Chapter 4

4

Lila

My dad used to tell people I have a photographic memory, but that's not accurate. I actually have a high attention to detail when it matters. Probably got it from my mom. Sometimes I wish I hadn't.

But it all means that I can't make myself forget things that I don't want to remember.

The green embroidered tablecloth that I stared at while Uncle Al told me that my parents were missing when I was twelve. Getting my period while wearing my favorite lavender jeans one weekend and having the headmistress from my boarding school have to explain to me how to use a tampon, because none of the girls in my dorm liked me well enough to do it.

That look on Levi Wilson's face last night when he realized he didn't want to give me that orgasm that was seconds away.

I should be concentrating on what's going on twenty floors above in the hospital, where Uncle Al is lying unconscious.

Instead, I'm picking at the tacos that my friends delivered here for lunch, feeling guilty that I was enjoying the hell out of making out with a stranger in a club bathroom while my last living relative probably needed me, despite the fact that he wasn't really there for me for much of anything, and also despite the fact that his stroke happened while he was chowing on cold fried chicken, watching a rerun of Dancing with the Stars , and getting a blow job in the back of a limo at the same time.

If those smoke detectors hadn't gone off, would Levi have been there with me when I got the call? And would we have gone all the way? Or would we have been laughing over drinks? Would I have asked him to go somewhere quieter with me?

Considering he froze the second before the fire alarms went off—triggered by a malfunctioning smoke machine, I heard later—I doubt it.

Maybe my vagina wasn't up to snuff, but he had to inspect it closely before he knew.

I throw down my chili lime taco.

Could I be a little more inappropriate?

Or a little more distracted when I'm supposed to be not only running a publishing company, but also the de facto person who needs to run Uncle Al's affairs while he's unconscious?

Challenges are usually a good thing. I love a challenge. I've built a fortune on challenges.

But today, I can't concentrate on anything. I couldn't even finish reading a book last night.

"I was thinking we should do a line of crocodile shifter heroines falling in love with mer-dinosaur beta heroes," Knox Moretti, head acquisitions editor for Wellington Holdings' publishing house's romance imprint—aka, my latest challenge at work—is saying. "It'll be a paranormal fantasy time travel imprint with unorthodox gender roles."

I nod absently. "Sounds good."

That kiss…just wow .

But then, that look of horror when the alarms went off…

Maybe he was stoned. He definitely wasn't drunk, but I'm still having a ridiculous fantasy about making a new picture-perfect life for myself with a guy who knows how to kiss a woman.

What the hell is wrong with me?

"Great, because my grandmother already has a draft, but I'm going to need you to run interference when she tries to work in the meteor angle for the black moment. It's good, but her meteors are always made of bacon-covered mothballs that turn into flossing armadillos when they touch lava. Flossing like the dance, not flossing like teeth. Plus, she's done it before."

I nod again, and it's not until Parker, Knox's wife and my friend who knows more about every boy band member in the history of time than I'd be comfortable with if I were Knox, snorts iced tea out her nose that I tune back in to the full conversation.

Mer- what? "Wait. No. We're not publishing your grandmother. Sorry. Hard no."

Knox grins. He's one of those tall, dark, handsome types that I won in a bachelor auction just so I could ask him to come work for Bubble Bath Romance, Wellington's romance publishing company.

Interview him, actually, without him realizing what I was doing. His internet presence was too clean, and I needed to make sure the man behind it wasn't going to get weird and embarrass me, and that he actually had the taste his romance-loving blog said he had.

Call me paranoid—the shoe fits for so many reasons—but I don't tend to blindly trust anything I read on the internet, especially when it comes to men loving romance novels.

"You don't like my nana?" he asks while Parker tries to keep a straight face and chides him about being inappropriate.

"I adore your nana," I say, "but that doesn't mean I'm willing to make her an internationally bestselling dinosaur shifter beta mer-crocodile author."

"And I thought you had vision. Also, it's mer-dinosaurs . And alpha shifter crocodile heroines ."

"Knock it off. Lila clearly has a few other more important things to deal with today." Parker rubs his hair, then winces and grabs a napkin and wipes his hair harder. "Gah. Sorry. Got some of my taco in there."

Of all the women I've ever met in my life, Parker is my absolute favorite, bar none. She's majestically awkward, and she owns it in everything from her autocorrected text conversations to—well, to rubbing tacos in Knox's hair in a hospital cafeteria.

"I like your taco," he says with a brow wiggle.

Her fair skin goes pink. " Shush ."

"You want to head home so you can lick it out?"

"Yes, but we're being polite and having a meeting with your boss . And then we both have to get back to work. Unless Lila needs one of us to stay with her. The taco will, erm, still be there tonight. It'll probably take a shower to get the clumped cheese out."

His eyes go dark, and he doesn't look at me while he talks. Nope, his attention is squarely on the woman he's head over heels in love with. "I hate it when you say shower when it's hours before we can take one."

They're a romance novel come to life. Him, a romance-loving librarian. Her, the geeky organic grocery store vice president who used to babysit him. The two of them together, utterly adorable.

"Go back to the real story idea, please. I'll dismiss you both within five minutes so you can get to naked shower time. Promise."

"We're not abandoning you in your time of need," Parker replies.

"Uncle Al and I weren't close. Boarding school, remember? Besides, I have seventy-five other phone calls to catch up on for the day job, and more meetings to reschedule."

"I thought Wellington's retirement was basically done?"

It is.

My boss's retirement was announced several months ago, which means pulling back from both the holdings part of Wellington Holdings, and also suspending work on the development side of things.

It's not a normal holdings company.

But then, my boss isn't normal either.

And I've really enjoyed the challenge of dismantling a company. So much so, I might've dragged out the process longer than necessary. In truth, those seventy-five phone calls are actually three, and they're final approval phone calls that will leave me with only one project on my plate beyond the publishing house, which I'm terrified I'll get bored with entirely too soon.

I have issues.

But I won't use my issues to hold my friends up when they clearly need to be somewhere.

Parker squeezes my arm. "If Dalton doesn't give you a two-week vacation soon , I'm going to go hunt him down myself and tell him to finish his own damn work."

"That really won't end well."

"Stupid reclusive billionaires and their stupid security," she grumbles. "You deserve time off. At least he's giving you a good severance package."

I gesture around the hospital cafeteria and swallow the guilt at telling my friends that I still have months of work to do to finish the retirement project. "Pretty sure the universe just gave me time off. But. In the meantime—finish with the story idea, please. I really do have to make some phone calls before I check in with the doctors. And I refuse to be a cock-blocker."

They both grin—Knox naughty, Parker embarrassed, and I'd like to tell her that she has nothing to be embarrassed about since she knows he'll actually close the deal tonight, unlike my last encounter with a man, but one, I can't bring myself to ruin the fantasy of one of her favorite boy band members for her, and two, it's not freaking appropriate.

Also, I really need to pay attention. Knox is talking about a self-published book he found about a woman keeping a diary about pretending to be Cinderella to snag a prince who's at her college for a year of studying abroad, but how she's actually falling for the guy playing her fairy godmother. It sounds fun, and I love Cinderella stories almost as much as I love secret baby stories, so I greenlight him to reach out about acquiring the book to repackage, re-edit, and market the hell out of it to take it from obscurity to superstardom.

He knows how to get in touch with the rest of the production and marketing team, so there's not much left for me to do.

I gather my planner and notebook off the table and toss them into my messenger bag, because I know I can't actually make phone calls without checking in with the doctors first.

And odds are good that instead of making my phone calls, I'll be sitting in the waiting room on the twentieth floor, reading a book.

An erotic rock star romance.

About a lead singer who can't get it up after a horrific break-up, and the groupie who's accidentally turning into his physical therapist. Yes, that kind of physical therapist.

It's super sexy, and I had to replace the batteries in my vibrator once already while reading it, and I should probably put that one on hold and grab a time travel romance instead. With shape-shifters. In space.

Dammit .

"You said your nana already has that book written?" I ask with a wince.

Knox grins, and I pretend I don't notice that he's palming Parker's ass while he helps her out of her chair. "I'll shoot it to you on email."

"No judgment here," Parker assures me. "Distractions are a good thing during times of high stress. Plus, we read it in bed the other night. You should really find someone to read in bed with. I highly recommend it. Just don't think about the author while you're reading, and you'll be fine."

Not a chance.

Hook-ups? Yes.

Love and reading romance novels in bed together? No.

That's for people with normal families and normal lives and normal hang-ups.

"Don't forget book club next week too," Knox adds while we make our way to the trash cans. "We're doing all four of those lady billionaire novels. I'm up to Kathryn Nolan's. Fantastic hero—love the motorcycle gang angle."

"I'm still re-reading the closet sex scene in Claire Kingsley's book," Parker whispers.

I manage to not wince at the mention of the book club's selections for next week—the subject matter is unfortunately close to home—and instead make myself smile at the memory of re-reading the closet sex scene a time or seventeen myself. With my vibrator on standby.

It's better than men anyway. No emotional attachments. No worries about having to confess to some of the things I've done in the name of business. No need to spill my secrets.

No hot kisses either, but a girl can't have everything.

"Lila, seriously, we'll stay," Parker says. "I hate seeing you so sad, and I hate the idea that you're all alone."

" Go ," I insist, and I have to fight against the lump suddenly growing in my throat, because now I'm thinking about why I was in the club in the first place. Got something of your mother's , Uncle Al had said. I'll bring it with me to the club tonight. You'll meet me?

He hadn't had anything of my mother's.

And he'd hinted that I should ask Dalton Wellington to lend him some money for the Fireballs baseball team.

I was only there because Uncle Al wanted something. Not because he had something for me.

"I'll text you if you promise to text back," I tell Parker. "That'll be an even better distraction."

"Do you want autocorrect translations or not?" Knox asks.

"Not. I want all the autocorrects, and this gossip is girls only." Just in case I confess to kissing Levi Wilson last night. Because if I'm going to talk about it with anyone, I'm going to tell Parker.

Who will tell Knox, naturally, but I can pretend that's not happening so long as I don't see it in my text string.

Parker grabs me in a hard hug. "I'm working from home the rest of the day. Ten minutes away. Call me and I'll be here, understand?"

I squeeze her back.

And not for the first time in the past year, I wonder how I ever survived without my friends.

I might not have had a normal family or a normal childhood, but I'm slowly learning what it means to belong somewhere.

And that's worth way more than a hot make-out session in a bathroom with a pop star.