My willpower holds out until I flop onto my mattress, just before I take off my glasses. I leave them on, though, for one moment too long.

That’s all it takes to peek at the last photo.

And, damn. That easy smile. That casual pose. That fucking arm around me.

Yup. He’s annoyingly perfect, and I’m double screwed.

ELEVEN

The Da Vinci of Underwear

MONDAY, A MONTH LATER

Asher

I gaze at my forty-two-inch monitor, putting the finishing touches on a photo campaign I shot for UnderKlad.

Translation: I’m staring at photos I’ve taken of the ripped bodies of professional athletes who model underwear on the side.

I love my job. So much.

“Hey Lucy,” I call. “Did we hear anything from FLI today?”

“Negative,” she yells back from her desk across the studio.

Okay. That’s a setback. I’d really been hoping to land a sweet gig with the most influential sports organization in the whole entire world. They told me I’d hear back from them ten days ago.

For the first few days, I’d thought maybe the contract got lost in the mail. Now I think they gave it to someone else.

I’ll be pissed off if they did. The whole campaign was my idea.

But I’m not going to let it kill my vibe today. Whistling along with the Citizen Cope track playing on my speakers, I adjust the color balance of the final shot. Then I deepen the shadows, so that the hockey player’s eight-pack comes into sharper focus. And, wow, it’s perfect now. You can almost taste the tiny beads of sweat on his torso.

Yummy.

“I will be known as the fucking Da Vinci of underwear,” I say to myself as I tap save on the project file.

“You are already,” my assistant says from her desk at the other end of my studio space. “But if you don’t leave now, you will also be known as the Da Vinci of showing up late. Again.”

I whirl around in my chair. “Late? For what?”

Lucy blinks at me from behind her round glasses. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten to check the schedule again.”

“But I thought I was free today before I take off tomorrow for the wedding,” I whine. “I swear the calendar said so.​”

She winces. “Check again.”

“Lucy! What did you do?” She probably snuck something onto my calendar. Hell. All I want to do is finish these edits, wipe my own drool off the monitor, and then reward myself with a long lunch of mussels and frites. “Just tell me—what am I almost late for?”

“Your fitting at Angel Sanjay.”

Shit. I open up my calendar and there it is—an appointment at the designer’s showroom, beginning in forty minutes. “This fitting—it’s for the wedding, right?”

“Of course,” she says. “You asked me to book you and a Mark Banks in for, quote, Miami-style beachy wedding attire.”

“Sure, sure,” I babble. The best men need to match their suits. And if I’d let Hannah’s brother pick the clothes, we’d probably end up in some 1955 seersucker disaster.