Don't Fall For Me : An Enemies-to-Lovers Romance (Hate to Love Book 1) Read online

  Don’t Fall For Me

  Gigi Black

  Copyright © 2020 by Gigi Black

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Contents

  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

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Thank you!

  I’m the guy you hate to love.

  A bad boy, a player, a billionaire businessman with enough charisma to explode panties rather than making ‘em drop.

  And I’ve got my sights set on her.

  My old high school hookup. The first woman who screamed my name, but not the first or last to curse it.

  She’ll curse it again before this is all over.

  Because I need a fake fiancée, a sweet family girl who’ll convince my hard-*ss father that I’m worth my inheritance.

  30 days. No strings attached. And a promise that I can and will save her from losing everything.

  There’s just one rule, I tell her,

  “Don’t fall for me.”

  1

  Damien

  I wasn’t the type of guy who hit on the help, but hot fuckin’ damn, this delivery chick had an ass that’d make a blind man weep.

  Or give him a rock-hard boner.

  Enough about the blind man. Back to the delivery goddess. The moniker fit her like she fit those jeans—skin-tight and close to the curves. The physics of how she’d squeezed herself into them when she’d woken up this morning boggled the mind.

  Easy, asshole, she’s not here for you. Just for the tip. Uh… financially speaking.

  I’d opened the door to the hotel room when the sniffy guy at the front desk had called to let me know my pizza was on its way up. I’d called out to her to put it on the coffee table and walked out of the bathroom to find this.

  Her bending over to put down the pizza, then stretching and scratching the back of her long, tan neck. She was petite, slender, curvy, with dirty blonde hair in a bun atop her head and fine hairs escaping here or there. “That’ll be fifteen bucks,” she said, turning to me.

  The voice hit me first—a shock of recognition that jolted loose memories I’d buried long ago—and then came the face.

  Her face.

  Hazel. Hazel McCutcheon.

  One of the many girls who’d wanted me back in high school. How long ago had that been now? Fuck, what… fourteen years? Yet here she was. Mature, curvy, her lips full with a perfect cupid’s bow, her green eyes wide and glittering.

  The memory of her clinging to me on the one and only night we’d been together came back to me. I’d taken her virginity, and she’d screamed my name.

  Damien. Damien. Damien!

  The next day, I’d left Winnetka without calling her. For a good reason, not that it mattered now.

  “Y–you,” she said, that honey voice doing things to my cock that it shouldn’t have. “You… you…”

  “Asshole? Dickhead. Prick. Douchemonkey?” I offered up the words. “I know it’s not something good. Though, I gotta say, Hazel, for my part, I’m happy to see you again.”

  She trembled and hugged herself. Was it rage? She was my age, thirty-two. Surely, she hadn’t harbored anger at me for this long?

  “What are you doing here?” she thundered, retreating so that the backs of her calves hit the table. She nearly tipped over but put out her arms to steady herself.

  I stepped forward, reaching. “You all right?”

  “Don’t!”

  A smirk parted my lips. “Don’t? What, stop you from falling?” I hadn’t been able to do it back then.

  “Don’t come near me,” Hazel said. “I… this has to be a joke. A huge, screwed-up cosmic joke.”

  “Having a bad day?”

  “Year,” she corrected, and I absorbed the sight of her. Her T-shirt, with its Pieslice logo on the left side, hugged her breasts. Pink nipples, I still remembered what they looked like, plucked at the cotton.

  “A bad year?” I said. “Anything I can do to help you with that?”

  Hazel scoffed. “This is surreal. Look, dude, I don’t even know you. I certainly don’t want you to help me with anything. Now, that’ll be fifteen bucks, and I’ll be out of your cologne mist and bullshit swagger before you can say ‘blast from the past.’ Capisce?”

  Hazel had been the nerdy chick at school, but she’d always had sass, probably because the popular girls had bullied her one too many times, and she’d grown a thick skin in a response. That and she was smarter than most people I’d met.

  I’d always liked that about her, maybe a little too much.

  I reached into the pocket of my suit pants and withdrew my wallet, walking over to her. She stiffened, about ready to jump out of her skin—not her clothes, unfortunately. “You know me,” I said, removing a Benjamin from my wallet. “Intimately.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  I hissed. “Dirty. But I think I’ll have the pizza without the happy ending.” I held out the money. “Keep the change.” Was I an asshole? Yes. But it was easier than the alternative: asking her out. Yeah, that wasn’t happening.

  It would spell doom for her and for me. Easier to piss her off, chase her away, and pass off this chance meeting as a waking nightmare.

  Hazel gritted her teeth, jaw working, skin smooth as a silk. She looked down at the money and back up at me, eyes blazing heat. “I can’t accept that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the pizza is fifteen dollars, and I’m not going to take eighty-five dollars from you in gratuity.”

  “Quick math,” I said. “Impressive.”

  “Don’t patronize me, jackass. You know, you haven’t changed one damn bit since you…” She cut off and swallowed. “Whatever. You got a twenty?”

  This wasn’t where I’d pictured Hazel ending up. There was nothing wrong with delivering pizzas for a living, but Hazel had always had bigger aspirations. She’d worked in the café her father had run in East Chicago and wanted to run it herself one day. Christ, she’d gotten a scholarship to one of the most prestigious private schools in the state—White-Tail High.

  “Hazel,” I said, my tone dropping low. “What are you doing here?”

  She blinked up at me, and the half-glazed expression
came over her, the one that I recognized too well. It meant one thing only: throbbing, wet, wanting. It cleared as quickly as it had come, and her perfect lips parted. “I thought that was pretty clear, given the uniform and the rapidly cooling pizza on your coffee table.”

  “You know what I mean, Hazel. Why aren’t you working at McCutcheon’s?” Her family’s café.

  “That’s really none of your damn business,” she said, shaking all over again. What was it like to be her in this moment? She was filled with anger and desire. That mix had to be nearly overwhelming.

  Almost as bad as the pure need pulsing through my veins and the nostalgia driving it. I lifted a hand and traced circles, stars, and lines on her cheek. “You look amazing.”

  She let out the tiniest of sighs.

  “Fuck, Hazel, you staying close by?”

  “No,” she said and grabbed my hand. She tugged on it, and I moved it away. She didn’t let go, her fingers wrapped around me, nails biting into my palm. “Why are you in Chicago?”

  The conversation was stilted, probably because our blood had diverted from the brain to other nasty places.

  “Business,” I iterated.

  “You’re not here for long?” Hazel stepped closer, releasing my hand, tilting her head back and meeting my gaze with defiance.

  “Couple weeks, tops.”

  “Good,” she replied, spitting the word out so hard it should’ve pierced me. “A twenty.”

  “Huh?”

  “Twenty dollars,” she said. “You know what? Forget it. I’ll pay for the pizza. On the house. Call it a parting gift.”

  “Not as good as the one I gave you.”

  Hazel growled and side-stepped me, but I caught her arm.

  “Take the hundred, Hazel.”

  “No.”

  “Hazel.”

  “Let go of my arm.”

  I did. The warmth of her skin was driving me crazy anyway.

  “Hazel.”

  “You always get what you want, don’t you?” She shook her head. “I remember that about you, Damien Woods. You always get what you want. That was the first thing you ever said to me.”

  “Right. That was my line back in the day.” When I’d been a player and a complete douche. I’d course-corrected since then, stopped treating women like their emotions didn’t matter—a steep learning curve. Shit, it wasn’t like I’d had the best example of a father growing up.

  The thought of him reminded me of that ‘business’ I had to attend to in Chicago. The whole reason I was standing in front of Hazel, wishing to be anywhere else in the fucking world. If that wasn’t a boner killer, shit, I didn’t know what was.

  “Your line. Right, of course. Well, your lines and your vibe and your sexy, deep stares don’t do anything for me anymore, Damien, and they never will. You’re nothing but a faded, bad memory. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “You think my stares are sexy?” I leveled her with a shit-eating grin.

  “Eat a dick.” She walked off.

  I chased after her—first time I’d done that, usually it was the women chasing me. “Hazel, take the fucking money. It’s not a favor. It’s not anything but paying for the food. I don’t have god damn change. I have hundreds in my wallet, and that’s fuckin’ it.”

  She spun toward me. “Of course you only have hundreds in your wallet.”

  I gave her a quizzical look. “Yeah, so?”

  “Nothing. You wouldn’t get it. Just give me the money.”

  I held out the now-clammy bill, and she took it and stuck it in the cute fanny pack she wore on her hip. “Thanks. Have a nice evening. Try not to choke on the pepperoni.” She walked off, swaying her hips, and I had to pull my tongue off the floor.

  There was something about a woman who could leverage a good insult at a man…

  No, there was just something about Hazel.

  But it didn’t matter. She was just a ‘blast from the past,’ as she’d put it. And I had other more unpleasant things to focus on. Like how I was going to stop my father from cutting me off and kicking me out the business. What a great start to one monster of a week.

  Still, a part of me wanted to see her again. Just one last time. For nostalgia’s sake. I shut the hotel room door, shaking my head.

  2

  Hazel

  Stick a fork in me, I’m done. Make that several forks. Or knives. I wasn’t picky at this point.

  I dropped off my pizza delivery bag, not meeting the gaze of the woman behind the counter—one of the bitchiest employees of the Pieslice and probably one of the only people I got along with at work. If Jessa caught a glimpse of my face, she’d know something was up, and she’d pry and poke until she found out what it was.

  Thankfully, my shift was over.

  Trust the last delivery of the night to be the one that brought back old memories and compounded all the negativity I’d experienced over the past couple months.

  Damien Woods.

  Damien fucking, drop your panties, hate your life, seriously re-examine your choices Woods.

  He should’ve had his name legally changed to that. Kind of like Khaleesi in Game of Thrones except with less fire and tits and more dick and bedroom eyes.

  I grabbed my stuff, waved to Jessa from the door—she was too busy with a customer to cross-question me—and slipped out into the night, mentally cussing at myself for how close I’d come to throwing myself at Damien.

  He was nobody now.

  Just a guy who’d once embarrassed the crap out of me. As I’d expected him to. Sleeping with him had been a dumb teenaged move, nothing more and nothing less.

  But he was so much further ahead than me in life. That was what stung the most.

  Damien was at the top of his career path, one of the most eligible bachelors in New York if the rumors were true, and I was… a thirty-two-year-old single woman who worked at a pizzeria.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I brought it out. My twin sister’s name flashed on the screen.

  I so wasn’t in the mood for bad news.

  “Kara,” I answered.

  “Hey, sis.” Kara whined it out. Drunk. Great, exactly what I hadn’t wanted to hear. “Where are you?” Music thumped in the background, nearly drowning out her voice.

  “I’m on the way home from work.” I made my way down the sidewalk. I’d parked a block away in front of a convenience store because there was no space near the pizzeria. And because it was closer to home and gave my old broken-ass Honda less chance of breaking down on the way home.

  “Work! Biiitch, you should be out here living your best life.”

  “Kara, is there a point to this conversation?” All I wanted was to get home, check on Dad and Mr. Piddlywump, my cat, take a warm, cleansing bath, and wash off the dirt from Damien’s stare.

  “Listen, listen, listen… Hold on.” She fumbled and shouted something.

  I held the phone away from my ear, grimacing.

  Kara and I were opposites. She was the party-girl version of me. One who didn’t have any qualms about not owning up to her responsibilities—maybe that was a judgmental thing to say, but sheesh. It was a Monday night.

  “Kara?” I put the phone to my ear again, tracking down the street and ignoring a stare from a passing dude in a clear state of inebriation. There was a bar around the corner, but I doubted that was where my sister had gone. “Hellooo.”

  “Hey, who’s this?” my sister yelled into the phone.

  “It’s Hazel!”

  “Oh, hey sis,” she replied, slurring a little. “I’m here with Timmy. He says hi.”

  “Hi Timmy,” I said, because I knew Kara, and she wouldn’t let it go until I greeted the guy who couldn’t even hear me right now.

  “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I got an audition tomorrow! Hell yeah!”

  “That’s great, Kara. Congratulations.” I injected enthusiasm into my tone.

  “Yeah! OK, I’m gonna go party the night away.”


  “Have fun!” She hung up before I even got the words out, and I was back to thinking about Damien again. Ridiculous, since I had more important things to worry about. Damien would have to stay in the past.

  I wouldn’t run into him again anyway, and if he called for another pizza? I’d get one of the other delivery guys to drop it off. Simple.

  Five minutes later, I reached my car, checking all around to ensure the coast was clear—I was overly conscientious about not getting mugged or attacked. There were worse ways to be as a woman nowadays. I got in, locked all the doors, and rested my head on the steering wheel.

  “Keep it together,” I whispered. “It will get better. You’ll make this work.”

  I started the car and reversed out of the parking lot. The car ride over to our house on Parrish was a total loss—I did nothing but chew on the inside of my cheek and try not to think about how miserably wrong everything had gone in my life.

  Dumb way to end a shitty night. After all, I wasn’t going to let a thing like the complete collapse of my hopes and dreams stop me from well… attaining my hopes and dreams.

  I had to be stronger than that. For me and for Dad. And for Mr. Piddlywump. Kara too, if she ever stopped partying long enough to catch up with the real world.

  I put the car in park, got out, and bumped the door shut with my hip, looking up at the tiny clapboard house, all straight up and down, two stories and narrow, that was my childhood home. My dad was inside, likely in bed by now.

  He was always tired.