Keeping Secrets in Seattle by Brooke Moss Read Free Book Online

engaged to him, I wouldn’t be tired. I would’ve been running through the streets and screaming it from the Space Needle.
    Kim had a frown on her pixie-like face. “You sure she’s not knocked up?”
    “Hush,” I hissed at her.
    She grinned wickedly. “I heard pregnancy can really wipe a girl out. Especially when she only weighs seventy-five pounds.”
    Gabe glared at her. “Well, it was nice to see you, too. But I’d like to visit with Violet now.”
    Kim rolled her eyes. “Okay, lover boy, as you wish.”
    I offered Gabe an apologetic shrug. “Sorry.”
    I gestured into my room. “Come on in. It’ll be quieter if I can shut the door.” Gabe meandered toward my rumpled bed, and I gulped. “Unless you want to go somewhere else? We can sit in the living room or something? I mean, you know, since you’re engaged now and everything.”
    Gabe’s face split into a grin, and he sat down on my bed, stretching across its width. “This is fine. So…why are you acting weird about this now?”
    “Well, have you heard of calling first?” I sat down on the edge of the bed, the farthest away from him that I could manage. He smelled like a mixture of his Bvlgari cologne and rain.
    “I did. And I texted you.” Gabe frowned disapprovingly. “I didn’t realize I would catch you in a postcoital glow. Who’s Landon?”
    “He’s someone I’ve been…” I stopped speaking and gulped. Seriously, was it hot in my bedroom, or was it just me?
    “Dating?” he finished for me.
    I nodded dumbly. “Yeah. But, we weren’t…I didn’t…”
    Gabe’s jaw twitched. “So you weren’t….”
    “We weren’t having sex. We were just…chasing each other.”
    One of his eyebrows went back up. “Chasing?”
    I folded my arms across my chest. “Don’t give me that look, Mr. I-can’t-see-my-best-friend-anymore-because-I’m-freakin’-engaged.”
    The corner of his mouth tugged upward. “Yeah, sorry. Alicia has had me busy every single night since Christmas.”
    I frowned at him. “You’re helping with the wedding plans? That’s…weird.”
    He tucked a pillow under his head. “Alicia thinks it will bring us closer together.”
    “Oh, I see.” I couldn’t help but grimace. The girl was already marrying my best friend—now she needed to monopolize all of his time making pew bows and confetti packets? “Whatever. Let’s talk about the subject at hand, shall we? Why are you here? At ten o’clock at night? On a Tuesday?”
    He watched me closely. “You don’t want to tell me about your new boyfriend?”
    “What do you want to know?” I shifted in my spot. The idea of discussing other men with him made me want to crawl out of my own skin. Probably because in my heart, there’d only been him.
    “Since when do we keep these things a secret?”
    Anger flashed in my belly. “This from the guy who didn’t tell his best friend he was getting engaged?”
    Gabe’s mouth formed a tight line. “Fine. Why haven’t you told me about him?”
    I shrugged. “I guess I’ve been busy.”
    “Too busy to tell me about your new…” He paused, a sad line forming across his brow. “Er, lover?”
    I could tell he was trying to get a reaction. “Stop it. He’s not my lover.”
    “So you guys are just friends?”
    “No, we’re dating. We met a couple of weeks ago.”
    “You guys sound pretty cozy.”
    “Yeah, I guess we are pretty cozy.”
    “Isn’t that kind of fast?”
    I looked at Gabe in disbelief. “Didn’t you propose to Alicia after just five months?”
    He held his palms up, laughing. “Okay, truce.”
    “Come on. I want to talk about you.” I tried to frown at him and clenched my fists at my sides to keep from touching him. Maybe if I picked his brain for a while I could get to the bottom of this new Gabe Parker I barely recognized. “I want to talk about you and Alicia.”
    He propped his head up on his hand. “All right, then. Shoot.”
    I wished that being that close to Gabe didn’t still make my