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Chapter 1
OLIVIA
“Ineedahusband!”
“You… what?” My brother Danny asked, staring at me as if I had lost my mind.
“Drinks would be appropriate for this story,” his best friend Jake said, heading to the refrigerator.
Jake and Danny called themselves roommates, although, in my mind, it was a pretty loose interpretation of the word. When I thought of a roommate, I imagined splitting the expense of a low-cost apartment. Splitting was what I did with my own roommate, Tanya. I didn’t think of co-owning one of the largest mansions in LA the way my brother and Jake did.
I took a seat at their kitchen table, and Jake passed me a beer. I tried to twist the cap off, but it didn’t want to budge. “I had just returned from an interview for a position doing rewrites for a Michael Sanders war movie,” I explained.
“You’re kidding,” Danny said. “A job writing on a Michael Sanders movie? He’s one of the hottest up-and-coming producers in Hollywood. How’d you get an interview?”
“You know that sitcom project I did script polish on last fall?”
“Sure.”
“The director is friends with one of the screenwriters, and I assume he liked my work because he gave the screenwriter my name and a sample of what I’d done, and the guy apparently asked Sanders to bring me in.”
Danny let out a whistle and looked satisfyingly impressed.
But Jake smirked. “I guess it really is all about who you know in the movie business.”
I ignored him. He wasn’t going to provoke me.
“Did you get the job?” Danny asked.
“I did.”
“Holy shit! That’s amazing!” Danny held up a hand for a high five.
I shook my head. “Don’t congratulate me yet,” I said. “I don’t have any direct experience writing about wars. So, when the producer asked about my experience, I said my brother was a retired Navy SEAL.”
“Nice one. I can definitely help you out.”
“A SEAL brother wasn’t enough for him,” I explained. “He gave me this look as if he thought I had no idea what the hell I was talking about. It was like he thought having a SEAL for a brother was nothing—“
“It isn’t nothing.”
“And I so badly wanted the damn job, so…well, I told him my husband was a SEAL too.”
Jake burst out laughing.
I scowled at him. Jake might have been hot—okay, he was definitely hot. He had big military muscles and blue eyes you could get lost in. His sandy hair, which had always been cropped short while he was on active duty, had grown long since he and my brother moved out to California, making him look like the world’s most buff surfer. But that didn’t mean he didn’t bug the living hell out of me. He always had, ever since we were kids.
“It’s not funny.”
“No, it’s pretty funny,” Jake said. “I mean, it was clever of you. And if it landed you the job, then—“
“Then nothing. They want my husband to join me and be a military consultant on the movie,” I said, turning my attention back to Danny. “They hired me conditionally, and if I can’t provide a military husband, I’m going to get fired.”
“Give me that.” Jake took my beer out of my hands and flicked off the cap with his thumb.
Fuck. Even after all these years, despite his teasing, mocking, and leaving me out of things he and Danny had done together when we were younger, he still made me hot.
My body didn’t seem to care that he was an arrogant jerk who didn’t care who he hurt with his actions. Given how he had always treated me, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. We might be adults now, but nothing has changed. He’d never even apologized.
