Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 96284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
He smirked lazily and leaned back against the cushions. Damn him. He was just so damn masculine and sexy without trying. Knees parted a bit, arms draped along the back of the sofa, T-shirt snug enough to show his perfect physique underneath, and jeans…that fit just right.
“Those were the good old days.” Amusement sparked in his blue eyes. “You used to be fantastic at makin’ me feel ten feet tall.”
He was cute when he put on a cocky front. He was the least cocky man I knew. Not to say he didn’t have it in him. I’d been there with him in Vegas. I’d seen glimpses of an assertive beast who wasn’t afraid to get rough.
Fuck.
Humor. We’d go with humor. “Used to?” I lifted a brow. “I’ve only gotten better, baby. I just don’t wanna make you uncomfortable.”
Solid bullshit.
“Do I look uncomfortable now, darlin’?”
No, and that was fucking unnerving. Sober Jake wasn’t bold. Sober Jake didn’t up the ante when I joked around with my innocent flirting.
“Get the fuck out, you can’t fool me,” I chuckled. “Let’s get back to work before this turns into a pissing contest.”
I was competitive and stupid enough.
Jake grinned triumphantly, the fucking prick.
The day after was a good one. After we’d wrapped the morning’s Off Topic, I buried myself in notes for our project’s structure. Jake and Jason sat on the other side of the office and went through footage of the interviews, and I jotted down the lengths of each final cut and let my creativity flow for potential lines for the narration. Jake and I were both narrating this series, and that would be our summer. We had a studio booked with Ortiz for two months, all of July and August.
Seth showed up around lunch, and we confirmed our meeting with the musicians next week. Yasmin arrived too, once again proving that we needed all the desks we could fit into the office. Jake and I had initially thought too small. Seth had entered the room and been all, “And where are the rest of us gonna sit?”
Talk about a wake-up call. Condor Chicks wasn’t just us anymore. But we’d made it work with the living room space too. And most of the guys liked to work from home, then come here to touch base and work as a team.
But it was time to set the next steps of our plan in motion. We were turning the garage into another office soon, because Haley needed her own space.
In the afternoon, when we started slowing down and most of the others headed home, Sandra dropped off our boy so she could sit in on a meeting at her dad’s agency, and I didn’t mind that one bit. Cas was calm for being a Finlay. He loved to sit with me while I worked, and at this point, I was only searching for future Off Topic topics on the patio.
I was half sprawled out on the sofa with my laptop next to me, the afternoon sun shining through the grapevines and the… The fuck was it called? Pergola ceiling? The wooden beams that held the pergola together. Jake was weirdly picky about garden furniture and structures. I had to use the correct words. Garden snob. God forbid I called it a canopy. That was apparently a whole other thing.
“Dada, eat!” Casper stuck a mushy piece of banana in my face.
Sure thing. I opened my mouth and pretended to munch on his hand too.
He laughed and tugged himself free.
“So yummy,” I said. “Do you think Uncle Jake wants some too?”
Cas eyed the little fruit bowl I’d set on the table, and he picked up an apple wedge. “This?”
I nodded. “Good choice. I think he’s in the office.”
He grabbed his stuffed animal, a sea otter Jake had bought him, and darted inside.
I smiled to myself and returned to my laptop. Topics, topics, topics. Running without a script didn’t mean we didn’t need to prepare. We had to keep the talkin’ goin’. I sent Jake a couple articles about white-water rafting, something we were gonna try for a Nomads episode eventually. After Currahee, we wanted to go back to nature documentaries for a while; we were itching to explore again. Maybe Alaska or… Eh, the list was long.
We kinda missed the comedy factor too. We’d briefly discussed that it would’ve been fun to do a series on surviving in the wild. Alaska was a perfect location for that. Like, send us out into the wilderness and see what happens. Maybe we had to stay there for a while, a month or two.
If we flashed our puppy-dog eyes, perhaps Sandra and Nikki could fly up with the kids, just so we didn’t go stir-crazy from missing them. A week on location was okay. Two was…not fun. We couldn’t concentrate as well if we went too long without seeing the kids.