Page 11 of Hating the Book Boyfriend

"Try..." I clear my throat and start again when my voice comes out heavy. "Try one million followers," I correct.

The water sloshes around us as another contestant leaps out. "One more," his lips brush against the sensitive skin on my neck, and this time, I don't believe it's an accident. "You know what's worse than one million people believing a lie?"

"What?" I question so softly I'm not sure I even said it all.

"Not making the lie count. The way I see it, I'm damned either way, so I may as well do what I want." His lips press heavily on my shoulder, with the weight of his head.

From the outside looking in, it probably looks as though he's simply resting his head, and maybe he is. It's possible I'm spinning his words into more and his lips aren't taking liberties the way his hands did. I saw the headlines over the summer.They called into question his career, using his single bachelor life status as a reason to start digging into his past cases to see if he'd been sleeping his way into wins. I'm sure his words now are partly in reference to that. People see what they want to see. I know that's true, but what of his words? That last line, 'May as well do what I want,' has me second guessing all of this. Colton Callahan chose to wrap himself around me, and his lips are pressed into my shoulder in what feels like a kiss.Am I what he wants?

"We have a winner!" Sandman announces, as everything around me seems to happen slow and fast, all at once. I look to my left and see that the last girl we needed to wait out is wrapped in a towel. How did I miss her getting out? The heat at my back is tugged away, and hands grip me under my arms as I'm pulled up to stand. I slowly blink my eyes as Sandman extends his hand to help me out. No sooner than I'm on the ledge beside him, an assistant wraps multiple towels around me. People are moving quickly; bright lights from his cameras blur out faces, and voices bleed into one. I won. I'm the winner, but if that's true, why do I feel like I lost?

When I look up to find Colton, he's already disappearing through the crowd, sopping wet, coat and shoes in hand. That's when it hits me. I did lose something. Him.

CHAPTER 7

Colton

Ishouldn't have followed her into that water tonight, but all I could see was her curled up on the floor in pain when she woke up this morning. I wasn't going to take her word that she'd be fine, and there was no way I would stand back and watch. Even when she's not trying, she provokes me. She always has. It's why I tease her. It's my defense mechanism. Poking fun at her guaranteed she'd walk away and stay away, but right now, there's no escaping her. I told her she could stay another night, and now she's climbing into my bed wearing an old band t-shirt and spandex sleep shorts that leave nothing to the imagination. Fuck.

I turn away and busy myself with the nothingness of my suitcase, wishing I'd brought a laptop on this sabbatical. I had to go all in when I decided to take a break from my life. I'm not a halfway guy. I knew if I had access to my phone, contacts, emails, and social media, I'd get sucked back in; there would be no escape. And where would that leave me? If you'd asked me a few months ago, I would have died on the mountain that said I had my life together; everything was by design and exactly howI'd planned it. But if that were true, I wouldn't have sabotaged one of my most prominent cases. I open the burner phone Everett gave me before I left. It has three numbers: his, Dad's, and my eldest brother's, Garrett. I check in with one of them every two weeks. Since I've left, it's only been text messages, but I really want to call Everett right now. Out of anyone, he knows a thing or two about resisting temptation and wanting something he's not supposed to have, but before the thought can finish crossing my mind, I toss my phone. A phone call would be an admission, and after this evening, I'm already blurring too many lines.

"You never told me why you wanted to enter that contest so badly," I say, trying to avert my focus to something else. We haven't really discussed anything important since we've been stuck together. Maybe talking is what I need to remind me that there is no space for the places my mind is threatening to take me. She's my best friend's little sister, and that puts her off-limits. "We both know you don't need money." I spoke to Archer a few months ago. We discussed planning a ski trip this winter, and everything sounded good, better than good.

"And how would you know that?"

I turn around and find her sitting up in my bed, her arms crossed with a furrowed brow. My expression morphs to match hers.

"Are you saying you do need the money?"

When Archer took over Estes Tree Farm, it became Estes Ranch. It's been supplying hundreds of trees across the US annually for years. However, after his parents left the business to him and Josephine, he quickly expanded it into a highly profitable year-round business that wasn't dependent on holiday sales for survival. While their name is synonymous with Christmas trees in these parts, he's breaking into the beer industry.

After visiting me in St. Louis and witnessing all the area's microbreweries, he got the idea to start growing hops. Things snowballed from there, and Estes Peak has been popping up in major retailers across the country. If she has cash flow issues, I suspect her family is none the wiser.

"My family is in the farming industry. Not everyone can be a senator's son turned big-shot lawyer. We are middle class. You spent summers vacationing near us, going home to your plush hillside estate that overlooked our property while we were tending to our fields and building our dreams with blood, sweat, and tears."

I bite my cheek to hold my tongue. I begged my parents to let me go to school out here. We had a vacation house a few miles from her parents' farm. That's how I ran into her at the lake. She used to ride her bike there in the summer to swim after helping at the farm all day. She was alone the first day we met; the second time, she brought her brother. Archer and I were fast friends, and by the end of summer, I didn't want to leave. Since I'm the youngest by more than a decade, my brothers were already in college, and my dad spent a lot of time on the East Coast for work. It didn't matter where my mother and I lived; either way, my dad was getting on a plane to see us when he wasn't home. However, wealth and status aside, one of the reasons I loved it here was because I didn't have the name recognition we had back home.

In Pine Falls, my parents didn't own half the land in town, my dad wasn't the state senator, and our house wasn't a mansion like she's insinuating. It was more or less a nice ski cabin. Either way, I didn't think she saw those things. I used to help out around the farm. Pitching in so that Archer's chores were done faster and we could hang out. I drop my head, ready to apologize for something... For what? I'm not sure. I don't make a habit of sticking my foot in my mouth to warrant an apology, butJosephine Estes isn't just anyone, and as much as I don't want to care, I do. "I?—"

"Don't say sorry. That came out harsher than intended. This whole truce thing is…" She slaps her hands on the bed, settling against the pillow before adding, "Foreign. I'm used to your barbed digs. It's hard to let my guard down, but you did help me win today, even if I'm confident I would have come out the victor without it."

I laugh before taking a seat on the chair across from the bed. "Yeah, I probably should have asked more questions before jumping into ice-cold water with you. Had I known you took semi-regular cold plunges, hanging back in the crowd may have been easier." The words are out before I can take them back. I rub my jaw and attempt to act as though the comment meant nothing, picking up a stupid brochure instead.

"Easier?" Of course, she caught that word. "Since when has my torture not brought you pure joy? I thought watching me willingly subject myself to torment would have ranked high on your list of favorite pastimes."

Unable to bite my tongue on the subject any longer, I say, "Is that what you really think? That I've enjoyed watching you stumble over the years?"

"Well, yeah," she says, exasperated. "If I recall, you were the cause of most of those falls, and you spared no teasing afterward."

She does have me on the teasing part, but that's because I'm the kind of guy who could laugh at a funeral. It wasn't the fact that she got hurt that was funny. It was the how. That's the thing about people who smile at inappropriate times. We look like unfeeling assholes, but my reaction isn't because I don't feel bad. It's not because I enjoy other people's pain; it's the way they get hurt. No one ever gets that part.

"The day you fell out of the tree, who picked you up and carried you to the main house?"

Her brows furrow as though the answer isn't obvious. Maybe it's not; she did have her eyes closed, but she wasn't knocked unconscious. Instead, she had the air knocked out of her lungs. "You."

"How about the day at the lake when you got your foot stuck in the rope swing?"

She rolls her eyes. "You were closest to me. It would have been cruel not to help me, and you laughed the entire time you helped me down."

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