Being Chased by Harper Bentley Read Free Book Online Page A

another guy, one who had money and was willing to spend it on her. That’d been two years ago, and Chase had been devastated. Since then Layton knew that his little brother had overtly slept with every woman in sight the entire next year, obviously trying to move on from the debacle with his ex, not being one bit interested in having a relationship of any sort with any of them. Yeah. This was big.
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    While she waited on dinner, Julia sat at the kitchen bar reading an email she’d gotten from Paige, a good friend of hers from prep school who was a friggin' brain. She'd gotten a scholarship to Stanford to study chemical engineering and was just finishing up graduate school.
    In her email Paige told Julia that she'd met a really cute guy she'd been dating for a month now, and she'd also been hired by a well-known petroleum company in California. She was so excited and wanted Julia to come see her soon. Julia wrote back congratulating Paige on her new job and new boyfriend and telling her that she'd definitely make plans to visit. She also told her about what had happened between her and Chase, wanting to get Paige's opinion on it.
    Women always did that, didn't they? Asked their friends' opinions about "guy stuff"? Julia rolled her eyes as she hit "send" knowing Paige probably had no more of a clue than she did. But it did make her feel better just throwing it out there to be ruminated over. Hell, Paige was a genius. Maybe she'd have some new insight.
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    “So, do you know who this guy was? You really think it was her boyfriend?” Layton asked Chase.
    “ The way she was clinging to the asshat, I just assumed it was. Guess I totally misread how she acted toward me. I thought she was flirting with me, but looking back at it, maybe she just wanted to be friends and was talking to me because she’s a nice person and I’m just ‘the help.’” Chase sighed realizing there may be nothing more between him and Julia. She’d just been trying to be polite by talking to him. God. Why’d he have to be so egotistical all the time?
    “ I think you should talk to her about it. Get this shit out there so you’re not questioning everything. If friendship’s all she wants, then at least you’ll know and not be driving yourself crazy. If she’d like a relationship, then there you go.”
    Layton always knew the right thing to say. Chase felt much better after they hung up, resolving to talk to Julia the first chance he got which, hopefully, would be in the morning. There were no two ways about it. He would ask her on a date, not giving a shit if Haha Dude was her boyfriend or not or whether he’d lose his job, and she’d either say yes or tell him to get lost. Either way, things needed to be resolved.
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    Julia’s lasagna turned out perfectly and the French bread she had with it was great. Peggy sure knew what she was doing when it came to cooking. After finishing and cleaning up, Julia got back on her laptop and out of curiosity Googled Chase. And wasn't that a great idea. At first she found an article about his class from NYU that showed he’d graduated summa cum laude, which shocked her. She knew he was sharp, but, damn, she didn’t know he was that intelligent. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. Next, she found a couple of items mentioning awards he’d received in martial arts. Wow. She realized there was a lot about him of which she had no clue.
    She looked through pictures of him at some fight studio wearing the white suit with a black belt that had some stripes on it, knowing that had to have some significance as to the level he was. Wow. There were some action shots of him too that took her breath away. There were also some shots of him guarding various celebrities and political figures. How could she not know all this?
    But as she scanned through more, that’s when the real shock hit. Pictures of Chase showed up from a woman's Facebook page, uh, Tracy something or other, and this Tracy girl was hanging all