Page 118 of The Guy Who Stole My Ranch

“Too sweet.” Brooke pulled her phone from her pocket. “What’s your number? I’ll text you and we can talk.”

Lorenzo grinned. “Is this your way of getting my number?”

“You bet, handsome.” Brooke winked.

The man laughed, rattled off the information, then nudged me and left.

I moved in front of her and settled my fingers around her upper arms. She looked up at me, and I lowered my forehead to hers. “I am sorry about this.”

“It’s okay. I haven’t had to sneak out the back of a restaurant in ages.” She put a hand on my cheek, which felt as if she were infusing me with energy and strength. “You have meetings the rest of today, right?”

“Unfortunately.” I ran my fingers up her arm. “You’re opening a storage unit tonight?”

“We are.”

“Good.” Once again, my mouth allowed my inner thoughts out into the open. “Then I won’t worry about the other men of New York trying to steal you from me.”

Brooke grabbed my tie and pulled me down until our lips hovered so close I could feel the heat from hers. “You don’t have to worry about that, William.”

Then she kissed me, and I wondered how I could keep her in my life forever.

Chapter 31

-Brooke-

“Someone’s distracted.” Nanette nudged me with her elbow as we walked down the hall of the storage unit facility.

“Huh?” I asked, knowing that daydreaming about William had kept me from hearing whatever my friends had been saying for the last few minutes.

The other four women of the Curvy Girl Crew laughed.

“Told you,” Teresa said with a smirk.

“She’s making that face you’ve all been making since you met the men of your dreams,” Jessica said.

That made me feel a little bad, and I blinked and vowed to focus on the people around me.

Ashley, who walked ahead of us with a pair of bolt cutters over her shoulder, looked back and grinned. “How was breakfast?”

I shot an annoyed glance at Jessica, who winked at me. Apparently, she had spilled the beans on what I’d been up to this morning.

“He took you to Lorenzo’s Stove?” Nanette asked. She’d worn a yellow casual jogging suit that stood out next to her dark skin.

I nodded. “It was good.” The to-go boxes were piled in Jessica’s fridge, and we planned to feast on them later.

If anyone knew the restaurant, Nanette would. She’d married a Broadway star who had moved on to movies, and I knew they frequented such establishments. When they had to. Nanette had told us that she and David preferred the places they found via random internet searches that looked terrifying from the outside but turned out to have the best food around.

That reminded me of Whitehill BBQ, which I’d had a hankering for since I’d gotten here, and that reminded me of William and Frank interrupting my lunch in the park all those weeks ago.

“You know we want the details,” Teresa said. She wore a mildly terrible white sweater knitted with tubas on it. I had no doubt her husband, Marcus, had found it for her, and I had no doubt that she wore it whenever she taught tuba lessons. She still had the glow of a newlywed, and I recognized the excitement in her eyes as the desire to help me find my happily ever after too.

I resisted the urge to look at Jessica, who had to be feeling a bit left out, and shrugged. “What’s there to tell? This annoying billionaire is buying my dad’s ranch. He asked me to train him for a week so he knew what it took to run the place. He’s pretty good-looking and kind of awesome. We kissed during a rainstorm. We had breakfast this morning. The end.”

Everyone laughed.

“You’re the worst storyteller ever,” Ashley said from ahead of us.

A man coming from the other direction saw her and did a double take as he went by. Not because she was five-ten and a size three, she was that tall but not that thin, but likely because she’d won theBattle of the Blowers, a glass blowing competition show on television. She’d won the hearts of tens of thousands of people that watched her systematically destroy her competition, in the most kind and loving way possible. Her red hair had become iconic on the show, as had her infectious laugh and her habit of always encouraging her competitors.

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