Annie
PROLOGUE
The bumbling boywho once beat me to the top has become a towering mass of a man who is, once again, very much in my way.
Unless I can make him useful for ending my twin sister’s engagement party.
“What, Annie Li?” Nico growls, eyes narrowed. Those eyes are glazed and unfocused, listing sideways with the rest of him—but they still hold the same amount of malice as the last time I saw him. They also reflect the orange glow of the lit cigarette dangling from his lips.
Bingo. Party ender, acquired.
I reach for Nico’s mouth and try to think of how cancerous it looks and not how pretty it’s gotten, almost petulant,pouty—and then I’m distracted by the bulging bicep the size of a melon, which is extraordinarily inconvenient because I need to save my twin from this nightmare. Now.
I snatch the cigarette from between his lips. “Smoking is gross,” I tell him as condescendingly as possible, as if I hadn’t quit like, nine months ago.
“You’re gross.”
“I thought I got sexy,” I purr, referring to his drunken slip from just moments earlier.
“You’re so sexy it’s gross.”
I’m surprised to note that his Brooklyn accent, once the heaviest of anyone I’ve ever met, is far less pronounced than it used to be. I’d call him the dumb guido—his thick accent bringing things likecannolisandbaked zitiand I don’t know,somegambling game involving diceto mind, instead ofvaledictorian of one of the best high schools in the United States.
Thick eyebrows punctuate panicked eyes as I lift my arm. “Annie,” Nico warns me with an outstretched hand, but he’s too slow.
I give myself exactly one more look at my sister—defeated in the corner of the rooftop, standing next to her foul, leering fiancé—and decide subtlety is a lost cause.
I chuck my unwilling accomplice’s cigarette at an artificial plant by the bar. My college degree wasn’t entirely useless, I suppose, as it hits with the alarming accuracy becoming of a two-time beer pong tournament champion.
Nico’s mouth drops open. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” he chokes out.There’shis accent.
Nothing happens for a beat.
Then—
Whoosh.
The thing erupts into flames.
I do the most sensible thing: scream.
"What the fu?—"
I lunge past him and grab the nearest fire alarm and pull. A screeching siren blasts through the rooftop.
Half a second later, the overhead sprinklers go off—not above us, of course, but over the bar side of the rooftop. The covered side. The part with the flaming ficus and mytwin’s slumped shoulders and her fiancé’s scummy face and the champagne tower and the dessert table… and the entire engagement party.
Amidst all the shrieking and scattering, I look back and lock eyes with Nicholas “Nico” Giannuzzi—childhood neighbor, high school nemesis, and source of all teenage anxiety.
Nico laughs once, a noise of horrified disbelief. “You look good, Annie Li, but you’re still fuckin’ insane.”
ONE
Annie
One Year Later
Flirtingwith a porn star is definitely against the rules.
