Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 60905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
“Either way the joke’s on you,” Lila muttered as she folded a pair of yoga pants.
Brady started rooting through her suitcase again, and this time he emerged with a small pair of silk panties dangling from his little finger.
Good god, did she really wear panties that small?
Lila smacked Brady’s hand, and the panties fell back into her suitcase. “Keep your hands off my underwear,” she scolded. She was disciplined enough not to look over at the phone Gideon was holding to make sure he’d gotten that, but I wasn’t. My friend’s face was frozen in concentration as he panned the camera around the room.
He probably thought that Lila had been paying him a compliment by choosing him to record this scene, but I knew better. I’d seen her reaction when he’d startled her downstairs. I could practically see her hackles rise. It was obvious that she blamed Gideon the most for our stunt with the fake massage tech. Of course, she didn’t seem inclined to let Brady or me off the hook either, but she seemed the most pissed off at him.
The whole thing actually had been his idea, but she had no way of knowing that. Even with our other jobs, it was a struggle for Brady and me to keep this place afloat. The taxes on the house and the land went up every single year. Gideon had offered many times to pay for upgrades, but I wouldn’t take him up on his offer. That wasn’t what friends were for.
When we’d first gotten word that a popular online influencer had disparaged us out of the blue, I was mad. So was Brady. But not Gideon. He hatched a plan.
“And this.”
I tuned back into the conversation to see Brady holding a thick toothbrush.
“You can’t be serious,” Lila said.
“It’s electric.”
“I need to be able to brush my teeth!” She turned to me with puppy-dog eyes under those thick lashes.
“I’m sure you can keep your teeth clean without a toothbrush capable of running NASA,” I said.
Lila pouted, but Brady pulled a simple white toothbrush sealed in plastic out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “We’re a full-service inn, you know.”
She took it begrudgingly and examined it. “You spelled the name of the inn wrong.”
“What?” Brady snatched it back and examined it while Lila smirked. My cousin had a bit of a naïve streak, but luckily, it only came out when he was around beautiful women.
And Lila sure was beautiful. There was no question of that. The first time I laid eyes on her in person, back in that fake lab, I’d wanted to plunge my fingers in her mane of honey brown hair. I’d actually been jealous that Gideon got to give her a scalp massage—not that he’d been able to feel the texture of her locks through the gloves he wore.
“What other tech have you tried to sneak in?” Brady asked Lila, but his gaze was on me, and I realized I wasn’t doing my part.
Plunging my hand into her suitcase, I ignored the smooth, silky undergarments and zeroed in on something I’d caught a glimpse of before. An eReader.
“Oh, come on,” Lila complained. “You guys are all about the old-fashioned lifestyle. Shouldn’t you want me to read?”
Brady spoke before I could. “Back in the olden days, there were these low-tech devices that people could use, and we just happen to have a bunch of them out in the lounge. They’re called books.”
“Don’t use terms she doesn’t understand,” Gideon said from behind the camera.
Lila’s pink lips curved into a snarl as she turned to him before she caught herself. “Books… I think I’ve heard of them.”
“They’re made out of paper,” Gideon said, his voice full of sarcasm designed to make our guest see red. “Paper comes from trees. And trees are those large green things surrounding the inn.”
“I wondered what those were,” Lila said, unfazed. “Guess not everything’s been replaced by tech… yet.”
I shuddered at the thought. I loved the woods around the house. Brady and I had spent our summers out there from dawn until dusk. But I didn’t think Lila was truly anti-nature. She just seemed anti-Gideon.
As I set her eReader down on the growing pile of things we were confiscating, she sulked at me. “So if you guys are supposed to replace my tech, is one of you going to come read me a bedtime story at night?”
A not-safe-for-work image filled my mind. It involved me sitting next to a very scantily clad Ms. James and reading her an adult story that would make her toes curl. I had to admit, it was an intriguing thought—mainly because Lila was an intriguing woman.
She was beautiful, yes, with curves in all the right places. But it was more than that. Once she’d come onto our radar, I’d watched a lot of her videos to find out who she was and why she went after us. I still hadn’t figured out the latter, but that didn’t change the fact that she was a vivacious young woman.