by Alisha Rai
“Ooh yes, love them.”
“Can you grab the juice, Jia?” Rhiannon asked.
“Yes, ma’am.” The younger woman stuck her head in the fridge. “Orange, apple?”
“Both.”
Katrina took her seat at the small breakfast table in the sunny nook and neatly placed a napkin on her lap while the other women joined her. The much larger dining room was rarely used, except for holidays. The last few Christmases had been fun, with Rhiannon, select Crush employees, and her own staff.
What’s going to happen when Rhiannon leaves you?
She swatted away the anxious thought. Nothing. She would be fine. People came into her life, and they left, and Katrina had learned to enjoy the parts in the middle. That was really all a person could do. “How was your party last night, Jia?”
Jia was at the point in her career where she was getting invites to various product launches. As far as Katrina could tell, being an influencer meant a whole lot of visibility. Like modeling, but with more access.
Inwardly, Katrina shuddered. Jia could have that.
“I couldn’t enjoy it.” Jia tapped on her ever-present phone and showed Katrina the screen. “Would you look at this jerk?”
Katrina peered at the photo of Jia contemplatively staring out at the ocean. “Ah. It’s you, Jia.”
“I know it’s me! Look at the comment from the motivational model.”
“What’s a motivational model?” Rhiannon asked.
“You know. A model who captions all his pics with inspirational quotes? Like, from Gandhi or Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama.”
Rhiannon pursed her lips. “Lovely. I’m sure Gandhi would be delighted he went on a hunger strike so his words could caption thirst traps.”
Katrina took the phone from Jia and read the comment out loud. “Wow, the west coast really agrees with you. Your skin has never looked better.” She handed the phone back to its owner. “I’m sorry. I don’t see what the problem is.”
“You’re reading it wrong.” Jia raised the pitch of her voice. “The west coast agrees with you. Your skin has never looked better.” She scowled.
“That bitch,” Rhiannon commented, and took a sip of her juice.
“You’re saying that sarcastically, but let me assure you, this guy is the worst.” Jia sneered. “He’s implying my skin hasn’t always been flawless. How dare he?” She stroked her smooth cheek. “Look at this. Like a baby’s bottom.”
“Your face is like a baby’s bottom?”
Jia growled at Rhiannon. Their relationship had quickly settled into a sisterly squabbling. “You know what I mean. Trust me, I’m reading this exactly right. I have good instincts about this. I couldn’t sleep a wink, I’m exhausted.”
“You can’t tell. Ah, to be dewy and twenty-five again.”
“I’m twenty-seven,” Jia answered pertly.
“You’d probably sleep more if you didn’t stay up all night texting a guy.”
Jia’s flush confirmed Rhiannon’s guess.
Rhiannon poured a generous serving of syrup on her waffles. “Where in the world is your mysterious boyfriend now, anyway?”
Katrina gently kicked her best friend under the table. Jia had moved cross-country to expand her empire and get the kind of opportunities that were only accessible in close proximity to L.A. When Rhiannon had proposed adding her as a roommate, she’d told Katrina that Jia’s family had been worried about her moving here and living alone.
About ten minutes after meeting her, Katrina had understood Jia’s family’s hesitance. The girl was social-media-savvy and clearly brilliant, but she had the kind of sheltered, wide-eyed eagerness and innocence that came from not having been exposed to the worst of mankind yet.
Katrina wasn’t that much older, and not nearly as cynical as Rhiannon, but she felt about eighty years removed from Jia when it came to street smarts.
Which was why she wasn’t eager to crush Jia’s spirit. Especially when it came to this mystery guy Jia had been texting for the past month. A guy Jia hadn’t met or seen yet.
“He’s in Hong Kong this week,” Jia said blithely, unaware of or uncaring about Rhiannon’s sardonic tone. “He’s finishing up his business in Asia and then he should be in the U.S. in a few weeks.”
Rhiannon nodded. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. And what is his business, again? Or his name, for that matter? Asking for science.”
This time, Jia’s flattened lips told Katrina she’d picked up on Rhiannon’s disbelief. “Stop playing big sister, Rhi. I’ve got enough of those.”
Rhiannon pointed her fork at Jia. “None of your biological big sisters know about this guy. I do. I’m looking out for you. It’s weird you guys haven’t even video-chatted yet.”
“It’s not weird. He’d rather we meet in person first.”
Rhiannon scoffed. “Have you ever heard of this thing called catfishing?”
Jia’s face turned red and Katrina cleared her throat, eager to ease tensions. She hated arguments. “How about I tell you guys about the guy I met yesterday?”
A pair of light brown and dark brown eyes turned immediately to her. “Where did you meet a guy?” Jia asked.
“At French Coast. We sat at a table together. I talked to him and we flirted a little and then he asked me out.”
“What?” Rhiannon’s scowl deepened. “What’s his name? When are you going out? What does he look like?”
Katrina shook her head, having expected nothing less than this third degree. Rhiannon might be protective of Jia, but she was overprotective of Katrina. She would happily internet-stalk any guy in Katrina’s vicinity. Possibly even real-life-stalk them. The amount of data Rhiannon had at her fingertips was a little frightening. “His name was Ross, and he was very cute. He likes to bicycle, and his mother has an adorable puppy. But we’re not going out. I didn’t feel a spark.”
Rhiannon harrumphed. “Okay. I won’t run a background check on him then.”
“Now I’m going to tell you to stop playing big sister.” Only she wouldn’t, because deep down, Katrina adored Rhiannon for caring so much about her. Having a sister had always been her dream.
“You can’t go out with some stranger you meet in a café. Or on the internet,” Rhiannon tacked on, giving Jia a meaningful look.
Katrina cut into her waffle. “You made a fortune for both of us by building an app where people literally go out with strangers. Strangers on the internet. You met Samson on that app.”
Rhiannon swallowed the bite in her mouth before answering. “That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“It . . . just is.”
Katrina rolled her eyes. “Okay then.”
“Wait a minute.” Jia’s silverware clattered onto her plate. “Is French Coast the place with that blue-and-white wall? And the red chairs?” The youngest roommate’s perfectly arched eyebrows drew together in a frown.
“Yeah, it is. Why?”
Jia bit her lip and glanced at Rhiannon. “Uh. No reason.”
“Pretty sure there’s a reason.”
“Um . . .”
Her hesitation worried Katrina. “What? You can say it.”
Jia reached for her phone. “There was something I saw yesterday on Twitter, but I didn’t have much time to look at it, because I was—well, that’s not important.” Her fingers tapped on the screen.
Rhiannon cocked her head. “Spit it out, Jia.”
Dread balled up in Katrina’s stomach when Jia’s face turned pale. She placed the phone faceup on the table so they could all see.
It was her.
Katrina’s face wasn’t visible, hidden by both her baseball cap and the way the camera was angled, thank God. But Katrina could still make out the curve of her round cheek and the light brown strands of her hair.
“What is this?” she whispered. “Paparazzi? Was he someone famous?” Ross’s face was more distinguishable than hers in the shot.
“Actually . . . you’re both famous now.�
�� Jia exited out of the picture she’d clicked on, and the tweet it had come from was revealed.
The thread of tweets, rather.
Katrina was barely aware of Rhiannon scooting closer to her. She read through the thread with growing disbelief, each tweet more ridiculous than the next.
This guy just sat down at this girl’s table and they make such a cute couple.
OMG! Wouldn’t it be adorable if he’s her soul mate???
I don’t see any wedding rings.
They touched legs!
Aw, they’re talking about each other’s families.
The fuck.
She looked at the avatar of the tweeter. It was the smiling blond woman from the table next to theirs, the one she’d thought was in the middle of writing something juicy.
You. You were the something juicy.
“You talked to him about your parents?”
Katrina shook her head at Rhiannon’s skeptical question. The surprise was valid. She didn’t talk about her parents with anyone, save Rhiannon and her therapist. Jas knew about some pieces of her family history. That was it. “We were talking about his mom’s dog, and Zeus,” she muttered. She waded through the meticulously detailed play-by-play of her and Ross’s interaction, each innocent action and part of their conversation taking on a rom-com spin.
“Jesus, there’s like over fifty tweets—” she gasped.
Breaking: #CafeBae and #CuteCafeGirl went to the bathroom AT THE SAME TIME
“What the hell, we didn’t go to the bathroom together. We definitely didn’t do what this is implying. He went to the bathroom. I went to get some napkins. I was barely gone for a few minutes.”
“This is so creepy.” Rhi took the phone from her and kept scrolling. “Jeez. He’s got a peach to die for.”
Katrina raked her hands through her hair. “Not entirely inaccurate, but irrelevant, since I wasn’t personally moved by the peach.”
Rhiannon shook her head. “They overheard him asking you out, and said you agreed.”
“I didn’t.” Katrina’s words were too loud, but she couldn’t dial back the volume, she was so agitated. “I mean, he did ask me out, but like I told you, I turned him down.”
Rhiannon kept scrolling. Oh God, was it never-ending? “After a bajillion tweets of buildup, she probably had to make up a happy ending to satisfy her followers.”
Katrina scrubbed her face. “This lady doesn’t have a lot of followers, at least, does she?”
Rhiannon was silent for a moment, then she cleared her throat. “As of this morning, she has about two hundred thousand.”
Two hundred thousand.
“Some of those have to be bots, though,” Jia tagged on in a hurry. Like it mattered if even two-thirds of them were bots.
Two hundred thousand people had seen her face on the internet.
“The thread went pretty viral. She probably got a lot of those followers overnight,” Rhiannon said.
“Why? I mean, it was an unusual encounter for me, but it was, like, utterly typical to most people.”
“People love to ship other humans, real or fictional.” Rhiannon slid the phone back to Jia. “This woman spun a story, and the world went with it. They got invested in your happily-ever-after.”
Happily-ever-after? No, this was a disaster. “She took my photo,” Katrina whispered, and picked at her cuticles. Save for the vague pics on her dating profile, no one had taken her photo since she’d disappeared into relative obscurity. She didn’t have any social media. Every photo of her on the internet was from years and years ago, and that was how she preferred it.
Anonymity had been the main thing that had comforted her when she’d gone for that first drive. The assurance that no one would know who she truly was if she had a panic attack in public. The certainty that anyone who wanted to hurt Katrina King would stay far away.
“At least you had that hat on. You’re pretty unidentifiable in it,” Jia reassured her.
It did reassure her, but only for a moment. “You identified me.”
“Only after you told us about the encounter. And honestly, I live with you. I know your face.”
Katrina waited for her heart to start racing, but an odd, icy cold had settled over her. It might not be a huge pool, but other people knew her face too. And the woman—Becca, according to her username—may have given a halfhearted thought to hiding her identity, but she hadn’t pixelated her face out entirely.
She pushed her plate away. “Okay, so odds are no one will recognize me, right?”
“Right.” Jia nodded. “And these things blow over. A cat will learn how to play the tuba in like an hour and you’ll no longer be a viral phenomenon.”
A phenomenon. She tried to smile, but feared it was a baring of teeth. “Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool.” This wasn’t a big deal. It would be fine.
“I’ll put my trip off. I’ll get Lakshmi on it. We’ll figure this out.”
Rhiannon’s assistant was amazing and possibly a warlock, but Katrina feared even Lakshmi wouldn’t be able to do anything about this. “No. You go. Don’t say anything to Lakshmi, or even Samson yet, please? I’ll monitor it and it’ll be fine.” The numbness was nice, a new way to manage her emotions.
“Should we tell Jas?” Rhiannon asked.
“No.” The single word was sharp, but she couldn’t help it. Maybe she should tell Jas, but that would mean bugging him during his time off.
You’re being foolish. He is your core security, and should know about this.
But that was the problem with getting romantically interested in one’s bodyguard, eh? The embarrassment of her crush finding out about this debacle outweighed her need to tell her employee that she’d gone viral, albeit anonymously. For now. “I’ll tell him if it escalates.”
As if she sensed her distress, Zeus came to rub herself against Katrina’s legs. She scooped the cat up, scratching under her chin. Zeus immediately collapsed in a boneless heap against Katrina’s chest. She wished she could relax as easily. “Do you guys mind cleaning up?”
“Of course,” Jia murmured.
“Excellent. Will you excuse me, please?” She didn’t wait for either of them to respond, just got up from the table and made her way to the door.
It’ll blow over. It’ll pass. No one will be able to identify you. The words played in her head as she walked down the hallway to her sunny little office. They had to be true, those words, or the tendrils of panic would grab hold of her and never let go.
No, no, that wasn’t true. The panic always let go. It did. She’d survive.
It’ll pass.
You’re safe.
Chapter Five
“HERE’S MILEY IN her Halloween costume. She’s going to be a Tootsie Roll.”
Jas dutifully perused the photo on the phone shoved under his nose. The baby was about a year and a half old and sported a solemn expression on the chubby face that poked out of the cutout in the candy costume. “Very cute.”
Dean Miller took the phone back, swiped a few times, and then showed it to Jas again, beaming. “Here she is dressed like a peppermint patty.”
Jas expected the photo to be from a previous year, but the girl looked the same, if more resigned, as a foil-wrapped square. “I thought her Halloween costume was the Tootsie Roll.”
“Oh, that’s for trick-or-treating. We’re having a party, too, to celebrate her second Halloween. I can’t pick one look, so I got her a bunch of different outfits and took photos.” Dean flipped through the photos. “Here she is as peas, and a piggy, and a roll of pennies, and a dinosaur, and a—”
“Can I see the dinosaur?” Harris, Dean’s cousin, interrupted from across the table.
“Sure thing.” Dean passed him the phone.
Harris didn’t glance at the device. Instead, he tucked it into the inside of his jacket. “Thanks.”
Jas coughed to hide his sudden laugh.
“Hey!” Dean glared at his cousin.
“No one wants to see your
kid dressed up like food and animals, cousin.”
“Jas was interested.”
“No, he wasn’t. He’s new, so you were taking advantage of his politeness to make him suffer through a slideshow of your kid’s every move.”
Jas was grateful neither man seemed to want his input at all. Dean growled at Harris and placed his hands on the table, rising slightly out of his chair. “Give me my phone back.”
Harris smirked, unconcerned. The two Black men had the undeniable stamp of family about them, similarities in their face and build, both clearly athletes—or former athletes, since Dean had retired a couple years ago and Harris was on his last season. Their comfortable squabbling held the ring of near-brothers. “Come and get it, green bean.”
Dean slammed his big fist on the table. “Veganism is good for the environment and your body!”
Samson walked back to the table at that exact instant, holding another round of drinks. “Guys, simmer down, drinks are here.”
Dean bared his teeth. “He took my phone.”
“He was over-dadding.” Harris rolled his eyes.
“You try having your heart walking around outside your body, Harris.”
Samson placed the tray in front of them. Jas grabbed his Coke. Since he was driving, he hadn’t wanted to drink.
“Harris, give him back his phone. Dean, your mother-in-law came all the way from the Valley to stay the night with Miley so you can have a break, remember? Enjoy the time off,” Samson said.
Harris and Dean both grumbled, but Harris handed back the phone and Dean subsided in his chair. “I didn’t even get to show you her as a bag of potatoes,” he grumbled.
Harris opened his mouth, but Samson cut off whatever teasing remark he had locked and loaded. “Harris, that woman at the bar was checking you out.”
Harris’s attention was immediately diverted. He straightened and puffed out his chest, then casually glanced over his shoulder. “Holy shit, she’s hot. Be right back, guys.”
Dean shook his head as his cousin left. “Was she really checking him out?”
Samson grinned. “She glanced this way a few times while I was getting the drinks. I suppose she could have been checking any of you out.” He shrugged. “If she’s not interested, Harris will come back or find someone who is.”