“I figured the Nightingale Investigations job application form had the question "Are you hot? Yes. No. If you answered no, please exit the building.”
“He isn't my man."
"Girl, it don't matter you don't think he is, he thinks he is. Therefore in Badass Motherfucker Land, that means he is.”
“The phone at my ass started ringing, I leaned forward and pulled it out.
“Don’t answer that,” Noah ordered.
“Fuck you,” I shot back, saw the display said “Luke calling” and flipped it open.
“Yo.”
“Babe,” Luke replied.
“I’ve been kidnapped again,” I informed him.
“I know. I’m following.”
“Later,” I said to the room at large as I didn’t want to appear rude.
For some reason this was met by Shirleen saying, "I’ll put money down that she’s living with him in four days.”
My confused gaze swung to Shirleen but she was looking at the movie star glamour girl who was looking at me.
“Three days,” Glamour girl said, smiling at me and I thought, in other circumstances, I would have liked to meet her.
“A week, she’s got spirit,” The other black lady said. She was smiling at me too, not like I was the butt of some joke, but in a kind way.
I opened the outer door.
Before it closed behind me, I heard Luke say strangely, “Tonight.”
Then everyone laughed.”
“I’d pay a man to talk to me that way.”
“I'm not stupid, I know your heart's involved in this and I've never, not once in all the time you've known me, given you the idea that I won't handle it with care.”
“I don’t put up with the shit you’ve handed me the last week because you’re some fuckin’ piece I want to conquer. I put up with it because I’ve liked you since you were eight years old. You made me laugh. You understood me. You looked out for me when no one else fuckin’ bothered and you acted like you thought I could move mountains and I needed someone who thought that about me because my Dad sure as fuck didn’t.”
“Jesus Christ," he muttered to the ceiling. "All those times I sat in the office and laughed my ass off at stories of Lee, Eddie, Hank and Vance. They should have fuckin' medals.”
“Swear to God, these boys should be locked up. It isn’t safe, men with that much testosterone coursing through tier blood free to roam.”
“Ava, you missed it when it happened so I’ll clue you in. Last night, around the time you fell asleep against me, you became mine.”
“You’ve been mine since you were eight.”
“Daisy said to me that I was trying to find ways to protect my heart but I was doing it wrong. She told me the best way to protect my heart was to trust it to someone who will protect it for me.
More silence but his body went completely still.
“That’s you. It’s always been you.”
“Then I said, “Matt’s got a big mouth.”
“They all got big mouths, girl, learn that quick. These boys talk more than a pack of women. I lost fifty bucks on you.”
I was stunned speechless again, this time it didn’t last as long.
“What?”
“See, Lee nailed Indy the first night they were together. Not nailed her nailed her but she was in his bed. Eddie, with Jet, it took a few days. Hank and Roxie, like, a day. Vance, like three, but Jules was a virgin and he had to interrupt the festivities once to go out and shoot someone.”
I was blinking rapidly and feeling kind of faint at the amount and sensitivity of information Shirleen was imparting, not to mention what it might mean to me.
“So we had a pool. Everyone threw down money on when they thought Luke would nail you. Mace won five hundred dollars.”
Ho-ly crap.
“So,” she went on. “Did he nail you nail you or did you two just sleep?”
For some reason, I answered her unbelievably nosy question. “We just slept.”
“New pool!” she shouted.”
“This isn’t a good idea,” I whispered, watching his lips come toward me.
“This is a fucking great idea,” he muttered. Then he kissed me.”
“My futon was a fancy one with armrests and everything. It was a pain in the ass to get open because it weighed a ton. I figured I’d make the bed when Luke got back. He’d probably be able to pull it out by glaring at it.”
“I hate you,” I declared.
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“Okay, maybe whoever this new Ava is does but she’s a bitch and I don’t give a fuck if she hates me. The old Ava doesn’t hate me and she’s in there somewhere, I saw her five minutes ago and that’s who I'm keeping safe.”
“I demoted him from The Best Man Ever to just The Best Man I’d Ever Met. Superman would have charged out (hell, he’d have flown) to get Lois Lane cookies. I was pretty sure of it.”
“Luke, you have to know, it won’t be like the other guys. If it’s you, it’ll be worse.” My voice went softer, lower, barely a whisper. “If this goes bad, it’ll destroy me.”
“Jesus, you could bring a man to his knees.”
“Did you pay for the repairs on my Range Rover?” I asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” he answered.
I felt my hold on my temper slip.
“Luke, it’s my car.”
“Ava, you’re my woman.”
I ignored the melty feeling that gave me too.
“So?”
“So you’re my woman, I take care of you.”
“Luke – “
“This isn’t up for discussion.”
“It sure as hell is!”
“I’m thinkin’, as payback for the hickey, I want you in that pink teddy thing tonight.”
Was he for real?
“Luke!”
“Later.”
Disconnect.
Argh!”
“Oh my goodness, Luke’s massaging your arm! Isn’t that sweet? Good Ava trilled in my ear.
Jump him! Rip his pants off! Bad Ava shouted in my other ear.”
“You wanna taste me?" he murmured.
Yes, I wanted to taste him. I would pay every penny of Aunt Ella's inheritance to taste him.
"No," I lied.
He did a full grin this time, a full satisfied grin. It was hot, so hot my knees totally buckled and he took all my weight into his body.
"Liar," he whispered...”
“What I did know was that I was someone special to Luke and I always had been, just like he was and always had been to me. And that knowledge made my world tilt so much, I was certain I was going to fall off.”
“What are you gonna do?” I whispered.
“I’m gonna do whatever I have to do to protect Luke while he does whatever the fuck he wants to do.”
“The best way to guard your heart was to trust a good man to take care of it for you.”
“You act like a bitch, I’ll call you a bitch and you’re actin’ like a fuckin’ bitch.”
“Life’s too short, I’m through talkin’. This is happening, we both know it, we both feel it and you even admitted it. Ava Babe, stop fighting it.”
“First up, get rid of Luke.
Second, go workout with Riley.
Third, get some work done.
Fourth, learn how to become a lesbian.”
“Call me hopeless romantic but I want to see my friend with the guy she's been pining for forever.... I want that more than anything on this earth.”
“She gave me her jewelry and a shitload of money, but only gave Marilyn and Sofia a token, which pissed them off big time but they’d always been mean to her and I hadn’t, so fuck them.”
“What do you mean, “Not to worry, she's home safe with Skiboy”?
What the hell is a "Skiboy"?”
“If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more important than one's own.”
“To try. To live through the horror of failure; to endure the guilt. To try again. To make that choice.”
“The question is not whether you ever gave yourself to God, but whether you are His now.”
“Maybe I was just one of those people who couldn't rest easy unless things went catastrophically wrong.”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.