Page 31 of Dream On, Liar

I didn’t need to rake my memory to understand who she was talking about. “Yeah, the one you ditched me for?”

“Yes.” She already sounded resigned.

“The ridiculously attractive one” I continued, unable to stop the grin spreading across my face. “The same man you were fully prepared to ignore until he handed you his room key?”

Samyra pointed at me. “You told me to go.”

I practically pushed her into the lift.

“Because once I got a proper look at him, I appreciated the vision too much to let the opportunity go by.”

She groaned and dropped her head onto the table, banging it softly against the surface.

“I was annoyed for, like, ten minutes,” I admitted generously. “Then I saw his face and realised I actually would’ve judged you harder if you hadn’t gone back to his room.”

“That is not helping.” She groaned.

“And if I remember correctly,” I continued sweetly, “you came back the next morning looking like you’d descended from a different planet.”

Samyra groaned, again. “Yes. I get it, you remember him vividly.”

My grin widened. “What about him?”

Her expression shifted into something between irritation and disbelief. “Apparently, he’s an F1 driver.”

Silence blanketed our flat as I blinked, processing her words.

“Excuse me?”

“Axel Beauman. That’s his name,” She nodded, almost like she wasn’t pleased. “I didn’t know at the time,” she defended. “And before you say anything, I genuinely didn’t. I only found out last weekend when Ishaan sent me the first draft of the proposal to look over, and it included their driver line up at the end.”

I stared at her for a long moment. “You hooked up with a Formula One driver and somehow forgot to mention that detail?”

“I didn’t know he was a Formula One driver!” she repeated, exasperated. “To me he was just...some guy I bumped into in a club in Manchester and had a one-night stand with.”

“That sentence alone should get studied by scientists.” I replied, sounding half-dazed already, before I paused. “Is he any good?”

She narrowed her eyes like I was betraying some kind of silent promise.

“Well. Is he?” I pressed.

When she only shook her head and reached for her yoghurt instead, I leaned across the counter and grabbed her phone before she could stop me.

“What are you doing?” she demanded immediately, her pitch raising with concern as I stepped back until I was out of her reach.

“Research,” I replied calmly, already unlocking her phone and typing his name into the search bar. The violent scrape of her bar stool against the floor echoed through the kitchen as she lunged upright.

But the screen had already finished loading making me burst into laughter. Samyra’s expression turned murderous just as she snatched the phone back out of my hands.

“How many times have you looked him up,” I gasped between laughs, “for his profile to come up as ‘You visit often’?”

“That means nothing,” she said far too quickly, clutching her phone to her chest.

“It means you looked him up enough times for the search engine to place a banner on his profile—”

“It means I was verifying information.”

“You verified him multiple times?” I raised my brows.