Page 1 of Best Served Cold

CHAPTER ONE

SOPHIE

“Uh, Otis?” I ask, waving the phone screen at my twenty-one-year-old cousin. My hand is jittering, causing my two-carat diamond ring to sparkle in the light streaking in through the kitchen window. “Can you come take a look at this? I need a second opinion.”

Otis sighs as he sets down the toast he was preparing, spilling a glop of jam onto his grandmother’s granite counter. If I don’t clean it up, it will probably remain there until we both die. He once found—and ate—a chocolate bar that had been wedged between the couch cushions for an uncertain amount of time. My cousin is sweet, mostly, but cohabitating with him has not been the highlight of my time in Asheville. Now, though…

I’ve never been a lucky woman. Bad luck follows me around the way other people are trailed by loving pets. I know better than to tell anyone this, but in my lowest moments I worry I’m cursed. Still, I’m hoping against hope Otis will be able to explain away the text message that just ruined my life.

My pulse thunders as he takes the phone in his sticky hand and peers at the screen.

“What the…?”

He glances at me in disbelief.

I feel my hope shriveling like a raisin. So, the text says what I thought it did…

BigCatchBabe: I can’t wait to see you this afternoon. I’ve been thinking about it all week. After I suck your cock, you can bend me over that barrel again. ;-)

“Uh, Soph.” Otis returns the phone, which I nearly drop, clumsy from nerves. “Doesn’t this person realize you don’t have a cock?”

“It’s not my phone,” I snap, slapping it down on the counter with a resonant crack. Hopefully, it broke.

Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out.

But panic has already cracked me down my middle, heartache seeping out. This is bad. So bad I have to borrow a phrase from Jane Austen to describe it: it’s aruinousaffair.

“You stole someone else’s phone?” Otis asks, his forehead furrowing. “But why?”

Without looking at him, I respond in a gush of words. “It’s Jonah’s. He just bought me a new one, and he set the wallpaper so it’s the same as his. They’re basically identical, and he took mine by mistake this morning. When I realized what happened, I thought it would be funny to text him from his own phone—healwaysuses his birthday as his password—but then this text popped up, and…” I swallow the rest of the run-on sentence. “You think someone’s playing a joke on him? Like one of his buddies?”

His mouth falls open, closes, and then opens again. I’m hoping some brilliant explanation will spill out. Instead, he rubs his chin and says, “Yeah, guys don’t joke around like that, Soph. Not unless they’re secretly blowing each other.”

“So you think…?”

He looks like he does every time I ask him to do something around the house—panicky. I can see sweat beading above his upper lip as he shifts his weight. Avoiding my eyes, he stammers, “You know what? I gotta go. I forgot, but I have this thing. It’s pretty important, and yeah…I’ll see you later. Sorry.”

“For what?” I ask numbly as he edges away, abandoning his toast.

He lifts a shoulder, shamefaced. “For…you know…being a guy.”

“You don’t have anywhere to be,” I accuse, the words sharper than they should be. Heislying, obviously, but he’s not the one who did this to me.

Jonah is.

Jonah Price is my fiancé of four months.

He told me he wanted to marry me after our first date and bought me an iPad three weeks later, loaded with my “favorite songs.” Truthfully, it was his favorite music, but it was still an attempt at thoughtfulness. So was the way he proposed, with a bouquet of handpicked flowers.

My great-aunt Penny would point out that he’d woven poison ivy into the arrangement, but he’s not a florist. How was he supposed to know?

Jonah has been my silver lining for months, my proof that my life isn’t as hollow as it sometimes feels. But if this text means what I think it does…

My knees go weak.

It’s like twelve years have been rewound and I’m sixteen again, stuck in the worst moment of my life. Rinse, repeat.

“Can I leave?” Otis asks as he scratches his head violently. “I think that might be better for both of us. I mean…Jonah hates me anyway. He’s definitely going to find some way to blame this on me.”

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