Page 73 of Fraud
“I know. And, frankly, I really don’t have an answer. I just got an idea, and it kind of happened.”
Her eyes wavered to the living room where all my paperbacks lay.
“So, your ideas, they don’t come from experience?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind.”
She must have sensed my need for a confidant because she pressed on, “How’d your date go the other night? Mr. Dark and Handsome?”
I smiled at her nickname for Killian.
He really was tall, dark, and handsome, and he had a way with his hands that could melt a woman in five seconds flat.
Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t that woman.
Not anymore.
“It went well, but I think we’re cooling off for a while. He’s not sure he’s permanent to the area, and I made the mistake of pulling out the relationship card too soon.”
“He’s not a commitment guy, huh?”
My mind was still replaying all the ways in which he’d made my breath catch. The almost predatory grip of his fingers and the tenderness of his tongue.
“I guess not,” I replied sadly.
“Maybe he’s coming out of a bad relationship,” she offered up.
“Maybe. But he said it was because he’s not stable here, which is understandable. I mean, the guy’s living in a nasty motel, and he hasn’t had a single bite on a job since he arrived.”
“He just moved here without a job? That’s weird. He doesn’t have family or friends here?”
I shook my head. “Nope. It was all very spur-of-the-moment, seize-the-day type of stuff.”
“That sounds more frightening than graduating.”
I smiled. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Says the woman who was offered a job before she was even handed her diploma.”
“Yeah, and look at me now. Still here! At the same job, doing the same thing, day in and day out, trying to date guys who are clearly not that interested in me.”
She gestured over to the enormous pile of books. “But you don’t have to be, Kate! Look at that! Those books—that is your ticket to another life. All you have to do is own it.”
I stared at them. All one thousand copies.
All I had to do was own it.
To be Laura Stone.
The problem?
I wasn’t even sure I knew how to be Katelyn O’Malley yet.
Amy had left my place sometime around midnight, chipper as a robin in springtime.
Freaking college students.
I, on the other hand, stumbled into bed, only to lie awake, pondering how I’d morphed into such an old fuddy-duddy in the last six years. I used to be a bright young college student like Amy.
