boats. It was odd. I had never been to a floating party like this in my life.

Several people yelled their hellos and welcome homes to Liam, and I wasn’t surprised to see how many of them were vying for his attention.

“So, Brooke. What do you do?” one girl who was sitting on the edge of a boat with her feet splashing in and out of the water asked. I had already forgotten her name.

“I run a salon. You?”

Liam was talking to some guy at his side and paying us no attention.

“I’m a bartender.”

She was hot, and I was sure she made tons of tips, so I told her so.

“I bet the tips are good.”

“They are.” She smiled. “It’s the only reason I haven’t quit yet. Oh. Hey, Katie!”

She was waving at a girl on a boat that just pulled up, and I wouldn’t have paid her any attention if she wasn’t so pretty and the guy who was supposed to be my boyfriend didn’t tense up like someone had just yelled that there was a shark in the water.

I looked over at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. His gaze was bouncing back and forth between the guy he was talking to and the brunette on the boat.

She was gorgeous, in that effortless beauty sort of way. Her dark hair was tied into a bun on the top of her head, but soft curls had fallen out and framed her face. Her nose was covered in freckles from the sun and good genetics, and if Liam didn’t seem so affected by her, I would admit that she was by far the prettiest girl out here.

“Hey!” Katie waved over at the group with a huge smile on her face, but I caught the moment it faltered. The moment her eyes landed on Liam.

Whatever was going on between them or had gone on between them, it had affected them both, and it was complete bullshit that something I didn’t know a thing about, had no business knowing, seemed to be affecting me too.

She seemed to catch herself and the way she was staring at Liam as some guy took a seat next to her. She looked up and shared a sweet smile with him before she finally looked at me.

She still had a smile on her face, and I had a feeling that she rarely let that smile slip. It looked too practiced and perfected, almost exactly the way Liam’s was. But her eyes were pinched in the corners, and I knew she wanted to know who the hell I was as badly as I wanted to know the same about her.

She stood, jerking her gaze away from me as if she couldn’t take another second of it, and I watched as she jumped into the water without a second of fear.

Whoever this girl was, she had meant something to Liam or she still did, and I couldn’t stop watching him as he watched her.

Eight

My Girlfriend, Brooke

Liam

If I had known that Katie was going to be here, I would have never brought Brooke. Hell, I wouldn’t have come at all.

I hadn’t seen her in so long I was a little shocked looking at her. She looked almost exactly the same as the day I left, but she looked so different as well.

So much had changed.

We had both changed.

When Tucker and I decided to move away from Tennessee, I had thought Katie would be coming with us. She went everywhere with me. She had for years. While my focus was completely on her, I was a fool for not seeing that hers was on someone else. The same someone else that was now helping her back into his boat.

“Who’s that?” Brooke’s voice startled me, and I realized I had barely taken my eyes off Katie since she arrived.

Shit.

“That’s no one.” I took a long pull from my beer and tried to settle the small ache that still echoed in my chest.

“It’s definitely someone.” She said the words for only me to hear, and I wondered if I was crazy for thinking