AllFreeNovel
Share Us
With the ice blocking him from seeing me, I curled my legs up beside me. “You should go to bed. It’s two a.m. You’re going to have to be up in less than two hours, right? We have to stop and pick up Molly, then drive downtown.”
He grunted something noncommittal.
I peeked at him, the motion causing my t-shirt to slip down my shoulder. “What? What’s the matter, Ransom?”
Now that he had just about every light on in the place, I could see his pupils were huge. His gaze even seemed intense. “Can’t sleep. Just didn’t like the way some things went tonight.”
I pulled off the ice to look at him. “It’s okay. I can be hard to take.”
He took a wide stance and crossed his arms in front of me. “You think you know how I feel about everything?”
My head was throbbing. “I know you pretty well.”
Ransom tore his hand through his hair. “Then you should know I think you look amazing. Why can’t you see yourself the way I see you? Or trust me to tell you what I see?”
I forced a small smile. “I wish I could, Chief.”
He scowled. “I mean it, Raven. You’re beautiful. But you don’t have any idea, do you? The way your eyes light up when you come up with mischievous ideas. The way you vibrate with anticipation when you’re excited about something.”
It felt like I was having an aneurysm. This couldn’t be real. I hit my head and now I was hearing sweet things coming from Ransom’s lips because I was unconscious.
He blew out a sigh. “But I’m wasting my breath, right? You’ll just tell me to shut up.”
I scoffed. “Shut up? Hell no, keep talking. If I’m having a concussion dream, let’s hear it, baby!”
His gaze dropped to my legs, then returned to my eyes showing me raw, unbridled lust. Stalking toward me, his body moved with grace and precision. He only wore pajama pants, so I saw his muscles bunch as he approached. My panties soaked through and I was terrified of embarrassing myself. He didn’t mean it, right? He was just joking.
“Phoebe, I—”
Then some sort of annoying ringtone was going off like a foghorn in another room. Shit! It was my room. It broke whatever spell we’d been under because that was a source. Someone had something for me. Scrambling, I dropped the ice and ran for my bedroom.
I barely saw the caller ID in time to answer. “Jez?”
She coughed a couple times, then spoke in a raspy voice. “So, I’m at this party and people are talking about that thing that happened that you care about and I thought to myself, ‘Self? Are you going to remember this after you wake up in the morning?’”
I chuckled. “You definitely won’t. Tell me everything.”
“Girl, you are not gonna believe this. Someone’s here who was at the Norman house party.”
“Who?”
Someone pounded on the door where Jezebel was. “Give me a goddamned minute. I’m peeing here!” Then she whispered to me again. “Julio Suarez. The hosts hired him to be the photographer for the evening at both parties. Hell, maybe he was at earlier ones too. I don’t know.”
I jotted his name down in my notebook. “Anyone else who was at the same parties? Who else do they hire for these things?”
She sighed as if bored. “Caterers, decorators, videographers, bloggers, vloggers, models, DJs, cleaning crews. It takes a lot of planning and people to make these things work.”
I jotted down what she said while she spoke. “Got it. What else?”
“Oh, you know who’s here tonight? Meeghan Zappo, the new up-and-comer who’s supposed to take Angel’s place in the big shoot next week. Everyone’s flocking around her, fluttering about whether she thinks she’ll be able to handle the pressure, handing her business cards for their therapists, falling all over her. And she’s so over it.”
I huffed. “I’ll bet. Did she even have a sip of water or was she too worried about being bloated tomorrow?”
When her laughter got too loud, the pounding on the door started up again. “Yeah, I’ll open up when I damn well feel like it, bitch!” To me, she lowered her voice even further. “There’s another one here that most people don’t know.”
I whispered back. “Who is she?”
She flushed the toilet as cover. “She goes by Lane. Single name thing, but her name is Esther Krudowski.”
