The Pretend Boyfriend 2 (Inhumanly Handsome, Humanly Flawed Alpha Male Erotic Romance) Read Online Free Page B

pitch to Henry Moody?

6
     
    Brian sits at his desk in his wide office. His walls are a vista of clear glass, looking out into the skyscraper-filled city of Chicago. If you were to spy on him with a telescopic lens from an adjacent building, you would think him hard at work, tapping furiously at his keyboard.
    The truth is that Brian is Googling.
    To be more precise, he is Googling Henry Moody.
    He finds articles, press releases, images. He reads them thoroughly. Moody isn’t a bad account for his ad firm to land either, he muses.
    A line in an article catches his eye. Henry Moody is a patron of the opera.
    Opera?
    Brian wrinkles his nose. He could never stomach opera music. He always thought it sounds like cats being tortured.
    . . . And he can be found frequenting the Galois every Saturday night with his wife, the article says.
    Brian picks up the phone.
    “Sammie sweetheart? Yeah, I’m calling because I’m thinking about you.”
    Pause.
    “No . . . I’m seriously thinking about you in a non-romantic, non-commitment, spur of the moment, hanging out kind of way. Yeah, there is more than one way to skin a cat.”
    Pause.
    “Uh huh. Speaking of cats, what are you doing Saturday night?”

7
     
    “It’s great to go out on a double date,” Cassie says.
    She’s dressed in a little retro black dress and her style is done up in a sixties Audrey Hepburn do. She looks amazing, though Brian would rather eat thumbtacks than to ever tell her that. The downside about having Caleb date Cassie is that he’s forced to put up with her now and again – as in every fortnight. Which is far more than Brian can take of Cassie in a lifetime.
    Take tonight, for example. He’s sorry he ever dropped the subject of opera to Caleb.
    “Hey, I like opera,” Caleb chimed up brightly.
    “Since when? I’ve known you since the eighth grade, and you’ve never, ever shown the slightest inclination towards the deviant arts.”
    “Like, duh. Opera isn’t deviant, last time I checked.”
    “Matter of opinion. Back in the Inquisition, it was a legalized method of torture alongside the rack and anal probes.”
    “They didn’t have anal probes during the Inquisition.”
    “Speak for yourself. I remember the history books differently. If you were a fornicator, they probed your prostate with matchsticks before they fucked your ears with La Traviata.”
    “Hey, I know my history. La Travalina . . . whatever wasn’t written during the Inquisition. It was written sometime in . . . uh . . . ” Caleb scrunches his forehead.
    “How can you like opera when you can’t even pronounce half the Italian names? Now, why do you want to go to something that’s going to trip your tongue up and bore you out of your skull when you can do the same with a power drill?”
    “Why the fuck are you going then? Oh, I get it. You’re taking Samantha out on a date.” Caleb grinned. “I think it’s totally cool you’re dating her, though I hadn’t pegged you for the dating type, Mr. ‘I don’t do romance, I only fuck.”
    “I believe my exact words are ‘I don’t believe in love, I believe in fucking’. And I’m not dating Samantha. We’re just hanging out, the way you and I hang out. When you do make the time to hang out with your old, lonesome friend who happens to be single, of course.”
    Caleb had the decency to look abashed. “Well, Brian, I know I haven’t been around as much as I used to lately – ”
    “Hah.”
    “ – but it happens when you start dating someone. You want to see them as much as you can to see where you’re going with the relationship. Not that you’d know. Or care.”
    “Not that I’d want to know.”
    “But it’s a temporary phase. I’m sorry I’ve neglected you – ”
    “Oh baby, you haven’t neglected me.” Brian mimicked a woman’s voice. “I’ve just been waiting by the telephone and you haven’t called in days.” He slaps the back of his best friend’s head. “You twat. Of course you don’t