Love Arranged (Lakefront Billionaires, #3)

by Lauren Asher

We both know you’d never willingly choose to be trapped with another human being. Laurence True. Or at least it was until I met you.

She laughs—a sound that makes me feel closer to heaven than any religious service or gospel.

One kiss to remember her by, I promise myself, embracing the rush of energy coursing through my body as she single-handedly ruins every future kiss for me. She might as well be my first and my last because no one from my past compares, and there won’t be a single person who ever will.

I hope you never forgive me for hurting you, I think to myself when she returns my kiss with equal enthusiasm. She tastes of passion fruit and sweet temptation, a forbidden combination that I could become addicted to. I hope you find every reason to hate me and hold on to it, I silently add as I slide my hands through her hair and tilt her head back so I can better plunder her mouth.

And I hope that one day, I’ll stop hating myself for letting you go.

So here I am, a witness to everyone else’s love story after spending so long wishing for mine.

I’ve wished for so many different things in my life because to wish is to hope, and that’s the one thing no one can take away from you.”

“If my actions said anything, it was that I liked you too damn much, Lily. That was my problem. Never you.”

“I wasn’t looking for anything real when I joined the app, but meeting you made me consider it.”

“I can’t get angry at them for something I’ve been guilty of. So let them look. Let them stare. Let them wish they were going home with the most beautiful woman in this bar—in this town—for all I care. I’ve been there. Many times, in fact, when it comes to you. So if anything, I sympathize with them because they can want you, but they’ll never truly have you.”

Hope I haven’t felt since I took the last gold coin my dad gave me and used my wish on him. I hope Lorenzo is the one I’ve been searching for, I said before tossing the coin into my dad’s fountain and watching it join the other ones at the bottom. Maybe the wish wasn’t a waste after all.

To wish is to hope, and that’s the one thing no one can take away from you.