Page 16

“Have you thought about an internship for your senior year?” Dr. Foley, my academic advisor at UNLV, asks.

I shake my head. “Not yet. When do I need to have that lined up?”

She glances at the calendar in front of her. “By February first, so you have lots of time, but some students have already started finding them and they’ve started working.” She lifts a shoulder. “Something to think about. You’ll just have the internship and your Marketing Policies course remaining.”

“I’ll find something.” Now that I think about it, I bet I could work with my dad. I’ll have to ask him, but he’s been gone a lot the last few weeks.

My meeting lasts all of five minutes, but it’s the kickoff to school starting in just two short weeks. My advisor reviewed my schedule for this semester, which is intense but not horrible as I finally get to focus on the courses I’ve always been interested in taking: Marketing Planning and Analysis, Global Consumer Behavior, Leadership and Management Skills, and Business Marketing. It should be both a challenging and interesting semester of classes, and I overloaded my previous semesters so I could take a slightly lighter schedule my senior year.

That way I can enjoy it, too.

And I’m hoping I get to enjoy it with Cooper around.

Speaking of Cooper, we talked last night for an hour before we both reluctantly called it a night, and we’ve already texted a little this morning.

I decide to try calling him on my way home from my meeting.

“Good morning,” his warm voice answers, and it sends a little thrill up my spine. “How was your meeting?”

“Good,” I say. “My advisor told me I need to figure out an internship next semester.”

“Have you thought about it?”

“A little. I have some ideas, but nothing set in stone yet.”

“Let me know how I can help,” he says.

I hear someone in the background yelling from what sounds like another room. “Cooper Michael Noah! You have to come see this!”

“Just a second!” he yells back.

“Is that your mom?” I ask.

He chuckles. “Yeah.”

“Cooper Michael?” I tease.

“What’s your full name?”

“Why do you want to know?” I narrow my eyes even though he can’t see me.

“So I can yell it out when I come inside you.”

I gasp. “Gabriella Rose Grant.”

“Well, Gabriella Rose, I told her about you.”

“You did? What did you say?”

He lowers his voice. “That you’re so goddamn hot it’s not right. That when I slide my dick into your tight pussy, it’s the best feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

“Shut up,” I say, my cheeks flaming as I merge onto the highway, his voice filling my truck with his dirty words over the Bluetooth. “You did not tell her that.”

“No, I didn’t.” He laughs. “I said you’re funny and beautiful and honest and smart, you light up the room with your sunshine, and you make me feel things I’ve never felt before.”

“Back at you, Captain.” Warmth spreads through my chest at his words.

The depth of emotion I feel with him already is frightening. I can’t imagine the exponential growth that might occur if we nurture this and give it time to grow.

“I better go before she asks to talk to you,” he says.

I giggle. “Tell her I said hi.”

“And stoke those flames? Not a chance in hell. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Okay. Miss you.”

“Not as much as I miss you, Sunshine. Bye.”

We hang up, and I can’t help the dreamy and breathless little sigh that falls from my mouth.

Instead of heading home to my dad’s place, I head to the apartment Mia and Chelsea share to pick Mia up for lunch. Chelsea headed to California for a trip with her family for a few days, and Mia and I made lunch plans.

“How was the meeting with Dr. Foley?” she asks once she opens the passenger door and slides into the seat. She’s working toward her bachelor’s in business management, so we’ve taken a lot of the same classes together over the last three years and we share the same advisor.

“Fine. She told me I need to start looking for an internship for next semester.”

“Any ideas?” she asks as she buckles her seatbelt.

“I want to find somewhere that might hire me on after I finish my degree,” I say. I pull out of the parking lot and head toward her favorite Thai restaurant. “I’ve thought about asking my dad if he might have something for me.”

“Ooh, that’s a great idea. Ask him if there’s anything for me, too,” she says. “Wouldn’t it be fun to do an internship together?”

“It would be so fun!” I say, but the truth is I’m not sure I’d really want that. We’ve done everything together since we met our freshman year of high school. I love her dearly. She’s the sister I never had. But I also sort of want something that’s just for me. I feel selfish telling her that, though, so I exaggerate my excitement over the idea.

“It probably wouldn’t work out, though, since I’d need something on the business side and you’d more be looking at the marketing angle. Maybe he can get me in the front offices and you in the marketing department,” she suggests.

“I’ll ask,” I say.

If it was anybody else, I’d assume she’s using me for my connections. But this is Mia. She’d never do that.

Still, it feels…weird. We’ve never had issues regarding my family, but for most of our friendship, we didn’t know who my dad was.

And then we did, and now I’m a little territorial over him.

I shouldn’t be. I trust Mia more than anybody else in the entire world.

But that doesn’t mean I want her getting close to my dad. He’s been like a father to both of us since we moved here, and just like when Cooper asked Mia her name at the blackjack table that first night we met, a bit of jealousy tears through me any time my dad gives Mia fatherly attention or advice.

It’s not just that.

My dad…he’s a complicated man.

As it turns out, he has a lot of money. He has his hands in a lot of different business ventures in Las Vegas, and he recently accepted a new position that will take him away from me a lot more. I’m so excited for him—thrilled, actually, since he told me it’s everything he ever wanted out of his career, but I’m sad I won’t get to spend as much time with him. So maybe if I can snag an internship with him, I’ll get to have more time with him.

And it’s not just all that. Sure, he’s successful. Sure, he’s rich. He’s even pretty famous, which is why I don’t want to mention him to Cooper.

But he’s also devastatingly good looking. Women flock to him, and I see the way my best friend looks at him.

She literally swoons when he pays her the tiniest bit of attention, and he never does it in any type of sexual way. But he’s young at only forty-one. He got my mom pregnant when he was nineteen, long before he became a household name, and when I tracked him down through a cousin, of course her first instinct was to believe I showed up out of the woodwork to claim something that didn’t belong to me.

But my uncle was there at that first meeting, and he saw the resemblance immediately. He knew my dad had gotten a girl pregnant. He knew my dad sent monthly checks to help with the expenses of raising a child. He believed me, and a DNA test proved the rest of the truth.

It was weird at first, and I didn’t live with my dad when I first moved to town, instead opting to live in a dorm my freshman year. But I found myself driving over to his place for dinner or meeting him in between classes, so when the school year was over and I needed to find housing for the summer, I opted to stay with him. And he convinced me not to leave when my sophomore year started.

My close group of friends know who my father is, but for the most part, I’ve kept it quiet at school. We don’t share the same last name since my mother put her last name on my birth certificate, and sometimes I wonder what he did to her to make her hate him as much as she does.

And then I think about how narcissistic she is, and I truly believe it had more to do with her than him. He’s a good man, passionate about the things he loves, smart and business-minded, talented and athletic. I admire so many things about him, and I often wonder what it would’ve been like to grow up with him rather than with her.

But I can’t change the past. I can only react to the present and plan for the future.

Such an optimistic life view, and I find it adorable how Cooper immediately picked up on that part of my personality so easily that he nicknamed me Sunshine.

I love when he calls me Sunshine. I love when he calls me Gabby. I love when he calls me babe.

That feeling of missing him claws at me in a way I’ve never felt before.

“Are you okay?” Mia asks.

“Fine,” I murmur, still lost in thought about Cooper as I pull into the parking lot.

“You’re just…quiet.”

“If I say what I’m thinking, you’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“Say it anyway,” she says.

“I miss Cooper.”

Her brows rise. “That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I don’t know. Something about the internship maybe. How’d we get from A to B? Or C, for Cooper, I guess.”

I shrug. “I feel like I’m always thinking about him. I don’t know what took up my brain space before I met him, because he’s starring solely in my thoughts at the moment.”

“You’re in deep, huh?” she asks.

“I’m in deep,” I confirm.

“But you just met him,” she points out. “How can it be more than just sex?”

A prickle of defensiveness races up my spine. “I don’t know. It just is . We had amazing sex, sure. But we had amazing conversation, too.”

“Do you love him?” she asks softly.

I stare out the windshield at the restaurant in front of us. “I think I do,” I murmur, and she lets out a soft gasp. I glance over at her. “I’ve never felt this before, Mia.”

She reaches over and squeezes my arm. “I’m happy for you, girl.”

“I’m happy for me, too.”

“Just be careful. You hardly know him.”

I feel like now would be a terrible time to bring up the fact that I’m going to San Diego this weekend, but I tell her anyway.

I trust him implicitly, but I’m not dumb enough to go out of town without telling someone where I’ll be.

“He invited me to San Diego this weekend,” I admit.

Her eyes widen. “Are you going?”

I nod. “I want to see where he lives. I want to see what his life is like. And despite the fact that he’s a celebrity and he still hasn’t told me, I trust him. I refuse to look him up, but Chelsea said everything she’s read about him has been positive. He’s not going to do anything I don’t one hundred percent want to do, too.”

She purses her lips. “How about this…if you have sex in the first hour after you get to his place, it’s just sex. If you have a conversation first, then maybe it’s more.”

I roll my eyes. I know she’s just looking out for me, but now she put that in my head and I sort of hate her a little for it.

We head inside, and we spend our lunch talking all things internships and our senior year of college as I avoid the topic of Cooper. He’s all I want to talk about, but I don’t want more warnings about him. I know what I’m getting into.

I just hope I can make it all work together. If our one weekend together taught me anything, it’s that I’m not going to be able to focus on much of anything except him once he moves to town.

And I can’t wait for the distraction.