Page 48 of Jackson's Redemption
And it wasn’t like Noah didn’t respect me because I was a woman. No, his disrespect went right to my core.
He thought he was a better engineer than I was.
#NOTTRUE.
Okay, #MOSTLYNOTTRUE.
I turned toward him and gave him one of my impervious stares. “Which is it? Russians or reality TV?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Neither. It’s a contest.”
“A contest?”
“Angel’s idea. We put together this website with all our profiles on it and offered any woman a chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to Alaska to go out on a date with one of us.”
I was fairly certain my jaw hit the bar. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. And it worked. Or sort of worked, depending on your point of view. Turns out women all over this country were just looking for the chance to date me.”
“You? You’re part of this?”
You don’t care. You don’t care. You don’t care.
“Of course. I haven’t had a chance to date a woman, a real woman, in over a year.”
I bit my tongue rather than ask him what he meant by areal woman.
“So some stranger you’ve never met is flying all this way to have a blind date with you.”
He smiled smugly. “That’s right, Olivia. I’ve got a date with a gorgeous woman. Her name is Jenny. She likes hunting and fishing. Sitting around a campfire. Everything the great state of Alaska offers with only the best views. She seems as sweet as a person can be in her reply to me.”
“And desperate,” I added. “What kind of woman comes all the way to Alaska for a date?”
“Jenny makes the third one, I’ll have you know. And so far, the women who have come up here have lived up to their hype. Who knows? I might pull an Angel and fall head over heels at first sight.”
I wasn’t annoyed by that. Didn’t bother me. Not at all. I was, however, ready to head to camp and my room where I didn’t have to look at his handsome, smug face anymore.
“When does she get here?”
“Not for a few weeks. We wanted to stagger the visits so the cabin outside of town would be available.”
I lifted my beer in salute along with my chin. “Then I wish you all the luck. I hope she’s everything you want her to be and she appreciates the charm of Hope’s Point.”
He lost his smug look for a minute. “You mean that?”
“Of course,” I lied. I really wanted her to be a stuck-up bitch who took one look at this place and Noah’s life and laughed in his face for daring to invite her here.
What I wasn’t willing to do was acknowledge why I wanted that to happen.
I drained my beer. Left a twenty on the bar for Bud and got off my stool. Noah reached for my arm as if to balance me, but I shrugged it away before he could.
I didn’t want him to touch me. I didn’t want him to even look at me right now. He was going on a date with some woman named Jenny and I was one hundred percent fine with that.
I gave him a negligent wave without looking at him. “See you back at camp.”
* * *
Jackson
