Page 7 of You Wish
“I heard she surprised you in your trailer when you were in nothing but your bare ass. The full monty. And right after an ice bath.”
“Oh merda!” Enzo snorted. “What a way to impress the lady. All three inches of you.”
“More like eight inches. Flaccid,” Jake lied. He’d been so shocked his nuts had curled up inside his body. Then there had been the way she’d glared at him when he took his sweet-ass time getting his towel.Man, she’d been blistering. Just the memory had him smiling.
What had him sweating was the look she’d given him once they’d been a breath apart. He’d been teasing her about going in for a kiss. Then he’d seen the confused look in her eyes—like she might actually welcome the kiss—and he’d nearly blew his wad.
“I know that look,” Enzo said. “That prick right there wears it a lot.” He jerked his chin toward Henry, who was recently married.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Jake said. “Just two old friends saying hi.”
Henry burst out laughing and Enzo asked, “Then what’s the big issue with working with her?”
“How did you know about the offer?”
Henry laughed. “Mate, everyone knows about it.”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Define everyone.”
“She told Jane,” Henry said, referring to his wife. “And Jane told me.”
“And Henry told me, and I told the pit crew,” Enzo said.
“Well, that fun game of telephone has it wrong. She needed a favor. I said no.”
Henry looked him dead in the eye. “When do you ever turn down a charity? Especially The Wish Project?”
“Since it conflicts with my trip home to visit my grandparents.”
“I call bullshit,” Enzo said. “She said she’d move what she could so it would be closer to Pine Village. So the grandparents thing is a cop-out.”
“It isn’t just one day. It’s a gala, an auction, a photoshoot, and then going to a Christmas thing.”
“The thing is surprising a sick kid with a visit from his hero,” Henry said. “Even a broken heart can’t stop you from saying yes.”
“I never said she broke my heart.”
Henry’s expression was soft. “You didn’t need to. It’s written all over your face.”
?
“Just how big are we talking?” Roxy, Georgia’s dear friend and computer hacker, asked.
Roxy was the kind of woman who would rather go ax throwing than go shopping. She was the tech extraordinaire for Bride Buddies, a rent-a-bridesmaid business that their third musketeer, Jane, founded.
Today Roxy was wearing a black leather skirt, a blackfun fact, i don’t caretank, and black combat shoes, completing her bad girl vibe.
“Was it a ‘I once caught a fish this big’ size?” Jane asked, putting her fingers a few inches apart. “Or ‘I need a forklift to hoist the thing up’ size?”
If Roxy was a boss babe, Jane was a steel magnolia, which made them the perfect business partners.
Georgia picked up her wine glass and took a sip, sighing when the peppery Zin touched her tongue. It had been a hard week, and she needed to unwind—and some girl time.
Tonight, they met atPurr and Pour, a wine bar that housed adoptable cats, and Georgia’s favorite after-work watering hole. Not only did the wine loosen her up, but the cats were therapeutic.
“It was so big, I thought it was a rat. Its body was the size of a peach pit, and it kept staring at me with all eight of those beady eyes,” she said, referring to the spider that cornered her in the bathroom for over an hour, making her late to girls’ night.
When her younger brother was born, Georgia’s entire world changed. She went from being an only child, spoiled with singular love, to a part-time caretaker for Connor. She grew up fast, robbed of the carefree and magical part of coming of age.
