Relentless (Mason Family 4)

“But you could be my plus-one.”

“No.”

She rolls her eyes.

“But weddings are fun. I mean, I think they are,” I say, taking a half-gallon of unopened orange juice from my friend. “I’ve never actually been to one.”

She makes a face. “They are usually fun. This one held a lot of promise until The Break Up.”

I make the same face back to her.

“I wish I could say that I wasn’t dreading seeing Thomas and the starlet who shall not be named,” she says, her grip clenching so hard on the bundle of bananas in her hand that I think I’ll have to throw them away. “But let’s be real.”

Lisbeth is right. It would be futile to even try to play the devil’s advocate.

Her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Raines, is the talk of professional baseball. He’s leading the league in a variety of statistics—a fact that I know because he’s a hometown boy. But Tommy is also the talk of every rag magazine in the world because he was caught with his fingers literally inside the starlet at an award’s show earlier this year.

While probably great for YouTube replay numbers, it wasn’t so good for Lisbeth’s relationship with Tommy.

It also doesn’t bode well for their mutual friends’ wedding.

“I think you should go and enjoy yourself,” I tell her. “You obviously learned an important side of Tommy that you didn’t know before it was too late. Let the starlet find out on her own. This is definitely your win.”

“I just wish I wasn’t going alone.”

“So find a date.” I toss the carrots into the crisper. “There are a million guys you could call.”

“Yes. True. But I don’t want to have to entertain someone. I don’t want to have to be nice to them. I’m going to be pissy and self-conscious, and having to dance around someone else’s feelings doesn’t seem doable.”

I raise a brow. “But going alone does?”

She shrugs.

We work silently for a few minutes, trying to find room for all of Lisbeth’s groceries in my refrigerator. I pause every now and then and examine items. Beet juice shots? Okay.

“You really don’t want to go?” she asks out of nowhere.

“No.” I laugh at her. “I can’t. I …” I set a box of ice cream on the counter and try not to smile. “I got a job offer today.”

Her blue eyes light up, and she raises her hands up in the air. “You did? Why didn’t you lead with that when I walked in? We could be celebrating right now.”

I force a smile and turn back to a bag of frozen peas.

My insides go bananas as I let my mind flip back to the interview this morning. It feels so amazing to have hope that I might be able to turn things around. It’s the light at the end of a disastrous tunnel that I’ve been begging for.

But, then again, it has my stomach in knots because I don’t know how to navigate this anymore.

“Where is it?” Lisbeth asks, oblivious to my inner turmoil. “Is the commute awful? You can always sleep over if it’s closer to my place, you know.”

“I’m not sure I’m taking it, actually.”

“Why?”

The million-dollar question. Or, at least, a hefty-salaried question.

I take a deep breath. “Do you know the guy who I hit yesterday?”

She nods.

“Well …” I blow out my breath. “It’s for him. As his executive assistant.”

It’s as though the room gasps, waiting for an explanation. Lisbeth leans back as if the distance will help her understand.

“Okay,” she says slowly, her lips threatening to split her cheeks. “This is an interesting development.”

“It’s an odd coincidence. That’s what it is.”

“Or kismet.”

“Or a coincidence.”

She sets her jaw and tilts her head. “You said he was hot—a word you don’t throw around lightly. That leans this entire situation into the kismet realm.”

I scoff.

“What happened?” she asks. “Like you just walk in, and he’s sitting there?”

I abandon the ice cream on the counter and sit at the kitchen table. I might as well get comfortable. Lisbeth and I have been friends for almost ten years. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about me and vice versa. She loves a good kismet story, and I can tell by the look in her eye that she thinks that’s what this is.

Poor girl.

“The interview has been scheduled for three days with a woman named Toni,” I say, using the time to replay the scenario for the six-thousandth time today. “I’m sitting in a conference room, and Toni comes in. She sits down for a few minutes. We chat. It’s going well. Then she leaves, and a few minutes later, Oliver walks in. We were both dumbfounded.” I narrow my eyes, trying to hide the way my heartbeat just picked up. “Well, I was dumbfounded. He seemed to be surprised but less … shocked.”

I think back to the way his eyes widened ever so slightly and how a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. He was definitely pleased to see me. But shocked? No.