My Charming Rival Read online

  “Last name is Harrigan. See? There. I’ve given you both my names. All you have to do is give me one of yours,” he added, his sexy voice threatening to make my stomach flip. I simply couldn’t deny that the words and the way he said them sparkled in that accent of his.

  Resistance, Jess.

  I kicked myself mentally several times, and the final kick was enough to maintain the stony look on my face and the straight line of my lips. I would not smile at him. I would not be sucked into his orbit of good-lookingness. Besides, he was probably well-trained to use his kind of extraordinary handsomeness to throw me off the scent of photographic battle. Like he knew his looks were a powerful weapon against the female opposition.

  “Did you get the picture already?” I asked, challenging him because I needed to remember he was the competition. Only the competition. “Is that why you’re talking to me? You sent it off to J.P. and now you’re just taunting me?”

  He laughed. “No, I didn’t get the picture. No, that’s not why I’m talking to you. And no, I didn’t send it off to J.P. seeing as I didn’t get it, pursuant to answer number one.” He tucked his thumbs into his jeans pockets, his camera slung around his neck, then shot me a captivating smile. Instantly, my stomach practiced its best handspring.

  My God, the man was a charmer, and I tried desperately to look anywhere but at him. “Very cute,” I muttered, relenting the slightest bit. “The whole pursuant to answer one thing.”

  The corner of his lips quirked up. “I’ll take ‘very cute’ as a good sign. So do you have a name? Or shall I just call you Girl Who Likes Huckleberry Pie?”

  I smiled, and looked at the ocean so he couldn’t see my face. “I do have a name. And truthfully, I don’t really like pie.”

  “Not any kind?”

  “No. Not any kind,” I said, lying because I didn’t want him to know the truth. That I’d once loved pie too much. That when my carefully controlled world had spun out of control back in high school, I’d turned to pie, or ice cream, or cookies for a once-a-week binge and purge. I’d never been heavy, but only because I never let myself get heavy. I’d been the poster child for secret bulimia—the kind so manageable and mild that hardly anyone knew my struggles. Thadd never knew that the shock of my shitty grades when we went out had sent me back to the cake tin. I’d kept it all well-hidden, until I finally managed to kick the habit shortly after him, thanks to Anaka and her encouragement. Now, I kept tempting food and tempting men at a distance. Which meant I had to walk away from Tempting William. No matter how sexy and adorable he was.

  “I should go.”

  “I’m sorry if I rubbed you the wrong way.”

  “You didn’t rub me any way at all,” I said hastily, then instructed my brain to remove all thoughts of rubbing—the right way, of course, because he’d do it the right way. I was sure he’d do everything the absolute, toe-curling, mind-blowing way.

  * * *

  William

  * * *

  Could American accents be any more endearing?

  The answer was no, and no, and no.

  It was simply impossible, and this whole damn country was rife with them, like a fucking paradise. God, I loved America, and California was a slice of heaven. No, wait. It was manna from heaven, and that’s even better, right?

  I shook off the queries, though, because who cared about matters of divinity when right in front of me the hot girl was doing her absolute Olympic best to rein in a smile. As if she were fighting every instinct that told her to curve up her lips. She pursed them together, then brushed a few loose strands of blond hair from her cheek and glanced away. She wanted to dislike me, which only made her more intriguing. I turned on my best gentlemanly charm.

  “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, and I’ll just have to imagine then that you have an equally lovely name,” I said, and there it was again. That smile when I said lovely. Ah, perhaps she was an Anglophile. Certain words said in an accent simply undid the walls in American women—lovely was one of them. I was not above using it. Besides, it had the added benefit of being true.

  She was lovely.

  And hot.

  And feisty.

  Translation—everything I liked best.

  “Jess,” she breathed out in a low voice, as if it cost her something to give me this little nugget.

  “Jess,” I repeated, liking the way her name sounded. I could tell for her even sharing a small detail was hard. But I loved little details—they told you the things you wanted to know about people, they were clues you could assemble into a whole puzzle. I held up my index finger as if making a pronouncement. “And I bet it’s just Jess. I bet it’s not even short for Jessica. Because I don’t think you’d use a nickname.”

  She shook her head, as if she was trying to suppress a laugh. “It’s just Jess,” she said in acknowledgment, and I wanted to pump a fist in victory. I’d read her right. Now the question was how to keep reading her because maybe she wasn’t interested in backing off. Sure, I had a job to do, and hell, she was part of it, but jobs were infinitely more fun when they included one hot, blond California girl. American girls were my kryptonite. British chicks had nothing on ladies in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  “Just Jess,” I said playfully.

  Then I felt a quick rush of wind, and heard the sound of tires spinning wildly. “Coming by,” a voice called out. Jess quickly moved to the left.

  The voice turned frantic. “Right! On your right!”

  What the bloody hell? Cyclists were supposed to ride on the left but this guy was barreling down the path pedaling like the chain had sprung free. Right at Jess. Instinct took over as I lunged forward, wrapping my hands around her arm, and yanked her out of the path of the careening cyclist who must have been dead-set on catching up to his pack. I tugged her to the sand to make sure she was safe.

  Then, a loud smack rang in my skull, and my forehead throbbed.

  * * *

  Jess

  * * *

  I breathed hard, the wind knocked out of me from surprise. When I looked up, William was the one wincing.

  “Are you okay?” I pointed to his forehead, now marked with a scrape. My heart lurched towards him, and my blood pumped faster with worry. I didn’t want him to be hurt because of me.

  “Don’t worry about me. I think that lamppost got in my way,” he said, gesturing to the streetlight along the boardwalk.

  “You hit the streetlight when you were pulling me out of the way?” I asked, incredulous but also amazed.

  “I didn’t want you to get hit,” he said, as if there were no other choice but to save me from the bike. “The cyclists around here can be crazy.”

  I reached for his forehead, gingerly touching near the cut. “You sure you’re okay?”

  He nodded. “It’s totally nothing. I’m sure it’ll look cool later when it becomes some rugged scar.”

  I smiled again. “Scars are rugged.”

  “See? It was worth it.” He flashed a smile at me. The man was so charming I’d need a new word for charming. He was more than charming.

  “Well, thank you. That was quite gallant of you,” I said, pretending to bow grandly.

  “Just call me Gallant William,” he joked.

  “Do you need a Band-Aid, Gallant William? I have some with me.”

  “You carry Band-Aids?” he asked, sounding as shocked as if I’d said I was packing heat.

  “You don’t?”

  “I’m a guy. I don’t carry Band-Aids. I also don’t need one for my forehead, but thank you for the offer.”

  Then I heard an even more beautiful sound. The sweet soprano voice of a rising starlet calling out to her accessory dog. “Sparky, do you want some water?”

  William and his bravery slipped into the rearview mirror.

  I was the horse at the gates, ready to be the first out. I didn’t even need to bring the camera to my eyes. I whipped it out of my backpack, held it in front of me, and snapped picture af
ter picture of Riley and Miles laughing as Miles held down the button that sent streams of water shooting into a green-rimmed silver bowl at dog-eye-level and Sparky McDoodle happily lapped up his H20. They didn’t even notice me.

  “Oh, Sparky McDoodle, you are so adorable. Isn’t he cute just drinking water?” Riley said to Miles, her right profile in frame.

  “He is adorable at everything he does,” Miles said, flashing his cute actor smile at Riley.

  William might have snagged some shots, too. I stopped caring about him, because I had a higher calling, and I was off and running to the public restroom a hundred feet away. I raced into a stall, slammed the door, unzipped my backpack, and yanked out my laptop. I grabbed the card from my camera, slid it into the drive, downloaded and uploaded, and sent the pictures to J.P.

  When I left the stall five minutes later, there was a reply on my phone from J.P.

  Check out Up Close in twenty minutes. Pics will be there. Come by tomorrow for $$.

  Cash. My favorite four-letter word.

  Looked like I was a little closer to the price of admission for next semester’s anatomy class and learning exactly how the knee bone was connected to the leg bone.

  4

  Jess

  * * *

  “Do you want to get an ice cream?”

  The question came from William as I walked down the boardwalk, and I prayed I’d heard him wrong. The last thing I wanted was to get an ice cream with William because that’s the first thing I wanted. The ice cream and the time with him. Especially because he wasn’t only handsome. He was gallant.

  “Why would I want to get an ice cream?” I tossed back casually.

  “Why wouldn’t you want to get an ice cream?”

  “I’m not hungry.” I didn’t make eye contact. The second I re-engaged with him, I’d want to spend more time with him. I kept on a path toward my beat-up black scooter with the well-worn seat. I’d bought this scooter myself because it was the only model I could afford, and even then it was used, and even then I’d haggled at the dealership for a lower price. But it was all mine. I owned that baby outright and I loved it.

  “You don’t need to be hungry to get an ice cream,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if this was a completely obvious answer. “It’s like in that movie with Paulie DeLuca, Anyone’s Dough, when he offers a doughnut to the lawyer who’s trying to take over his firm and he says—”

  I couldn’t help myself. I knew the movie. I loved the movie. “‘Since when do you have to be hungry to eat a doughnut?’”

  We said the line in unison, and William couldn’t hide a big fat smile. “You like the movies, don’t you?”

  As if he’d learned my naughty little secret. I didn’t hide my affection for films, but I didn’t wear it on my sleeve, either. And William had already figured it out. Like he’d figured out that I wasn’t Jessica.

  Smart guy.

  “Of course I like the movies,” I said, rolling my eyes, as if that would work as my Smart Guy Repellent so I could keep him at bay. “Name me someone who doesn’t like movies. That’s like not liking sunshine. Or puppies.”

  “Or pie.”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s normal to dislike pie.”

  “But not ice cream. So why don’t you have an ice cream with me even if you’re not hungry since that’s what Paulie DeLuca’s character would have done in Anyone’s Dough,” he proposed, and this man was getting under my skin in more ways than one. I might have been Scientific Jess, OCD Jess, Driven Jess when it came to school, but movies were my guilty pleasure, and my soft spot.

  I wished I’d brushed my teeth in the bathroom a few minutes ago. Not because I had bad breath. But because having minty, fresh toothpaste breath is the one surefire way to make sweets taste bad. Sort of like drinking orange juice after brushing. Ergo, a clean mouth not only was good for the teeth, it was also good for resistance. To sweets and to the hot guys who proffered them.

  I pursed my lips, considering if I wanted to give in, and William seized the moment. “Ice cream is like a Band-Aid for me. For my forehead scar.” He brushed his fingertips across the small cut and dropped the corners of his lips into a frown. “Besides, I hear the soft serve is irresistible, especially with the shells that harden. I bet you like hard shells,” he said, and raised an eyebrow. He was no longer talking about ice cream. He was talking about me. Seeing through me, and my very hard shell.

  Since my resistance was already shot, I relented. “Fine. But only because you have that rugged scar and you like Anyone’s Dough.”

  “Two reasons. We’re making progress.”

  * * *

  William

  * * *

  I did like Anyone’s Dough. I also didn’t want the conversation to end. Plus, I needed her. Was it a crime that I would both benefit from talking to her and that I’d enjoyed it so far?

  Of course not. It meant I was a lucky bastard, as my brother Matthew would say.

  We headed to the ice cream shack, a few feet away now that we’d managed to walk a good length of the boardwalk together. A group of guys was playing volleyball on the sand, yelling loudly in Spanish each time someone served.

  “Chocolate or vanilla?” I asked.

  “Vanilla with a chocolate shell,” she said.

  I ordered for us both, opting for chocolate-on-chocolate since I was of the belief that you can never have too much of a good thing, and chocolate was one of those things. The guy behind the counter handed us our cones, and Jess reached into the front pocket of her backpack.

  I waved her off. “I’ve got this.”

  She shot me a sharp look. Oh, she was an independent little American vixen. What a turn-on. Feistiness was like a good drug to me.

  “You don’t have to pay for my ice cream,” she said firmly as she opened her wallet.

  She was not going to win on this front. I grasped her wrist gently and tugged her hand away. “I am aware of that,” I said softly, looking into her eyes. Bright blue, like a clear sky. “I certainly don’t have to pay for your ice cream. I’m sure given your fantastic photographic skills that you are more than capable of paying for it yourself. But I asked you, and more than that, I want to buy you an ice cream.”

  “Fine. Thank you,” she grumbled, and I placed a hand on the small of her back as I led her over to a nearby table. She shrugged off my hand. I didn’t let it bother me. After all, I’d won the first battle—she’d agreed to spend more time with me.

  “So,” she began, lingering on that word as she took her first lick of the ice cream. I wasn’t even sure if it was intentional or if it simply couldn’t be helped, but let’s be honest—there’s just something about a girl’s tongue licking something sweet that makes a guy’s mind wander. Mine was taking a quick trip into its dirtier corners, of which there were plenty. Sometimes I wondered how my brain even found its way out of all that terrain to let me function as a normal human being in civilized society. Like right now, as I imagined the taste of her lips. The feel of them. The things she could do with that tongue…

  “What’s your story? You’re obviously not from here.”

  Like a slingshot, I’d been returned to Planet Clean. “You’re direct.”

  “I am. So…” she said, her tone making it clear she was on a hunt for information and wasn’t going to stop till she got it. She was relentless. Another trait I admired. It probably also meant she was fiery in bed.

  Oops. There my mind went again.

  “I’m an open book. I grew up in London, my parents are BBC producers, my older brother is a rock critic,” I continued and she raised an eyebrow at the mention.

  “That must be a fun profession,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s madly in love with his job, as well as his fiancée.”

  “Glad to hear he has strong feelings for both. And you?”

  “Am I madly in love with my job? Because I don’t actually have a fiancée,” I said in a faux whisper as if she’d suggested something t
erribly scandalous.

  “Thank you for clarifying. Because you look like you’re about to be married.”

  “It’s the scar, right? The rugged scar?”

  That earned me a small laugh, which then turned to a quick intake of breath as she ducked. “Watch out,” she said, as a volleyball soared in my direction this time. I reached out a hand and caught it easily in my right palm. A guy in black swim trunks trotted over to me, shouting at his friend in Spanish, “Dude, you need to be more careful. You have the worst serve in the free world.”

  I tossed him the ball. “I’m not sure it’s the worst serve. Maybe the second or third worst?” I offered and the guy cracked up.

  “How’s your serve?”

  “Not too shabby,” I said.

  “Then come join us later.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said and high-fived me before he jogged back to the makeshift court.

  I turned my focus back to Jess.

  “You speak Spanish?”

  “I do?” I asked playfully.

  “Well, you just had a whole conversation with him in Spanish,” she said, arching an eyebrow.

  “I’m pretty sure that was just a couple lines.”

  “Either way, I’m impressed.”

  “Wait until you hear my Japanese, then.”

  She smirked. “Oh, I’m sure you speak Japanese, too. By the way, nice catch.”

  I shrugged. “I used to be a volleyball star back in the home country. It’s huge there on all our beaches, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Right up there with soccer, I bet,” she said, keeping it up.

  “But the Japanese thing?” I said, shifting to serious as I took a big bite of the ice cream cone. “All true. I’m studying East Asian languages at the University of Los Angeles.”

  “That’s an unusual major. I go there, too. But I’m a bio major. Pre-med.”