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Oh, hell no.
It’s my job, as her older sister, to stop her from making that mistake. To save her relationship—and the app.
Engagement jokes aside, Willa was clear: the investors need a poster couple, and what better poster couple is there than one of the sisters who created the app and a handsome employment attorney dating steadily for six months?
Lexi and Jake are it.
This is happening.
And the “extreme makeover” edition of the boy-next-door is not fucking it up for us.
Chapter Three
River
After a decade spent living in the world’s greatest city, New York, the Huntington house is both smaller and grander than I remember it.
The sheer size defies my imagination.
This place is a castle, with apartments, a pool, and a rose garden. And it’s completely lacking the history and taste of an actual castle. Or, say, a brownstone on the Upper East Side. A four-story apartment building in the Village. Even compared to one of those new buildings in the Financial District, the place feels too new. Only it also feels too dated.
As if it’s stuck in its strange mix of seventies original construction and nineties McMansion grandeur. Red tile roofs, white paint, wide windows, rectangular pool.
Well, there’s no arguing with the pool.
And there’s certainly no arguing with the beauty of Lexi Huntington.
Even after ten years and three thousand miles of space between us, as soon as I see her, I fall under her spell immediately. I tried to forget her, and for a while, I thought I had. But now…
She fits perfectly into her surroundings. She’s the vision of the ideal California woman—busty, sun-kissed, friendly—in the ideal California setting. A beige patio chair, under an umbrella, soaking in all the shade on a cloudy day.
And the pool. All that azure water casting highlights on her gorgeous face.
She smiles as she removes her round sunglasses. “Hey.”
My heart thuds against my chest.Hey. That’s all it takes.
Ten years without seeing or hearing her and I’m swooning over a friendly hello. I can’t help it. There’s something to Lexi beyond colors and shapes. Beyond a linear narrative.
This isn’t just the dork falling for the popular girl.
It’s more.
Kismet. Destiny. Magic.
It has to be—because I’m not nearly as innocent now as I was before, and I still feel it.
“Hey,” I say back.
She brushes a hair behind her ear and looks me over carefully, studying the line of my jaw, the cut of my shoulders, the fit of my jeans. I know what that look means.
A million times, I imagined the thrill of Lexi’s interest, but the real thing is even more intoxicating.
I don’t move. I don’t think. I don’t even breathe.
She looks me over again, this time stopping at the tattoo on my chest. The one that peeks out from under my V-neck tee.
I didn’t believe my ex when she told me it would drive women crazy, but it does.
