“The show is a joke,” Levi says, sitting back in the booth. He creates so much distance between us, I hadn’t realized how close we’d been. The empty air is more like a chasm now. “One of the ladies followed me into a bathroom and complained I wasn’t putting on a good enough show for the audience. Can you imagine?”
“I knew it,” I announce. “Those things are scripted.”
“If it is, I didn’t get the memo. I was doing what I normally do.”
“Well, they probably want to piggyback off your success. So many of the contestants on those shows end up in entertainment somehow.”
“Live and learn, I guess.”
“So you haven’t found a match?”
He scoffs. “Not likely.” He rubs his face, gaze turned down. Again, reacting differently than I would have guessed for a playboy like him. He looks genuinely upset by the events of his show.
“Have you told anyone else that you’re unhappy?”
“And admit I made a mistake? Don’t think so. It doesn’t matter anyway. My only option is to finish. He has me by the balls. That’s a direct quote, by the way.”
Aww. That’s not right. I?—
“I guess I’m going to need your number,” he smirks. “Clearly I have to use you as a sounding board for big decisions…like signing my life away.”
And there it is. The playboy is back. “You didn’t just make all that up as a ploy to get my number, did you?”
He laughs. “You know what, I wish I had. It was actually a good line, but I’m afraid I’m being one-hundred percent genuine.”
“Well, sorry to break it to you, but I don’t have a number right now. I don’t even know if I have my old number. I haven’t seen my phone since…you know. People have been calling the home phone.”
“Who has a home phone anymore?”
I roll my eyes. “We do.”
“Well, that’s not convenient for me.”
I chuckle. “Sure, we’ll go with how it impacts your life.”
He grins. “Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that.”
4
Levi
Istand at the coffee shop front window and watch Tab maneuver the sidewalks of Nashville. I’m poised to follow, only a step away from the front door if she leaves my sight. My heart pumps the same thought through my body on an endless reel:I need to know where she lives.
If Micah won’t give me the information, I’ll find out myself.
It’s been a month since the fire, but the connection was still there, electric and unyielding. The phrase drawn to her would be an understatement. Ever since that night, a persistent need to know her, help her, be with her has rolled against me like the never-ending surge of ocean waves.
On the crosswalk, she dodges people like she’s trying not to be noticed, moving this way and that, avoiding any contact whatsoever. As if attention would cost her something.
That alone would usually make her invisible to me. Women I know dress like their only objective is to be seen. Who wear their confidence loud and tight and lowcut.
Tabitha Riley wears the exact opposite—and somehow I’m all the more attentive.
I track the way her shoulder dips when her steps slow. The way she pauses, just barely, before entering the building across the street, almost like she had to brace herself.
Even though I know the building, I move closer to the glass to read the name on the canopy: Wingate Building.
Interesting. Micah failed to mention he put the girls up so close to headquarters.It’s like she’s been sitting under my nose all this time. I could punch him in the nuts for this.
