Free Wrecked (Crystal Book Billionaires) by Jessica Blake Page B

was also disgust on his beautiful face.
    “You’re just like all the kids I grew up with,” he said.
    Everything inside of me stiffened. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean you expect the world to be handed to you on a silver platter.”
    I blinked heavily and stared at him. How could he be so judgmental of me? He hadn’t even spent a whole combined hour in my presence, for God’s sake!
    “I think I should go back home,” he announced.
    Ice flooded my veins, making it impossible to speak. Luke turned away, heading in the direction we’d just came.
    I opened my mouth to call his name, but nothing came out. With each step he took, the possibility of me having a happy and secure future got farther and farther away.
    “Luke,” I finally managed, but it was no more than a gasp. He didn’t hear it. He just kept walking… and the world just kept crumbling all around me.
    *
    For the first half of the walk home, I allowed ten minutes of feeling sorry for myself. I took the street one block over from Luke’s. Even the thought of him seeing me walking by his house felt shameful. After the beat down he’d given me, I was sure I hadn’t been so embarrassed since the day my period started during an assembly in eighth grade. I was wearing skin tight white pants, FYI.
    The second half of the walk was different. At that point I started brainstorming, coming up with ideas to get myself out of the quagmire. For some reason, I’d slipped up big time. I’d put my foot in my mouth and said things I shouldn’t have.
    It sucked to have a guy you were genuinely interested in turn his back on you like that, but it sucked times ten worse when that guy was the human being you were counting on to turn your life around.
    By the time I walked through the front door, I had a concrete plan.
    Sitting down on the couch, I pulled my phone out and opened up the browser. Aunt Ginger said that Luke had started a food pantry in Crystal Brook. Surely the pantry was in need of help.
    I was desperate to show Luke I wasn’t the self-involved shopaholic he thought I was. Honestly, did he just assume that I had no concern for anyone else simply because I was from Hollywood Hills?
    I found the site almost immediately. There was only one pantry in the whole town, and it was called Community First.
    Of course, I could have just gone and banged on his door and given him a speech about how wrong he was about me. It wouldn’t have worked though. I knew that the second the idea flitted through my head on the walk home. The way Luke had looked at me told me everything I needed to know. I’d disappointed him. Let him down before we’d even really gotten a chance to know each other.
    There was only one way to build up his image of me. I needed to do something drastic.
    And so I sent an email to Community First asking if they needed help. The email address listed on the website was for a woman named Brie Marsden, so I could be sure Luke wasn’t going to be reading it.
    It was a fireproof plan. Luke hadn’t gotten the chance to mention Community First to me. As far as he knew, my showing up there as a volunteer would be completely coincidental. And once he saw that I was so much more than the spoiled girl he seemed to think I was, his falling for me would be quick.
    It was all so perfect I thought about giving myself a pat on the back. Instead, I opted for relaxing into the couch cushions and creating a mental list of possible locations for mine and Luke’s wedding.
    Once I’d jumped from Irish countryside locations to the Hawaiian Islands, I was so excited about the whole thing that I knew there was only one thing left to do.
    Pulling my phone back out, I called Rainy.
    “Hey,” she answered, sounding slightly out of breath.
    “Hey. Why do you sound so tired?”
    “I’m running at Runyon. What’s up?”
    “Okay, do you remember that guy I told you I saw when I first got here?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Long story or short story?”
    “Uh, can you give me