CHAPTER ONE – HOLLEYrule one: you can’t always fake it ‘til you make it.“Oh, screw this shit!” I threw the book at the other end of my sofa. It hit it, the pages splaying, and it bounced off the arm and onto the floor, then crumpled into a mess.
I didn’t care.
It could stay there.
This was, without a doubt, the most annoyingly unsatisfying romance novel I’d read in a long time, yet I just couldn’t stop reading it.
I was a masochist.
Then again, most romance readers I knew were.
I stared at the book accusingly. It was lying there on my living room floor with the cute little illustrated cover staring at me deceivingly. There was nothing cute about this book. Nothing cute about the love triangle or the angst or the potential pregnancy with the guy she didn’t think she wanted to choose!
Not that I could blame her for not wanting to choose Alex. He was a baseball player.
I wouldn’t pick him, either.
Fuck baseball players.
I wasn’t going to pick that book up. No way. There was no chance I was picking it up and reading more tonight, or I’d just get all kinds of worked up and not be able to sleep.
I’d pick it up to straighten the pages out and slip a bookmark in, ‘cause, you know. It wasn’t the book’s fault. It didn’t deserve that.
Damn it.
This was one of the perils of being a bookworm: inappropriate feelings toward inanimate objects.
And characters that didn’t exist in real life.
God, that was the worst. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d fallen in love with a fictional boy just to wake up the next day and be like, “Oop, no, I’m still alone.”
Alone, ten pounds overweight, and a taco aficionado.
All right.
Fifteen pounds.
What? We all lied about our weight. And absolutely nobody is the weight it says on their driver’s license.
Or their height, if you’re Saylor.
I sighed and picked up the book. I really needed to do better about choosing my reads. That, or I needed to stop letting Say pick out my books and let Kinsley do it. Kinsley would never do me dirty the way Saylor did. Neither of us were big lovers of love triangles, but sometimes you just needed a little angst in your life.
Like being single in a small town wasn’t angsty enough with all the old people asking me when I was going to get married.
If one more person asked me, I was going to ask them when their funeral was.
I flattened out the pages of the book and slipped a rainbow watercolor bookmark with ‘bookworm’ written in silver, metallic writing inside it, then set it on my coffee table.
I was so over that book tonight. I needed a nice cozy mystery or something lighter than what I’d been reading lately. A palate cleanser, as it were.
Like ice cream.
Mmm, ice cream.
And I wondered why I couldn’t shift those fifteen pounds…
With a shrug, I got up and headed for the kitchen. I knew there was ice cream in my freezer, and at this point, what was another pound on my butt?
I scooped the chocolate ice cream into a bowl and carried it back to the sofa where I lay my lazy butt back down and scrolled for the first series of Game of Thrones. I’d watched it a thousand times, and while it wasn’t a patch on the books—what adaptation was?—but sometimes you just needed something comfortable to watch.
Especially when it felt as though your life was imploding around you.
No, don’t look at me like that. I was allowed to be dramatic.
Nothing in my life was going the way I’d planned.
And that was me. I was a planner. I had everything worked out. Even though buying Bookworm’s Books with my best friends, Kinsley and Saylor, had thrown a wrench in the first five-year plan of my twenties, it’d been a good wrench. One I’d welcomed and thrived upon, because it’d changed my life for the better.
I was supposed to be engaged by now, or it was supposed to happen in the next twelve months, at least. But here I was, as single as could be, without even a prospect of a boyfriend, despite my best efforts.
And now…
Well, now the one person who’d broken my heart was back in town.
Sebastian Stone, the Montana Bears star pitcher and White Peak’s hometown hero. The man who’d once been my best friend, even closer to me than Kinsley and Saylor.
I would never forget our senior prom and how he’d hurt me.
Sure, I’d never taken the leap and told him I’d had feelings for him. Back then, eighteen-year-old me had been far too shy, and I’d been so afraid I’d lose him as my friend if he didn’t feel the same.
As it turned out, he obviously didn’t, because I’d seen him making out with the person I hated more than anything in the world. Iris Benefield had done nothing but make my high school life hell, and seeing them together…