Kissing Booth Read online

  Kissing Booth

  River Laurent

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue (1)

  Epilogue (2)

  Dear Neighbor

  Author Note

  “Fuck”

  1. Mimi

  2. Mimi

  3. Mimi

  4. Mimi

  5. Mimi

  6. Mimi

  7. Mimi

  8. Mimi

  9. Mimi

  10. Mimi

  11. Mimi

  12. Mimi

  13. Mimi

  14. Mimi

  15. Max

  16. Mimi

  17. Mimi

  18. Mimi

  19. Mimi

  20. Mimi

  21. Mimi

  22. Mimi

  23. Mimi

  24. Max

  25. Mimi

  26. Mimi

  27. Mimi

  28. Max

  29. Mimi

  30. Mimi

  31. Mimi

  32. Mimi

  33. Mimi

  34. Mimi

  35. Mimi

  36. Mimi

  37. Mimi

  38. Mimi

  39. Mimi

  40. Mimi

  41. Mimi

  42. Mimi

  43. Mimi

  44. Mimi

  45. Mimi

  46. Mimi

  47. Mimi

  48. Mimi

  49. Mimi

  50. Max

  51. Mimi

  52. Mimi

  53. Mimi

  54. Mimi

  55. Mimi

  56. Mimi

  57. Mimi

  Epilogue

  The Bad Boy Wants Me

  Appreciations

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Tori

  Britney

  Cash

  Cash

  Cash

  Tori

  Tori

  Epilogue

  Last Look Epilogue

  Note:

  SWEET REVENGE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Kissing Booth is a full-length standalone novel. It ends before 100% on your kindle file because of awesome content and a never before published story called Sweet Revenge. It’s hot and you don’t want to miss it!

  Happy reading.

  xoxo

  Acknowledgments

  A big, big thank you to…

  Leanore Elliott & Brittany Urbaniak

  Kissing Booth

  Copyright © 2017 by River Laurent

  The right of River Laurent to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the copyright, designs and patent act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-911608-11-0

  Created with Vellum

  Chapter 1

  Dani

  “I need your help,” Helen explodes into my ear, as soon as I answer my phone.

  Oh, Jesus. It’s another one of her emergencies. They come like clockwork. At least twice a week somebody calls out for the day and she flies into a panic and calls me. If I survive the stress of night school and working for her agency, I’ll be thankful for every last damn hair on my head. I stayed up all last night studying because I thought I had today off and could sleep in. Of course, I should know better by now.

  “What time is it?” I groan.

  It must be really early, because she doesn’t answer my question. “Lisa fell and sprained her ankle last night,” she frets instead.

  “You don’t say!” I mutter, turning from my side to my back, and knocking over the pile of books I’d left lying beside me in bed. Of course, Lisa and her accidents! This time, it’s an ankle sprain. A couple of weeks ago, it was a sprained wrist. Before that, a bruised tailbone. A pinched nerve. Always things no one can follow up on since she can’t be expected to prove that any of it is true. The bruised tailbone is my favorite, supposedly the result of slipping down the stairs onto her ass. God, I really hope that one, at least, was true.

  “You don’t need to sound so sarcastic.” Helen tuts. “Some people can’t help it. They’re just accident prone.”

  I wish I could say, stop with the bullshit, but I know what she’s doing. She’s making excuses because she doesn’t want to lose Lisa, since Lisa handles some of her best clients. I squint at my alarm clock. “I’m sorry, Helen, I really am, but don’t you think this is getting a little ridiculous? This was supposed to be my first day off in two weeks, and I’m seriously behind in my Psych homework. I was up studying until four this morning. And according to my clock, it’s only freaking six-thirty now.”

  Helen chuckles, apparently unconcerned by the extent of my sleep deprivation. “If it were anybody else handing me that line, I’d say they were lying.”

  “But you believe Lisa’s lying ass every time,” I mutter.

  “You, on the other hand,” she continues, like she didn’t just hear my quip. “Are the one person I can believe is pushing herself that hard. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of coffee.” I sit up. I need a brain reboot, which always involves a pot of coffee.

  “Just for this, and because you’re such a terrific sport and somebody I can always count on, I’m giving you Lisa’s most prized account. I mean, you’re gonna love this. It pays a fortune.” />
  My ears perk up. Well, that’s different! “Just how much is a fortune?”

  “A thousand dollars,” she announces smugly.

  My eyes nearly pop out of my head. Whoa? That kind of money for one day of work? “Do I have to give someone a blowjob after I finish cleaning?”

  “I know you’re joking, so I’ll let that go.” Her voice is dry. “It’s a 4,600 square-foot penthouse. Belongs to some crusty old billionaire, but I’ll doubt you’ll even see him. Lisa never has.”

  “You want me to clean a 4600 square foot penthouse in a day?”

  “It’s in tip-top condition. Hardly any scrubbing. Lisa normally finishes it all in a day. I think he just likes having someone come out to give it the royal treatment before he gets back from his business trips. His secretary said that he won’t be back for another two days, but Lisa is booked solid for the rest of the week, so I had to schedule his place today.” She pauses while her words sink in. “Any of the other girls would have bitten my hand off for this job, but it’s yours, if you want it.”

  “Yes, I’ll take it,” I snap, launching myself out of bed, and switching on the coffee maker. The royal treatment simply means a deep clean. I can do a tip-top apartment that size in seven maybe eight hours. A thousand smackers for nine hours work tops. Holy crap. Where do I sign?

  “That’s wonderful news,” she gushes, like she didn’t know I would accept even if it had only paid the usual rates. I’m such a sucker, and she knows it. “Now, there are specifics we’ll have to go through first.”

  I pause in the middle of pouring my coffee into my mug. I knew it was too good to be true. “Specifics?”

  “Specifics. He’s a very specific type of person. Dani, he’s paying a thousand bucks. I think we can give in to a few demands.”

  I breathe in the fragrant aroma coming from my coffee mug. “Demands. First it was specifics, now it’s demands. Should I start getting nervous?”

  “If you don’t think you can handle them…”

  Sometimes I hate Helen. She’s more manipulative than a doe-eyed two-year old. I look down at the chipped Formica counter, heavy with unpaid bills. “No, I can handle them,” I say, before pouring a half-mug of coffee down my throat. Something tells me I’m going to need it today.

  “Great,” she coos happily.

  “Where is it, by the way?”

  “Central Park West.”

  “Naturally.” If he could afford to pay that much for a cleaning service…

  “Do you have a pen handy?”

  Jeez. How long is this list of specifics and demands? I scramble back to bed and grab my pen. I open my notebook. “Right. Shoot.”

  “First, you have to wear shoe covers the moment you walk inside. He doesn’t like the carpets getting dirty.”

  “I thought that was why people took their shoes off before entering a home.”

  “He doesn’t want that. No socks or tights, nothing like that on his floors.”

  “Wow! He sounds like a party animal.” I write it down. “Where would I even get them?”

  “I don’t know. Walmart, probably. If Lisa can find them…”

  “Right, right. Next?”

  “A hair net, too.”

  “Am I cleaning his bathroom, or cooking his food?”

  She snorts. “We’ll get to the bathrooms in a minute.”

  I exhale. Suck it up, Dani. It’s not every day you get to make a thousand for a day’s work.

  “You can’t use bleach. Fresh lemon or orange juice, white vinegar and baking soda only.”

  I scribble it down. “Hmm…that’s interesting. Do you know why?”

  “He hates the smell and it’s unhealthy,” she explained.

  “Is he a germaphobe?”

  “No. Just very particular, and very health-conscious.”

  “Okay. That, I can get behind.” Even if my treadmill makes a better clothes hanger than it does a means of exercise.

  By the time we finish, I’ve filled out two pages. Both sides. “This is a lot, Helen. And Lisa does this on her own?”

  “She does, though she’ll sometimes split the job between two days when there’s a decent amount of time before the client gets back to town. Though, we don’t have two days. You’re booked tomorrow at Mrs. Sheldon’s.”

  “True.” And I’m not about to split the work with anybody else and let them cut in on my payday. “It’s okay. I can handle it. It’ll just take a good part of the day.”

  “Let me know if you run into any problems.” Now that she knows I’ll take care of the job, she’s all light and breezy.

  “You mean, if I open the wrong closet door and find dead bodies hanging from hooks?”

  “Lisa told me she cleaned those up last time, and he has promised he’d never leave them out again.”

  I gulp the rest of my coffee. It’s already cold. “Famous last words.”

  Chapter 2

  Dani

  “Holy. Mother. Of God!” I gasp, throwing the door open.

  I’m too intimidated at first to even step through the front door. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Normally, I clean homes around North Jersey, the sort of places one would expect mobsters like the ones on TV to live in. Maybe they do, I don’t know. I never see the owners. I’m always there while the house is empty, as though the home’s owners don’t want to risk exposure to the person who cleans up after them. It might break some fragile cosmic balance.

  But nothing I’ve seen in those McMansions can touch what stretches out before me.

  One person needs all this space?

  I don’t take my eyes off the living room as I stretch the plastic covers over my sneakers, then pick up the caddy which holds my cleaning tools—including the required cleaning solvents and two brand-new toothbrushes for cleaning the grout in the showers. One room, one toothbrush.

  Yeah, unreal.

  But then, the entire situation is unreal or close to it. In a daze, I walk through the door and close it behind me. I can’t help but forget about the cleaning for a moment as I walk straight to the plate-glass windows which stretch from one end of the large, open room to the other and look out over half of New York. I’m so high up, the people down in the park look like ants.

  I can barely think straight, it’s all so beautiful. I can’t help but remember the girl I used to be—still am in a deep, secret part of my heart. The girl who only wore the hand-me-downs of strangers. Granted, I’m only in this apartment because I’m supposed to clean it. I don’t live here. It’s not mine and it never will be.

  But I’m here. That’s something, anyway.

  “Oh, hell.” I catch my reflection in the window, the curve-hugging tank top under a bleach-splotched hoodie, the yoga pants and covered sneakers, and I realize I haven’t covered my hair yet. I couldn’t find a hairnet so I just bought a shower cap. I pull my long, chocolate locks into a high ponytail and stuff it into the cap while rolling my eyes. What a weirdo this guy must be.

  He has taste, though. I’ll give him that.

  I would never know how to begin decorating a place this big, this exquisite. The dark, polished wood floors gleam in the clear light flooding through the windows. The sleek leather furniture could be mistaken for art pieces.

  I look around for photos, but there are none. Not surprising, considering the list of dos and don’ts I’ve got tucked into my pocket. He probably considers all other people unhygienic. It must be hard to have sex with a woman while she is wearing a hair net and shoe covers.

  There’s a long bar along one side of the room, fully stocked. Black leather bar stools line up before it. A glass-enclosed fireplace makes it possible to enjoy a cozy fire from both the living room and formal dining room, with its long table and many chairs. The center piece is an intricate glass sculpture.

  Every room is like this, I realize as I take a brief tour.

  I could probably hide out in this place and the owner would never find me. It’s that big. There’s a greenhouse wit
h a glass roof and hundreds of plants. A chef’s kitchen that looks like it has never been used. There is even a butler pantry. The media room, complete with reclining chairs that face a massive flat screen panel. Just when I thought I knew everything about this cold ordered house, I come across a popcorn machine that I’m just aching to test out. Better not. Something tells me my client would clue into the scent of popcorn in the air.