by Lulu Pratt
In the six months since my viral video on addiction and my second BeYou talk show appearance, my career had absolutely taken off. My follower count had ticked up by the millions, and the growth hadn’t slowed even a little. I was brimming with gratitude. How had I, a normal girl from a tiny town, gotten this far? Hard work, I guess, a good attitude, and a dollop of luck!
Thanks to said follower increase and partnership with BeYou – and a big heaping of the aforementioned hard work – I’d been approached by a well-known make-up company, whose name I cannot disclose at this time, to collaborate on my own line of cruelty-free products. The designers, with my constant input, were finishing up their samples this month, and in about two to three more months, we anticipated dropping the release just in time for Christmas. It’d be the best gift I’d ever received from Santa.
To say it was a dream come true would be a massive understatement.
“Poppy,” he called again, his voice echoing up to the loft where we had our shared office space. “Are you dawdling?”
“No, no, I’m coming.” I powered down my monitor, slipped into the high heels I’d left strewn across the white shag rug, and toddled down the stairs.
At the base of the stairs was Finn.
“My golly, you look handsome,” I beamed, taking in my boyfriend.
He was wearing a black suit, the slim-fit kind with a skinny tie and slender leather belt with a silver buckle and silver jewelry. I couldn’t imagine another man in the world pulling it off, but Finn did so with aplomb, his black hair making him look like a dashing young count from some little European country.
Finn whistled. “I? I look like nothing, not compared to you.”
He strode to the stairs, holding out a hand to help me descend the final step. I felt like I was going to a very adult prom.
“You,” he continued, “you put me to shame.”
I blushed. Even after six months of dating – during which time we’d moved into a fabulous New York apartment together – and being wildly in love, Finn’s compliments made me school-girlishly giggle.
That being said… I did look fabulous. I was wearing head to toe bubblegum pink, inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s pink Givenchy in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The dress was a tight pink satin sheath, the earrings were enormous pink crystals, and the clutch was a slender baguette with crystals that matched the earrings. The shoes… well, let’s just say, the shoes had freaking feathers.
“Do I look the part?” I asked, fishing further. “Tell me, does this outfit say ‘girlfriend of the very famous photographer’?”
He laughed, “It says that the famous photographer in question will have a hard time keeping his hands off her all night.”
“Oh, you charmer.”
I pulled him in close for a quick peck on the lips.
“C’mon,” I insisted. “We can’t be late. Let’s go call a taxi.”
“You don’t wanna muss that dress up a little bit first?” he asked, his tone flirty and dirty.
“As much as I’d like that, and believe me, I would, it’d be pretty crazy if you showed up late to your own magnificent debut.”
Tonight was the night Finn and I had been anticipating for months.
Shortly after leaving Regency, Finn had begun working on his own art photography. He still mainly shot people, but this time, they weren’t just traditionally beautiful supermodels. They were men, women, and everyone in between, from all walks of life, all races, all abilities. The portraits were honest, insightful and kind. And I was his greatest muse.
Or at least, that’s what the world-famous gallery had told Finn, upon reviewing his pictures. They’d said his shots of me were the most inspired, and the most groundbreaking. It was, according to them, on the strength of these photos that they’d agreed to feature several of his pieces in the exhibit opening tonight, an honor rarely, if ever, bestowed on a photographer so new to the art world. I was so proud of him, I was fit to burst right outta my pink seams.
In anticipation of tonight, I’d recorded a video or two for my channel with Finn, explaining his artistic process and breaking down the photos of me that would be on display. I knew he hated social media, but I guess he made an exception for me. And if that’s not love, what is? My audience adored it, and were begging me to feature him again, a request which I’d be more than happy to oblige.
Finn tied his hair back with a black velvet ribbon, and at last, we were ready to go. We held hands all the way from the apartment, down the elevator and onto the sidewalk, where we were greeted by a doorman, because that was a thing I could afford now, apparently, who hailed us a cab.
Finn was all jitters in the cab ride, and I placed a reassuring palm on his thigh.
“You got nothin’ to worry about,” I insisted. “They’re gonna love it. And you.”
He smiled, flashing his white teeth. “Only because I got such a gorgeous girl at my side.”
“A girl who doesn’t want to be anywhere else but by your side.”
When we arrived, the first thing I saw were the stairs of the gallery covered in an enormous red carpet, light bulbs flashing against backdrops.
“Are we walkin’ that?” I gulped. No one told me anything about a red carpet.
Finn nodded. “Indeed.”
“I don’t know what to do on a red carpet.”
“Pfft, of course you do,” he contradicted. “You’re a star, you’re born for the red carpet. Besides, we’re the talk of the town. Everybody’s clamoring to see us, and I don’t think they much care if we do a good step and repeat.”
That much was true. Thanks to the coinciding rise of our stars, our names were on everybody’s lips. I’d never expected to be a society girl, but here I was hangin’ around celebrities of every stripe. Who’da thunk?
We walked out of the cab, and after paying the driver, Finn took my hand in his.
“This is gonna be a good night,” he told me as we began our walk to the red carpet.
Turns out, there really isn’t anything that hard about standing in front of a bunch of cameras and smiling. It’s kind what I did for a living, right? Besides, with Finn next to me, nothing was all that intimidating. There wasn’t a dang thing we couldn’t do together.
Once we passed the gauntlet of cameras, we strode, hand in hand, through the gallery’s double wide doors.
“Mr. Maguire!”
“Ms. Reeve!”
One person after another called our names, and though we politely waved at all of them in turn, we’d agreed to not get up in conversation until we’d seen Finn’s pieces on the wall. That first moment, of seeing his bravery in stepping away from Regency pay off in dividends… that was a moment we needed all to ourselves.
We skirted around the crowds, giggling at our own evasiveness, before reaching the featured galleries. Two rooms later, at the end of the hall, serving as the anchor to the whole exhibit, was a picture of me.
Finn and I came to a halt in front of it. It was one of the first pictures he’d ever taken of me – the one on the beach, in the Caribbean, with my hair down and my lips parted.
“Oh gosh,” I murmured, feeling tears in the back of my throat. “I love it.”
He smiled. “Good. Because this picture is a love letter to you.”
And then, without warning, Finn stepped away from me, his face clouding over with nerves.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, concerned.
He nodded. “It’s more than okay… it’s…”
Finn took a deep breath, and before I could say anything, I realized with shock that he was going down to one knee.
“What’s going on?” I breathed, air constricting in my throat.
He gulped, then finding his confidence, said, “Poppy Reeve, I love you more than I can say, more than I can even comprehend. I knew it from the moment I laid eyes on you, and my love has only grown since. A life without you is no life at all. Poppy, would you do me the honor of marrying me?”
I didn’t even have to
think. I threw myself on to the marble ground so that I could look Finn in the eyes as I whispered:
“Yes. A thousand times, yes.”
And in front of his picture of me, blissful on a beach, we shared a kiss.
***
Thank you for reading Take Me. I hope you enjoyed it.
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Want You Back
He text dumped me, now I have to pretend to be in love with him or lose my job
I never thought I’d see Jacob again after he texted those seven words: I’m leaving, we can’t be together anymore.
I’ve spent the last two years staring at that message, hearing his gravelly voice loud and clear in my head as I read the words over and over.
We were supposed to be forever, instead he’s forever frozen my heart.
It’s been rough but at least my career is going great.
Or at least it was until I accidentally posted a vibrator video to my company’s instagram account.
They failed to see the funny side.
Now I have one shot to smooth things over with my boss - pretend to be in a relationship with a stranger for the weekend to impress a potential new client.
Except it isn’t a stranger after all, it’s Jacob
*** A steamy STANDALONE contemporary romance with a smoking hot hero. No cliffhanger, no cheating and a guaranteed happily-ever-after.***
Chapter 1
Sierra
I CHEWED ON the end of a pen and my eyebrows furrowed with concentration as I murmured, “Almost there, almost there… Come on…”
Riiiing.
I shoved away from my desk, frustrated. I’d been so close to finally aligning the grid margins of our big presentation. Some people call me anal. Those people would be right. If the grids weren’t perfectly centered, the presentation would look unprofessional and then I’d look unprofessional and the whole thing would be a disaster. I know I sound crazy, and I’ve made my peace with that. I’m focused, I’m meticulous, and I love things with bows.
So whoever was on the other end of that line was gonna have to apologize to me and my grids for interrupting such good work.
“Hello?” I said, jabbing a button and talking to the receiver.
“You sound pissed,” the voice noted mildly.
Oh, shoot. The voice was, alas, very familiar. “Erm, sorry about that, Joe. It’s the — never mind, what can I do for you?”
“I want to see you. In my office. In about one minute.” His tone was brusque, and given some recent mishaps, his tone did not thrill me.
I bit down on the tip of the pen I was still holding between my fingers. “Right now?”
“Well, in one minute.”
I sighed quietly to myself, but replied brightly, “Of course.”
Those grids were going to have to wait. I hit ctrl-s twice, just in case. Joe was my boss, so when he said jump, I asked how high. I thrust my feet back into the less-than-sensible pumps beneath my desk and grimaced. My Deep South upbringing had somehow wheedled me into a constant, incomprehensible need to wear shoes that made me blister and bleed. But damn, were they cute! They had a little Mary-Jane buckle with a bee as a button, and they were shiny patent red, like Minnie Mouse, and—
Right, the meeting. I pushed away from the minimalist white desk with perfectly organized sticky notes in different colors, inspirational quotes, a picture of my dog and a heavily marked-up wall calendar. Under my breath, I grumbled. Anything Joe wanted with me, he probably could’ve handled over the phone. Unless it was something bad, in which case it would only be polite of him to deal with it face to face. Oh God, it was gonna be something bad. What had I done? Had he seen me take my shoes off, that wasn’t very professional, after all…
“Pipe down, you!” I muttered to my nagging inner voice. “It’s probably nothing. You’re being a D-R-A-M-A queen.” My internal monologue tended to do that, so sometimes I had to loudly and forcefully tell her to take a damn hike.
Inner voice in check, I strode the couple of doors from my office to Joe’s, feet sinking into the gray carpet, and entered without so much as a knock. It’d taken some time for me to get over my formal ways, but Joe had insisted upon it. After all, construction companies aren’t exactly hallowed institutions of etiquette. I think his words were ‘you’re being a priss.’ And a priss I remained, though I played along with him and his brother for team morale or something.
“Hey Joe,” I said with as a cheery voice as I could manage as I entered his office, a relic to bygone manhood, adorned with dead fish, Revolutionary war muskets and other pointless junk. “What’s up?”
He growled a ‘hello’ from his worn-in leather chair. I wondered what would happen if he left that chair for too long. Would it just burst into flame? What was a dog without its ever present master?
“Sierra, come on in, pop a squat,” he ordered.
I took a careful seat on the moth-bitten flannel couch across from his arm chair. Joe, along with his brother Tom, ran a fairly successful business and I worked in the Fort Myers head office, but you’d never know it from the way he presented himself. While I was all high heels and barrel curls, he looked like he’d been marooned with the rest of the Gilligan’s Island crew. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was a man, part owner of a construction company, one of the last bastions of raw manhood, and could get away with showering only every other day. The patriarchy sucks — and also kinda reeks.
“What’d you wanna talk about?” I asked politely, eager to get my clean pencil-skirted behind off the couch and back to those grid margins.
“The retirement village job.”
I nodded eagerly. I was always ready to talk about the village. “Peachy. I’m just working on the presentation now, rest assured, I’ll have it in time for—”
He interrupted me with a wave of his hand. “Don’t mean to cut you off, Sierra, but it’s not about the presentation.”
“Um, pardon?” My eyes squinted with confusion. “Then, er, what’s it about?” The presentation was my main obligation on the project, as marketing manager. It’s not like we could exactly talk shop over timber varieties.
He picked up an unlit cigarette from somewhere in the piles of shit on his desk and rolled it between his fingers like a worrying stone, giving him an oddly monk-like air.
“Well, you see,” he began, his voice gravelly from years of smoke, “we gotta go meet with Charles up in Jacksonville.”
Again, I nodded. I knew all this. Charles was the owner of the yet-to-be-built retirement village, and I’d been carefully researching him for weeks to gear the presentation towards his interests. Charles was traditional, but a touch eccentric. Needless to say, I recognized the name. “Right, for the presentation. The one I’m working on. Which I just told you.”
Aw dang it, my smart mouth was running away from me again. Mama always said if I didn’t zip it I’d trip on it, and someday soon. And that had certainly proven true in the last few weeks…
Joe raised an eyebrow, suggesting that he’d clocked my uppityness, but he didn’t address it. “We’re going down to meet the client,” he repeated. “And I need you to come with us.”
Oh. Oh. That wasn’t what I’d been expecting, not a bit. Ordinarily, I passed the presentation on to Joe, allowing him to do the speechifying. I mean, I didn’t mind going, per se, but it was odd. Or was I overreacting? Perhaps he just wanted me to assist with last-minute changes or help gussy up the presentation a bit, seeing as how he didn’t exactly give off respectable vibes. My mind raced with questions as I tried to process this information. Joe must’ve seen the inquisition flitting across my face, for he added:
“Yes, even in spite of… recent events.”
I swallowed. “Are you sure?”
“Well, we can’t bench you forever.”
“But you said—”
&n
bsp; “I know what I said,” he retorted. “And you screwed up, Sierra, no doubt about it, but now it’s time for you to make amends. This is a huge team effort, and we need all hands on deck. Even yours. I’ll overlook your little… uh, what’s it called?”
“Instagram,” I said shortly, knowing where this was going.
“Right. I’ll overlook your unprofessional little Instagram mess up if you help us close this deal.”
That was a relief, I’ll admit. I don’t really want to talk about it, but I guess you need to understand the basics. So suffice to say I accidentally posted something a touch — er, a whole lot — unprofessional to the company’s Instagram account, which I ran, instead of to my own personal account. Why a construction company needs a social media presence is beyond me, but apparently we did, and apparently it was my job to maintain one. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, you name it. I guess it makes us ‘search engine optimizable’? Or something like that. Anyhow, I’d been digging myself out of the dog house for a couple of weeks, and anything I could do to curry — or rather, re-curry — Joe’s favor would just have to be done.
But that still didn’t really answer why they needed me for this trip.
I leaned a bit forward, tilted my head, and asked, “That’s great, Joe, and gosh knows I’m happy to do my part for Pillers, but… er…”
“Why you?” he said with a ghost of a smile.
I swallowed. “Well, yeah.”
He put the cigarette between his lips, at last lighting it with a Bic that appeared to have survived the Cold War. It was unclear how a construction company co-CEO got away with defying building codes like smoking indoors, but little things like ‘the law’ had never seemed to trouble Joe.
He puffed out some smoke, and replied, “This guy Charles is all about family-oriented businesses. You know, ones that looks mom-and-pop-y. We’re brother-and-brother, but same difference.”
I nodded, following along. From my perspective as the head of marketing, I was familiar with the trend of companies trying to appear as though they were bringing jobs back home. Plus, this job was building a retirement community, and amongst old people there was a greater desire, according to analysts, to have local companies involved.
