Rebel Heir (Rush Series Duet #1)(11)
Being a bar owner, most drunken babbling annoyed the crap out of me, but on Gia, for some reason I found it fucking adorable. “Yes, Gia. I know what you mean.”
“Okay, then. Anywho. Thanks again.”
She started to get out of the car and then I remembered I hadn’t told her about fixing her car.
“Wait. I…a…” It hadn’t felt odd when I’d fixed it. In fact, it felt just the opposite—like I was supposed to be fixing it. Yet now that I was about to tell her what I’d done, I realized for the first time that what was odd was my feeling like I was supposed to fix her damn car.
Gia tilted her head waiting for me to finish. A light breeze passed through the open car door, and a wisp of hair blew across her nose. Without thinking, I reached over and brushed it from her face.
Were her lips that fucking plump five minutes ago?
While I stared they parted and her tongue peeked out to trace the length of her bottom lip. The rise and fall of her chest seemed to expand as the inside of my car closed in around us.
Fuck.
It took every ounce of willpower, but I pulled out of whatever the fuck spell she had me falling under. “I gotta get going.”
Gia blinked a few times. “Oh. Okay.” She started to get out of the car again, and I started to feel like I could breathe. But before she closed the door, she leaned down and showed me her dimples. “You know, you can pretend all you want, but I know you wanted to kiss me just now. You shouldn’t have been a pussy and just done it.” Then she shut the door and yelled, “Good night, bossman.”
The next two days I didn’t have to work at the restaurant. Yesterday I’d spent the entire day attempting to write. I’d literally sat at my laptop for twelve hours—and produced nothing. I’d write a few hundred words, read them back, hate every single one of them, and delete. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. By the end of the day, I had added the sum total of nineteen words. Basically, I’d described the sky. I wasn’t even sure what the hell all my characters were named yet.
So on the second day of being off, I decided to take Rush’s advice and blow off the entire day in an attempt to clear my head. I spent the morning and early part of the afternoon in our beautiful yard, lying by the in-ground pool, working on my tan. After I’d gotten enough sun, I decided to go to the theatre that played foreign films a few towns over. I thought it might be a nice change of pace to spend the day reading subtitles and listening to something in French. But I had no transportation.
I knocked on Riley’s bedroom door.
“Come in.”
It looked like she might be getting dressed for work. “Are you working at the restaurant today?”
“Yeah. I’m covering Michael’s shift. Why, what’s up?”
“Do you think I can borrow your car? I’ll drop you off at work and then pick you up at the end of your shift?”
She shrugged. “Sure. Are you going anywhere good?”
“I’m going to go to the movies by myself.”
Riley shook her head. “How many times did you get asked out in the last week working at The Heights? You don’t need to go to the movies alone.”
“All of the guys who come into that place are jerks.”
She looked at me in the reflection of the mirror as she tied her hair into a ponytail. “You can’t let one bad egg ruin the entire summer for you.” I’d confided in Riley about my night with Harlan, the pretty boy I’d slept with who left me with the wrong number.
If I were being honest with myself, I might be letting the sour taste Harlan had left me with taint my thoughts on men who looked like him. But the entire male population out in the Hamptons seemed to be cloned Ken dolls. They looked alike, spoke alike—I’d even noticed most of them smelled the same. Well, except one. Rush smelled like something woodsy and cigarette smoke half the time. My thoughts started to drift off to the weird exchange in the car two nights ago. It was as if Riley read my mind.
Finishing her hair, she turned to face me. “What was going on between you and Rush the other night? One minute he’s going to fire both of us and the next the two of you are laughing hysterically and cursing at each other.”
“Nothing. He’s just fun to screw with.”
Her eyebrows jumped. “Rush? Fun? Maybe you spent too much time out by the pool today and heat stroke is making you delirious.”
I laughed. “He’s got a hard exterior, yes. But I think once you get to know him, there’s a decent guy underneath. I like his dry sarcasm and hard wit.”
Riley grinned. “Not me. I think once you get past that hard exterior, there’s more asshole underneath. Like an onion, every layer you peel back is just more onion. That being said, I bet he fucks like a champ. All that pent-up anger…that hard body. He might be an asshole, but he’s ridiculously hot.”
Well, we could agree on one thing at least… “What time do you have to leave for work? I’d like to take a quick shower if I have time.”
She looked at her phone. “I’m working five to midnight. So you have twenty minutes to get yourself all prettied up for your big solo movie outing.”
After seeing two movies, one in French and the other in Italian, I actually felt invigorated. The first film had been about a woman who pretended to be her sister, after her sister died. The film itself was sort of bleak, but it sparked something creative in me. I actually sat in the theatre for a half-hour after the movie ended and typed a boatload of notes into my phone—all ideas for my book.