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Oh my God.
What the fuck am I doing?
Why am I more bothered about the gossip rather than what he just told me?
“H-how do you know all this?” I ask, gripping the counter tightly.
“You told me.”
“I know that,” I tell him, licking my lips. “But h-how do you remember all this? How do you…”
“I guess I just have a good memory.”
“And…” I try to gather my breath. “And did you really do that? To Tessa. For me.”
For this he takes a couple of seconds to answer. Then, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because she messed with you.”
“So?”
“So I messed with her back.”
I lick my lips again. “Yeah. B-but why? Why would you care enough to —”
“Because you were my sister’s best friend. And because I could.”
My heart’s pounding and pounding in my chest. “But I thought… I thought I was your rival’s little sister. And nothing else.”
“Yeah well, it’s fucking complicated, isn’t it?” he says coolly. “What you were or what you are. I just did it as a favor.”
I don’t know what to make of it.
What he did and why he did it.
Not to mention that it’s pretty fucking surreal that he did it at all.
Pair all this with his apology, I can almost start to assume things. I can almost start to hope.
But I’m not stupid, not anymore.
He probably did it because he could, as he said. And as a favor. Nothing to freak out about.
Even so, I can’t help but blurt out, “It’s not Jimmy Anthony. It’s Marc Anthony. You’re thinking about Jimmy Choo.” His eyes narrow slightly at my correction. “And did Viktor Sullivan really move to the west coast?” His eyes narrow further. “Only b-because I never heard anything about it and…” When his jaw clenches, I change topics. “And eleven.”
He watches me for a few beats, his dark eyes penetrating. Then, “Jimmy Choo and Marc Anthony can go fuck themselves. If you want proof of Viktor Sullivan moving to the west fucking coast, I’d be happy to fly over and bring you photos of him laid up in a hospital bed. And eleven what?”
I bite my lip at the strong shiver that rolls down my body at the absolute murder I hear in his voice at the mention of Viktor Sullivan. A boy I’d met on the playground when I was five and I didn’t even remember up until he brought him up.
See? Crazy possessive.
For absolutely no reason.
“When I started baking,” I reply. “The age of eleven.”
I thought his eyes were super intense before but at my reply, they become scorching.
Blazing.
I want to say that they feel like the rays of the sun, but with him, there’s no brightness or sunshine, only thunder and rain. So it’s like looking into the eye of a storm.
“Why did I not know about it?”
“Because I…” I trail off, trying to gather the right words in which to express why.
He doesn’t have a problem though with that. “Because you wanted to bake them for me.”
I blush, thinking for a second that I should lie. But then, I whisper, “Yes.”
“Badly.”
“Y-yes.”
“And you wanted me to like them.”
I blush harder. “I did.”
“Again,” he says in a lowered voice. “Badly.”
I nod. “And so I thought it would be better if I just… never made them. For you.”
“You thought wrong,” he tells me, his eyes still burning my cheeks.
“It was something…” I swallow again and lick my lips and curl my toes, feeling all kinds of restless. “I read it in a romance novel.”
“What romance novel?”
“My favorite.”
His eyes flick back and forth between mine. “The one with the baker chick and that douchebag.”
“Jason was not a douchebag,” I say, frowning even as I tell myself that maybe I’m focusing on the wrong thing.
The right thing to focus on is that he wasn’t lying.
He does remember my favorite romance novel.
But then again if I focused too much on that, then that would be make me a fool and not a smart girl.
“Yeah, he was,” he says.
“No, he wasn’t,” I insist.
“Instead of telling the truth like a man, he kept showing up at her bakery and eating her cupcakes like he hadn’t eaten in days.”
“He kept showing up and eating her cupcakes because he loved her, you idiot.”
“No,” he explains. “He kept showing up and eating her cupcakes because he wanted to get in her pants.”
“What?”
“Which if he had admitted it like a man in the beginning of the book, then we wouldn’t have to read three hundred pages of nonsense only to come to the same conclusion at the end.”
I lean forward, completely outraged. “It wasn’t bullshit, okay? It was swoon-y. Her business was failing. She thought that she wasn’t a good enough baker to cut it. So he showed up every day to show her that she was. That she could do it.”
I can’t believe he didn’t see that.
Ugh. Boys.
