Page 18 of King of Temptation

So maybe he was right about her books being bullshit.

Asshole.

“Fuck this,” she muttered, annoyed with herself for moping around like a lovesick teenager.

Just as she was stalking to her kitchen for a third cup of coffee, the sound of her favorite time-traveling alien landing his blue police box rang out from her pocket. Pulling her phone free, she stopped dead in her tracks at the message on her screen.

* * *

[Aria: So… are you sitting gingerly this morning?]

* * *

Embarrassment heated Goldie’s cheeks. It wasn’t that she had anything against sharing her sexual exploits with a friend. But with all her high school besties either happily settled down with the requisite husband and two-point-five children or off chasing their own adventures in another part of the country, she didn’t really have any close friends to share such things with.

And it wasn’t really like she’d had much to share up until recently, anyway.

Now, though… Now she did have something she was dying to talk about with someone. And judging by the message sitting on her phone, Aria was quite possibly the one person in Goldie’s world who could even begin to understand what she was feeling.

“Okay. We can do this. It’s just a bit of girl talk.”

* * *

[Goldie: A bit, yeah. How did you know?

Aria: I may have done a little reconnaissance of my own in Killian’s phone. Boys are the biggest gossips, I swear.]

* * *

Oh, god. The head of the local Irish mafia knew she’d gotten her ass spanked like a naughty child.

Lord, just take me now.

* * *

[Aria: Anyway, I thought you might need a sympathetic ear.

Goldie: Understatement of the year. Do you wanna grab a coffee or something? There’s a local place, Rev and Roll, that makes the best chocolate chip muffins.]

* * *

Nerves, almost as bad as what she’d felt waiting for Brody to spank her, churned in her stomach while she sipped her coffee and waited for Aria’s response. Had she overstepped? Aria was the one who’d offered her ear, but maybe she’d just meant through text. Maybe she didn’t actually want to be the kind of friends who randomly hung out at a coffee shop in the middle of a weekday.

Ugh. Why the hell was making new friends as an adult so fucking hard?

After what felt like hours of stressing over whether she’d scared off her potential new bestie, her phone finally chimed again.

* * *

[Aria: Give me half an hour.

Goldie: It’s a date.]

Brody

* * *

Where the hell was she going?