Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 97287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 486(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 324(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 486(@200wpm)___ 389(@250wpm)___ 324(@300wpm)
She pulls out of my grip and folds her arms across her chest. “How so?”
“Like we’re meeting for the first time.” I stick out my hand. “Good evening, I’m James Hunter. I’ll be working as the protection officer for the Norwegian royal family. And you are?”
She stares down at my hand.
Then back up at me.
This isn’t going to be easy.
Three
LAILA
I learned at a very early age that life will utterly rip the rug out from under you when you least expect it, and hell if it wasn’t raising its ugly head again because holy shit.
How is this happening?
How the hell am I staring right into the face of the last person on earth I wanted to see?
James Hunter. A person whose name I have trained myself to never repeat inside my head is standing right in front of me, a face I thought I’d erased from my imagination. Somehow he’s walked right back into my life, like he’s been teleported here.
My mind and my body are functioning on two vastly different levels. My brain and my heart are racing, while my body is as frozen as the ice on the ground.
I stare down at James’s hand, wondering what my next move should be. Every instinct inside me is telling me not to shake it, to kick him in the shin and then storm off toward the house.
But my instincts often get me in trouble. It’s logic that I need to start listening to more, not what my gut tells me, because I swear my gut just wants a little excitement from time to time.
I have to do what my brain says. And it says that the only way I’m going to get through this is to make nice with him. Or at least pretend to make nice.
I hold out my hand and quickly shake his. His grip is strong, and far too familiar for my liking, and I try to take it back right away. But his hold is as persistent as he is.
“I mean it,” he says to me, and I hate how rich his Scottish accent is.
“I know we both have a lot of baggage behind us, but I’d like to keep it behind us for the sake of our jobs. I can’t imagine being here,” he continues, looking at the house, the fields, the woods, “and having an enemy.”
I snatch my hand back, burying it in my jacket pocket. “I’m not your enemy,” I tell him.
But he’s giving me a look that says, Oh yeah, then what am I, love?
Okay, he has a point. You’d think I would have had enough time to figure it out, but after I left the Fairfaxes, I put him out of my head. It was next to impossible when I was seeing him every day, but the moment I was gone, I did my best to put everything behind me. His transition from lover to enemy was pretty natural.
Besides, I had my grandmother to look after. She very quickly taught me the significance of life being too short and not letting the bad things take up too much space in your head.
And James Hunter was a very bad thing.
“So now what?” he says to me, shoving his hands into his pockets. “If it’s your night off, and I don’t officially start until tomorrow, do you want to get a drink somewhere?”
I stare at him. “Are you kidding me?”
He frowns, puzzled. “What?”
“What?” I repeat. “I’m not going to get a drink with you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” I have to think about that for a moment. There are a million reasons why—so many that it’s hard to pin it down to one. “Because I don’t want to,” I eventually say.
He lets out a dry laugh. “Fair enough. So much for trying to start things off on the right foot.”
Ugh. I guess he is trying. I should too. Even though he’s the one who broke it off with me and turned into a complete douchebag right after, so really, it’s about balance.
“Just because I can suck things up and tolerate you being here doesn’t mean I want to get intimate.”
His brows go up. “Who said anything about intimate?” He grins at me, and damn it, I hate that his smile still has the power to knock the air from my lungs. In fact, nothing has changed about him at all. I had foolishly hoped that if I ever saw him again, perhaps a wart would have popped up on the end of his perfect nose, or that he’d lose all the tight, lean muscle I know he has under his clothes, or maybe he’d lose a couple of his perfect white teeth, forever screwing up his smile. Maybe he’d lose some hair while he was at it. But no. His hair is still thick, shiny, and dark. The smile is still gorgeous, his face is smooth and blemish free, maybe a bit more of a beard than the last time I saw him, but it suits him well, and his body seems as in shape as ever.