“This is a special tour, Katie. I’m paying for a lot of it myself because it’s that important to me. It’s what I get up this early in the morning for.” He grinned and sipped his coffee.
“What do Brody and Maggie think of this… proposal?”
“They don’t know yet,” he said. “What doyouthink?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Really?” The mildly stunned look he gave me made me wonder how many times this guy had actually heard the wordnofrom a woman’s mouth… and that alone kind of made me want to say it. “Why not?”
“Well, for one, I have a job.”
He held up his coffee cup. “This?”
“Yes, this. This is my sister’s place and I work here four days a week.”
“Yeah? How much you make here in a day?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You know, that’s pretty rude to ask.” Mostly because the answer was embarrassing. But thankfully we were interrupted by a timely door slam and a pair of high heels clipping across the patio.
I turned to find my best friend staring down at us.
“Hi,” Devi said, smiling her charming smile at Jesse Mayes, then at me. “Owen said you were out here.” Her tone said,He neglected to mention you were with the hottest guy in the world.
“We were just talking,” I blurted, like we’d been caught making out behind the school or something.
“Actually,” Jesse said, “I was just asking Katie to come on tour with me.”
Devi looked at him, the charming smile stuck on her face. “On tour?”
“Yeah. Like a job offer,” I said.
Devi’s demeanor shifted. It was subtle, but I knew her well enough to sense my best friend going into full-on hurricane mode.
Shit.
“Oh. You mean you have a proposal for my client.” She swept down from the patio and walked over to us. Even after last night, she was impeccably polished. The woman had never met a pitcher of sangria that could dull the shine on her armor.
“I do.” Jesse got to his feet. “I was just about to offer Katie fifty grand to come on tour with me for six weeks. Which I’d guess is more than she’d pull in here in a year.”
Holy shit.
I hopped to my feet. Not only was that embarrassing, it was true. And totally generous.
But Devi laughed, her white teeth flashing against her beautiful brown skin like a set of tiny, polished daggers. “Sweetheart,” she said. “You paid her forty grand for one day’s work for the video shoot and now you’re asking her to walk away from her life for six weeks for fifty?”
Jesse smiled, his dark eyes sparking in the sun like coal briquettes. Great.Twonegotiation junkies. “What did you have in mind? Seventy-five?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I cringed, but Jesse seemed to enjoy the battle. “One hundred?”
“Double that and we can talk.”
I made a little involuntary noise of distress in the back of my throat, but Devi just winked at me as if to say,Don’t worry your pretty self, I’ve got this.
“Two hundred.” Jesse rolled the words around in his mouth like he was seeing how they tasted. Though it sounded more like a statement than a question.
“Plus travel and accommodation, obviously,” my BFF said.
