Own the Eights: Own the Eights: Book One

by Sandor, Krista

  She schooled her features. “I don’t bench press two-hundred-fifty-pound men for breakfast, so if we’re going to get up and check what’s on the CityBeat page, you’ve got to be the one who gets the ball rolling.”

  “You’re right,” he answered with a slight shake of his head.

  He came to his knees. “I’m going to take care of this,” he said and gestured to the condom.

  She nodded then rolled over and grabbed her phone and gasped. “Jordan!”

  “What?” he asked, finishing with the condom then pulling up his shorts.

  “You! You’re blowing up on CityBeat!”

  He’d crushed it. The internet couldn’t get enough of this gentle giant bottle-feeding baby goat after baby goat.

  “How about you? What’s your score?” he asked.

  She scrolled to her blog. Her numbers had gone up, but not like his. “Not too bad for me,” she lied.

  He grinned down at her. “See, we’ve got this. Now stay put. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Back to the car to get an umbrella.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  He gave her the sweetest boyish grin. “It’s still raining, and I don’t want you to get wet.”

  She reached for her bra, suddenly feeling quite naked. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.”

  She nodded, wishing the thread of disappointment running through her chest would disappear. “Okay, that will give me time to get dressed.”

  Jordan took off for the car when her phone pinged again. But it wasn’t a CityBeat alert. She sucked in a shaky breath, then opened her email to find a past due notification.

  “Shit,” she whispered, staring at the dollar signs dotting the screen.

  In a daze, she set her phone on the blanket and pulled on her clothes.

  Jordan entered the barn, still sporting that wide grin. And why shouldn’t he be smiling? He’d overcome his crippling goat phobia, got laid, and now had a bazillion more likes.

  He glanced from her to the umbrella. “Would you like to grab some dinner on the way home?”

  If she were a good eights girl, she’d say yes. In the course of the last couple of hours, this man had shown her his sensitive side, aka his goat phobia, rocked her world with not one but two orgasms, and ran out in the rain to get an umbrella for her. Everything screamed he was an eight, at least, for this afternoon. But her mind wasn’t on the number eight. It was on all the numbers strung together, telling her how much she owed her creditors.

  She picked up the blanket and began to fold it. “I should get home and work on my blog post.”

  He glanced out at the pond as thunder rumbled in the distance, and the air, once crackling with frenzied sexual energy, now hung heavy with the reality of their situation.

  He crossed his arms. “You’re right. We should get to work because…”

  “Because it’s a competition, and there’ll only be one winner,” she finished.

  “Only one winner,” he repeated as the warmth between them evaporated and was replaced with the cold hard truth.

  They both wanted to be crowned the winner.

  And if she wanted to keep her shop, that winner had to be her.

  9

  Jordan

  Jordan’s phone pinged, igniting a spark of excitement, but he had to keep his cool, especially at the gym.

  “Do you think that’s CityBeat?” Deacon called from where he was eyeing Shelly at the gym’s front desk.

  “I’ll check after I get the free weights in order,” he answered, going for nonchalance, but it didn’t work on his longtime mentor.

  “Jordan?” he said with a smirk.

  “What, Deac?”

  “Your legs. You might as well be doing the pee-pee dance like my kids.”

  Jordan cocked his head to the side. “Aren’t your twin girls eleven now? Kids don’t do the pee dance at that age, do they?” he questioned.

  Deacon had put all his energy into building his business. Jordan had always respected his mentor’s dedication, but now, there was no reason for him to be visiting his gyms all over the state. Every Deacon CrossFit ran like a well-oiled machine. As Deac’s number one trainer and the person in charge of setting up and monitoring all the locations, he was tasked with the day-to-day business. His boss should have plenty of time to see his kids, and maybe even try to patch things up with his ex-wife. Instead, the man seemed more intent on assessing Shelly’s panty lines as she bent over and picked up the multitude of pens that mysteriously kept rolling off the desk.

  “Are you winning?” Deac asked, taking one more look at Shelly.

  “It’s ongoing, and the numbers fluctuate, but we’re within striking distance of being in first place,” he answered.

  Deacon frowned. “We? Are you talking about that gal they paired you with? I think that’s bullshit. Every man or woman for himself.”

  “A slip of the tongue, Deac. I meant I’m within striking distance,” he said over his shoulder as he took a little extra time with the weights.

  “What’s going on with that girl? She’s not holding you back, is she?”

  That girl. The one with eyes so captivating and a smile so damn sweet he couldn’t think of anything else before drifting off to sleep.

  He shrugged, choosing this as the perfect moment to slide into the mute, stereotypical gym meathead.

  Georgie had barely spoken during the car ride back to Denver, and it had taken everything he had not to chase her down before she’d disappeared inside her bungalow when he’d dropped her off at home. It had been two long days since they’d made love in that barn with the rain as their backdrop, and they hadn’t spoken once. Granted, they hadn’t had any challenges. But Christ! Despite knowing they were competitors, he’d walked down the street to her bookshop half a dozen times over the last forty-eight hours only to chicken out and turn around.

  He’d shot up on the scoreboard, and they were barely trailing behind the Dannies thanks to his last post, which Deacon hadn’t seemed to have read, most likely because the man was preoccupied with Shelly’s ass.

  Georgie’s post about their goat yoga challenge, which didn’t rake in many likes, left out his near barnyard meltdown and instead focused on the health benefits of adopting or simply interacting with animals regularly.

  But he’d gone full baby goat confession.

  He’d spilled his damn guts in his blog post and shared his childhood goat trauma. He’d waited for the you’re such a pussy comments to flood in and for his subscriber numbers to drop, but the opposite had happened. There was a flood, but it was an outpouring of praise and shit-ton of likes on his page. It turns out, his goat phobia was a real thing. It even had a name, capraphobia. Capra, Latin for goat. And there was also a foundation for kids who had been traumatized at petting zoos. He had mothers, fathers, farmers, yoga instructors, and psychotherapists praising his admission and applauding him for taking steps to address his fear.

  It was crazy. Guys bigger than him had started posting their fears of all sorts of weird shit.

  For example, yo-yos.

  Some dude in Kentucky was afraid of yo-yos. He commented that the goat confession blog post had inspired him to overcome his fear and hold a yo-yo. The guy even posted a picture of himself doing it.

  In terms of the contest, it was the spike he and Georgie had needed. Now, thanks to those baby goats, they were only a handful of likes behind the Dannies, with him in second place and Georgie in third.

  He wanted to be happy, and he was grateful his post had helped his Marks Perfect Ten Mindset followers, but he wanted success for Georgie, too. She was the only reason he’d made it through goat yoga without pissing himself from fear.

  But his mentor was right. There could only be one winner, and Deacon had transformed him into a champion.

  But fuck!

  “Jordan, look at your damn phone!” Deacon called, stealing another glance at Shelly.r />
  “All right, Deac. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and opened the text.

  “Well?” Deacon beckoned.

  Jordan schooled his features, masking the surge of adrenaline that hit his system.

  “I need to go. It’s another CityBeat challenge. Are you good to close alone, Shelly?” he asked.

  “I can stick around and help out,” Deacon said, sharing a look with the desk clerk, who happened to be young enough to be his daughter.

  A muscle twitched in his jaw. Fuck it! He didn’t have time to cock-block his boss.

  He headed to the locker room, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then took another look at the text to double-check what he already knew.

  CityBeat had texted him the address of Georgie’s bookshop, but he sure as shit wasn’t about to tell Deacon. He went through the back and jumped in his Beamer. If he’d left his car, Deacon, while probably already bending Shelly over one of the treadmills, would know something was up.

  And why did CityBeat want him to go to the bookshop? Was he just supposed to pick her up? Was something going on at the shop?

  He couldn’t let his nerves get the best of him. He was Jordan Marks. The creator of the Marks Perfect Ten Mindset. He was cool under pressure, except for when it came to one particular woman in cork sandals and librarian glasses.

  It took less than two minutes to get to her shop by car. He parked, cut the ignition, then scrubbed his hands down his face. This was a competition. He’d go in. They’d do whatever the hell they had to do, and that was it.

  But that wasn’t it.

  Get your head in the game, Marks.

  He got out and walked up to the bookshop, and there she was, setting out a tray of muffins and doughnuts. Christ! What he’d do for her muffin.

  Gah! Stop!

  He opened the door, and she turned to him with a wide grin that immediately faded.

  She narrowed her gaze. “What are you doing here?”

  “CityBeat sent me. Didn’t you get a text?”

  She shook her head.

  He pulled out his phone. Had he hallucinated? Had she been so prominent in his thoughts that he’d gone One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and made it up?

  No, it was there in black and white.

  “The shop’s closed. Our book club is about to start,” she said, craning her head to look out the window.

  “Who’s in your book club?” he asked.

  “A couple of spry octogenarians,” she answered with a little smirk.

  He tossed her a smirk of his own. “You don’t think I know what octogenarian means.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  He shrugged. “Easy, it’s a gathering of octopi.”

  She gasped, thinking she’d caught him being a dumbass.

  He held up a finger. “I’m just messing with you. An octogenarian is a person lucky enough to live into their eighties. And I know that octopi isn’t a real word. The plural of octopus is octopuses, but that just sounds like something you’d find on a porno site.”

  “That’s right,” she chuckled.

  What the hell had gotten into him? His inner nerd hadn’t reared its nine-dollar bowl-cut head in years. And why did she look so pretty with that damn messy bun, little denim capri pants, with you guessed it, those Birkenstocks, and that same cardigan over a white tank top? Was she like Mr. Rogers? Did she enter the bookstore and change into it every day? Did she sing a little bookstore won’t you be my novel tune? It didn’t matter. He’d grown fond of those stupid shoes.

  He checked his watch. It was nearly seven thirty. “When do you start?”

  She tugged nervously at the hem of her cardigan. “Around seven. It’s strange for them to be late.”

  “What’s the book?”

  She glanced at the clock on the wall. “There’s not just one book this time. We’re doing our annual Jane Austen discussion. We’ll talk about her novels, but tonight, we’ll also dive into the parallels between Elizabeth Bennet’s life in Pride and Prejudice and Jane’s own life.”

  He picked up a book and mindlessly paged through it. “You’re right, there are many similarities between their lives, like how Jane and Lizzy both grew up in busy, boisterous households. Except, Jane had brothers and a sister where Lizzy had only sisters.”

  He glanced up to find her looking like the cutest fish he’d ever seen, with her mouth opening and closing as if she wanted to speak but couldn’t.

  Look at that! It was usually his abs that rendered women speechless. With Georgie, his English degree did the trick.

  “I…” she stuttered when the phone near the cash register rang. “Hold on,” she said with a minute shake to her head.

  He glanced down and noticed he was holding a paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice.

  “Not bad, huh?” he said, speaking to the picture of the Bennet sisters on the cover.

  He set the book down. What the hell was he doing? Was he talking to fictional characters in books now?

  Georgie hung up the phone and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, joining her at the counter.

  “That was the husband of one of the women in the book club. He just told me that they’re not coming.”

  “Why?”

  “Michael Bolton.”

  “The singer, Michael Bolton?” he asked as his brows knit together.

  Was that a legit reason to cancel plans these days?

  She drummed her fingers on the counter. “Yeah, he’s here in concert tonight, and they forgot to let me know they had tickets.”

  He scratched his chin. “There are eighty-year-old Michael Bolton groupies?”

  She shrugged. “I hate to admit it, but who hasn’t belted out the lyrics to “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You” in the shower?”

  She did have a point.

  “What happens now?” he asked when the door to the bookshop swung open, and a woman who looked like an older version of Georgie, wrapped in a fire engine red dress and dripping with diamonds, entered the room.

  “Oh, Georgiana, pumpkin! I forgot how dank it was inside this sad little shop,” the woman said, then removed a perfume bottle from her handbag and gave it a few sprays.

  A hot blush bloomed on Georgie’s cheeks. “What are you doing here, Mother?”

  Mother?

  “I’m here for book club, pumpkin. Didn’t you say that CityBeat would be here filming it? I told all the girls at the Denver Country Club that I was going to be on the web or the net or whatever they call it.”

  Georgie sighed. “I also told you that I don’t know when they’ll show up to film or take pictures.”

  The woman dropped the perfume back into her bag, then zeroed in on him, her cougar gaze raking over his body.

  Holy hell! How was this woman not only related to Georgie but her mother?

  Her stilettos clicked on the wood floor as she strode up to him. “You didn’t mention Jordan was going to be here,” she said, pawing his arm.

  He took a slight step back. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Jensen.”

  This was getting a little awkward.

  She waved a hand decked with gemstones. “I’m not Mrs. Jensen. I’m Lorraine Vanderdinkle. You might have heard of my husband, Howard Vanderdinkle. He’s a venture capitalist. You know, tech, blah, blah, blah. I just can’t keep up with it all.”

  He hadn’t heard of Howard Vanderdinkle—and Christ, what a name! But he nodded politely, then glanced over at Georgie, who’d crossed her arms and plastered on the hard grin of one holding back sociopathic tendencies.

  These two women couldn’t be more different if they tried.

  Lorraine turned to Georgie and huffed out an irritated sigh. “Shoulders back, pumpkin. Chin up. Don’t you remember anything from our hard work during your beauty pageant days?”

  The hot blush drained from Georgie’s cheeks.

  “Beauty pageant days?” he asked.

  Lorrain
e gasped. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “That was a long time ago, Mom,” Georgie said, piling a few books into a stack.

  Mrs. Vanderdinkle—Jesus, he still couldn’t get over that name—feigned mock distress. “Yes, back when my daughter was a winner and not promoting this embrace of mediocrity with her Eat the Sixes blog.”

  “It’s Own the Eights, Mom.”

  Lorraine gave another wave of her platinum-encrusted hand. “Whatever! Oh Jordan, she was such a knockout back then. We were killing it on the pageant circuit, and then, tragedy struck my poor beauty.”

  He looked from Georgie to her mother. “What happened? Did you get sick or hurt?”

  “No, I got fat,” Georgie answered over her shoulder, now busying herself by collecting all the snacks and refreshments she’d set out.

  Lorraine shook her hands and scrunched up her face or at least tried. The woman seemed to have had a shitload of Botox.

  “We don’t use that word, Georgiana. I will not have it spoken in my presence.” Georgie’s mom pressed her bejeweled hand to her chest. “My beautiful Georgiana had become so unruly, Jordan. You should have seen what I had to deal with! She’d literally jump off the stage in five-inch heels and sprint out of the ballrooms where the pageants were held. And do you know where I’d find her?”

  This was not a conversation he wanted to be a part of, but Holy Mary, it explained a hell of a lot about Georgie Jensen.

  “I don’t know,” he stammered.

  “Dunkin’ Donuts,” the woman said with the level of contempt usually reserved for drug cartel kingpins. “She’d tuck money into her dresses and costumes, even her bikinis, so she could escape and gorge herself with sugar and dough.”

  “God forbid that a child eat a doughnut,” Georgie said, taking one off a platter and smashing it into her mouth.

  Lorraine shook her head. “You should be like Jordan and those Dannies that you’re up against, pumpkin. They strive to be the best. Isn’t that right?” Mrs. Vanderdinkle asked as she squeezed his forearm.

  He shared a look with Georgie, who had powdered sugar all over her lips.

  “Well…” he began, not sure where the hell to start with this lady.