I’m not nervous at all. I’ve never looked forward to something before, not like I’m looking forward to seeing her.

I have a corner table at Raine’s, where I’ve made a last-minute reservation for me and Anna.

She is the only thing that’s pushed all the negativity that’s surrounding me out of my head. In fact, she’s so beautiful and fucking perfect that I don’t know if all that negative shit that overtook my morning will ever be able to come back.

Not as long as she is in my life.

Fuck, I am getting ahead of myself.

She hasn’t even said yes to my proposition yet.

Before this morning’s little run, I had a very interesting conversation with my father.

And that’s what I have to ask Anna about.

From the back corner table where I’m sitting, I see the door to the bar open and I see Anna walk in.

She is even more stunning than I remembered, even though I just saw her a few hours ago. She is wearing a stunner of a little black dress, and her curves are like sin. I need to know how she moves in the dark. I need to put my hands over her curves, feel every single inch of her, let my tongue run over hers and take her breath away when I kiss her.

“Anna,” I say, standing up and moving around the table to pull her chair out.

“Liam,” she says, smiling at me as she sits down. I push her chair in and she places her elbows elegantly on the table. “It’s nice to see you again. Very nice.”

“Now,” I say, “if you just visited my blog, you’d be able to see you any time you wanted.”

“Oh, but I don’t know if I want to see you all the time yet,” she throws back at me with a sexy little smile.

She better watch how she uses that dirty little mouth. I can show her how to cause all kinds of trouble with those lips.

I narrow my eyes at her, trying to wrap my head around the creature sitting before me. She’s a model, technically, but she is so much more than what you think of when you hear the word model. She is curvy, with sinfully perfect and pouty lips, and she isn’t tall the way you’d think most models would be. Anna has a perfect, cute little nose and eyes that I want to make flutter and roll back in her head when I smack her round, perky ass.

No model can compare to her.

And the way she gives me lip, she’s all sass and smarts.

And she makes me stone-hard.

“You think you can say no me to, baby?” I say across the table to her. She leans forward on her elbows, the neckline of her dress tantalizingly low across her perky breasts.

“I didn’t say no,” she breathes, “I said I don’t know yet.”

“Let me try to persuade you,” I say as our cocktail waitress brings over the two blueberry ginger vodka tonics I ordered. “Let me try to get you to say yes.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you looked at my card, which I know you did because you needed my number, you know that my family owns half of the newspapers up and down the eastern seaboard. My father is at the helm of the ship, but he is getting older now, and he wants to retire. My brother and I are the VPs of the company, and my father wants to leave majority control of the firm to my brother. This is a problem.”

“A problem?” she asks, taking a sip of her drink. Her lips wrap up around the thin black straw and I feel myself stiffen at the thought of what I’m going to have her do later. “What’s the problem? Let me guess. You want control because it means more money. More control, more power?”

Oh, my girl has me so wrong. And I’m going to set her straight.

“Let me clue you in, baby. I don’t give a shit about having more money or power. I already have all the money and power I could ever want. The moment I got you to come to this bar with me, that’s when I knew I wouldn’t need power ever again. Because if I can get you to come share a drink with me, have a date with me, then I don’t need anything. Because you are beautiful, and I still can’t believe it’s not your wedding day.”

She sits up straight, taken aback. Her eyes open wide and I can see her breathing come faster, and she reaches forward to take her glass in her elegant fingers, taking a sip of her drink.

That’s right, baby. Cool down.

“What is it, then?” she asks. “Why do you care about getting control of your father’s company?”

“My brother is a dickhead, and that’s putting it nicely. He wants to take one of our media divisions, the one that runs the print newspapers in New York, and chop it up. Sell off the parts to the highest bidder. Outsource the office jobs, take away the printing functions from the people who’ve run everything for years. And I know lots of people are going to lose their jobs if - excuse me, when - that happens.”

Anna takes another sip of her drink and puts the glass down on the table.

“Why’s this even a problem, though?” she asks. “Why don’t you just ask your father to put you in charge and cut your brother out?”

“My father is old-fashioned. He hates that I run a blog and interact with a community of other bloggers. Hates it. He thinks it’s too egalitarian. He thinks the media should be controlled by a few. He doesn’t agree with my approach to things. He doesn’t like that pretty much anyone can share and disseminate information so easily.”

“Disseminate information?” she says skeptically. “I think you’re overestimating the power of the internet. It’s all just cat videos.”

“You’re right, there’s a lot of that fluffy stuff out there. But that’s the point. We have to keep these platforms open and available to everyone. Even if we think some content choices are somewhat questionable.”

“What about you, Liam? What are your content choices?”

“I thought you didn’t want to see me online,” I rib her.

“Consider my interest piqued.”

I grab my phone and scroll through my blog, landing on a picture of me at the beach. Shirtless. Sweaty. Smiling. Like it’s all for the girl who’s looking at the picture.

“How’s this for content?” I say, pushing my phone across the table to her.

Her lips part slightly as she looks down at the picture, and then back up to me.

“Want to see me with my shirt off IRL?”

“Is that the question you wanted to ask me? Is that why I’m here right now? So you could show me your abs...what did you say? IRL?”

“No,” I say, taking my phone back from her. “I wanted to ask you to pretend to be my girlfriend. And I thought you’d like it if I bought you a drink first.”

Anna’s eyes widen and her eyebrows knit together slightly in the middle. I want to reach under the table to touch her thigh. I think she’s getting wet for me.

I know she’s getting wet for me. I know that look. And strangely, I feel like I know her.

My insta-girlfriend.

“Girlfriend?” she breathes. “I’ve never…”

“I know, you’ve never had some random guy off the street be so forward with you. I get it.”

“No,” she says. “It’s not that.”

And she arches an eyebrow at me and bites down on the corner of her lip, and I know it will be no fucking time at all before I have her in my bed.