Read Online Hope Entangles: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (Book 2 of 3) by Alice Bello - Free Book Online Page B

find an excruciatingly evil,
painful way of ruining it for me.
    Or, the sexy bastard might just go off
and have sex with someone, maybe even one of the authors, and then
what would I do? I’d be humiliated to the point I’d have to
quit.
    “ No way,” I
blurted.
    He added some pique to his
scowl. “Why not? You said you need a sexy date.” He opened his arms
and gestured to himself like he was a prize on The Price is Right . “Don’t I fit the
bill?”
    Danger, danger!!! Obviously he was, but I was not, not, not going to
tell him that I thought he was. No way in hell. The sneaky bastard
would find some way to use it against me.
    I gulped, bit the inside of my cheek,
and then took a deep breath.
    “ Thank you for the offer,
but I can find my own date for the party.” See, I can be
diplomatic… even when talking to a gorgeous,
attempted-tree-murdering maniac.
    “ Aha…” he said, his eye
brows rising in a clear sign of not believing me.
    “ Yeah, sure. I know at least
five guys that would love to go out with me.” Lie, lie, lie… I knew
no one, especially a sexy guy that would go out with me if I asked
them.
    Wait, maybe I should go to
Wal-Mart…
    But a shockingly detailed mini movie
trailer of my recent failure in the love department of Wal-Mart
flashed through my head. It actually made my chest hurt.
    “ So what day is this party?”
he asked.
    I had to think. Oh sweet Jesus, it was
in five days.
    “ Five days,” I
mumbled.
    He smiled and reached for his coffee,
taking a languid sip.
    “ That’s plenty of time to
find someone. I’ll probably have a guy by this
afternoon.”
    He shook his head pitiably. “So you’re
going to call an escort agency, is that it?”
    How the hell did he know about
Vinny?
    Oh, wait. He didn’t mean a model
agency, he meant…
    “ You see,” I said, plunking
my now empty coffee cup down hard on his polished granite
counter—nice counter space, by the way. “I could never take you
anywhere, especially anywhere near the people I work with. I’d have
to quit on the spot just from the humiliation you would cause
me.”
    “ You think I can’t behave
myself in a public environment?”
    It was my turn to scowl, planting my
hands on my hips. “You can’t behave yourself for the duration of a
cup of coffee.”
    His dark eyes darted to my empty cup
and back to me. His lips quirked in a smirk.
    “ Fine, you made it through
an entire cup of coffee, but you lapsed right back to your… your
smart-assed ways right after. You’d have to be good for hours. You
really think you can do that?”
    He took a step closer to me, making it
so I’d have to look up at him even more.
    Why, oh why, was everyone taller than
me?
    I could smell him. Not cologne, but
whatever primal scent he naturally exuded. A couple of sniffs and I
started to feel hot all over.
    He was too damn close.
    “ You’ll find, if you’re very
lucky, that I can do many things… for hours at a time.”
    I gulped again, and took a step back…
and tried to pick up the aroma of the zucchini bread to wash his
scent away with.
    I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing
came out. I cleared my throat while I took another step back.
“T-that’s okay, really. Thanks again for the offer. But I’ll be
fine.” I ran into the counter, not watching where I was backing up
into.
    I jumped, and made a little squealing
sound as I whirled around to make sure it was just the counter I’d
run into. You never knew, he might have another homicidal maniac
just like him roaming around the house.
    When I turned back Raphael had his arms
crossed over his chest, one hand casually covering his infuriating
smirk. But he was chuckling: I could see his shoulders and chest
rising a falling in little jerks… the big jerk!
    I took a big breath, luckily getting a
lungful of zucchini bread scented air instead of infuriatingly sexy
man smell.
    They should make that into an air
freshener for your car… in the shape of, well, him…
    But then