Page 32 of Meet Hate Love
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“You should feel my chest. I can promise you it’s five beats per minute away from heart-attack level. And no, that was not an invitation to put your hand on my tit.”
He snorted before taking a sharp turn onto a gravel path that led through small trees and shrubbery.
“Did you, Dickcasso, just snort at the word tit?”
“I prefer content creator, and I snorted because I would have expected a logophile to use a much more poetic word than tit.”
Logophile was a good word. “Like what? Mammary glands?” That sounded about on his level.
“More like bosom…”
“This isn’t the eighteen-hundreds.”
We walked through the rest of the park in silence, both of us staring at the massive iron structure before us. The only thing around for size comparison were the trees that lined the park path, and the tower absolutely dwarfed them.
“I knew it was huge, but…”
“Seeing it in person is a completely different story than seeing it on the Discovery Channel, isn’t it?” He dropped his backpack to the ground and rummaged through it.
I guessed even Mr. Punctual could give into being a little tardy to get a good picture.
I took about twenty photos before I heard the first click of his shutter.
“Blake? Turn around.”
The moment I spun to face him, the flash went off.
He stared down at the glowing screen as he took a step toward me. “Can I just…” His gaze landed on mine as he swept a stray tendril of my hair behind my ear, and I leaned into the soft caress of his fingertips along my jawline.
Then he moved back, aimed the camera, and took a few more pictures before he repacked his equipment and motioned me toward the security entrance. “Come on, Sid the Sloth.”
“You did not just refer to me as the sloth fromIce Age?”
“I did.” He started toward the security entrance. “And before you say anything, it’s not because he has a wonky eye. It’s because he’s slow.”
Wonky eye? What the hell was that supposed to mean? The guard checked my purse and then waved me through. While Vance’s backpack was being searched, I turned on my front-facing camera. I took a stealthy photo to see if maybe one of my peepers was, in fact, bigger than the other, then rolled my eyes at myself. What in the hell was I doing? Like it mattered if the attractive, not-such-a-massive butthole thought I had a wonky eye.
“What are you doing?” Damn, he’d caught me.
“Texting Margot.”
The man was really turning me into a liar to save face.
We walked underneath the massive structure, both staring up in awe on our way across the brightly lit esplanade. Vance directed us to the entrance of the elevators, passing our tickets to a worker. The man didn’t even bat an eye before waving us toward a group of people gathered around a set of stairs.
“See, no one cares if you’re late,” I said.
Smiling, Vance handed me my ticket. My attention narrowed on the admission time printed at the bottom… the admission time which was thirty minutesfromthen. “You lying sack of…”
“Consider it payback for the whole Louvre ticket incidence.” He smiled over his shoulder when we stopped behind the small crowd. “Besides, not only are we on time, but you got in some cardio.”
Gears clunked as the yellow, double-decker elevator glided down the tower’s pillar, finally coming to a stop right in front of us. The doors slid open, and a mass of people poured out before one of the Eiffel Tower workers signaled our group to board.
When our time came, Vance motioned me ahead of him. “The chronically late before the prompt and timely.”
I glared up at him as I shuffled inside, one hundred percent certain I’d have a crick in my neck by the time this trip was over.
