Delivery Girl (Minnesota Ice #1)
Lily Kate
SYNOPSIS
Good things come in extra-large, smoking hot packages.
Things like…pizza.
Things like the very pizzas I deliver for my dad’s restaurant, Peretti’s Pizza. It’s a temporary job, something to pay the bills until I graduate from school, but it does the trick. In fact, it’s working quite well until Ryan Pierce of the Minnesota Stars decides to order a pizza from me and life as I know it turns upside down.
You see, Ryan Pierce doesn’t just open his front door, he opens it buck naked. And suddenly, I’m not the one boasting the biggest, hottest package in the room. However, it’s what happens next that gives me butterflies whenever my phone beeps. Ryan starts to call, and then text, and then fifteen pizza deliveries and one fantastic night later, we’re friends with benefits.
When he asks me to be his fake girlfriend at his brother’s wedding, I’m happy to help. But the longer we pretend, the more I worry that this is one package I might not be able to handle.
Delivery Girl (Minnesota Ice #1)
Lily Kate
To my other half.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Scarlett Rutgers for the fabulous cover design.
Caitlin for her fantastic edits.
Virginia for her sharp proofreading eyes.
Next Step PR & Kiki for helping to spread the word.
All of you, readers—beta readers, ARC readers, bloggers, and the entire book community—each and every one of you are fabulous!
And, of course, to the very best of friends… you know who you are!
CHAPTER 1
Andi
“I need one order of a smiley face pie,” my dad shouts. He’s known around town as Papa Peretti, and he runs our family-style pizza joint. “Let’s go, Angela. Don’t keep the happy couple waiting. Spit out your gum and get to work.”
I raise my eyebrows at Angela, who rolls her eyes back. As always, it’s a hectic work environment here at Peretti’s Pizza. It’s a family-run business and, unfortunately, I’m part of the family.
Angela’s also part of the family. She’s my cousin, and we’ve developed a sort of silent language with our eye rolls to communicate. It’s necessary with a dad like Papa Peretti.
“I call delivery on this one.” I raise my hands in a truce. “You’re cooking, Ang.”
Angela spits her gum into the trashcan, scrubs her hands clean, and dives into fresh dough. “Smiley face pizza? Who orders a smiley face pizza?”
Papa Peretti puts a hand on his hip. “Some guy who probably wants to surprise his girlfriend, so make it extra romantic, please.”
Angela sets to work arranging a combination of sausage, pepperoni, and basil into a face. Angela is short, stout, and brash. If they held auditions for a remake of Jersey Shore, she’d be first in line.
Under most circumstances, her orange-ish skin tone would be alarming, but I happen to know she spray tans twice a week, which explains the glow. Then there’s her hair—or more accurately, her helmet. Her hair has enough product in it to set this whole place on fire and is hard as a rock.
“There,” Angela says as she surveys the grinning pizza. She looks at me and winks. “You think that’ll get a girl turned on, Andi?”
“Angela, watch your mouth,” my dad says. “This is a family-run business, and I have zero tolerance for that sort of talk.”
I have no desire to listen to an argument in which my dad and Angela argue about whether or not she’s allowed to say turned on at the office, so I grab the pizza and hightail it out of there as fast as my legs will go.
I plug in the address listed on the receipt and climb into the old Toyota Camry my dad donated as the company car ten years ago. It’s basically my own personal vehicle, but my dad pays the insurance, so he makes sure I know it’s a business car first. It’s parked in the alley out back, which is a moderately safe place for it.
Our little shop is located in an old, crumbling brick building on a block that averages three robberies a week, but the Peretti family is not terrified by this alarming statistic. In fact, it doesn’t faze us at all because we’ve started leaving an extra pizza on our back steps most nights. This creates goodwill between us and the criminals, and because of this, we haven’t been robbed once.
As I wait for the directions to load, I peek under the lid and survey the smiling marinara face. The pepperoni eyeball is winking at me, and I hate to admit that this is the most action I’ve seen in months.
I wink back anyway.
Finally, the lovely lady inside the GPS points me in the direction of Los Feliz, an expensive neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles. For the hundredth time, I debate switching the voice to something more reasonable than a clipped English accent, but I leave it be. My mom died a few years ago, and my dad is so lonely that I suspect he likes the soothing sound of this woman’s fancy voice.
I drive like a madwoman. It’s my last delivery of the night, and I have a show after this. The sooner I finish delivering this pizza, the sooner I can get to the comedy club.
My whole life, I’ve wanted to become a comedienne, a lady comic—it sounds glamorous, doesn’t it? Well, let me assure you, it’s not. I have yet to see a whiff of success, which means I play seedy bars, late-night shows, and extra parts in movies that will never see the silver screen.
Forty minutes later, I’ve crossed the hellhole known as the 405. I park at the curb of the address listed on my GPS. Then I double-check the numbers…and I check one more time, because this can’t be right.
This house is a freaking mansion. Nobody in a freaking mansion orders from Peretti’s Pizza. We’re good at what we do, don’t get me wrong—my family has been in the pizza industry ever since great-grandpa Peretti came across the pond from Sicily—but we do basic pizzas, none of that fancy Santa Monica shit with salad and avocado and kale on top.
I pull out my phone and call Angela. “Hey, can you read me the address again?”
She rattles it off. “Are you lost?”
“No, that’s what I have. I’m here. I just parked.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“This place is huge. I don’t even know how to find the doorbell.”
“Do me a favor: if the guy’s hot, can you get me his number?” She chomps her gum for a bit longer, and my dad yells at her in the background to spit it out. “Scratch that—if he’s rich and ugly, I’ll still take his number.”
“He probably ordered this pizza to impress a girl, Ang. I’m sure he’s taken.” I look up at the ginormous house. “And if he’s not taken, I saw him first.”
Angela screeches a retort, but I hang up before she finishes. I grab the pie and check on the cute little smiley face. The pizza really is adorable, except somehow, he lost his smile. Now the poor guy looks disgruntled. I push the row of pepperonis back into a grin with my finger.
“Stay,” I instruct, feeling like an idiot. “Good boy.”
The pizza doesn’t respond, but I’m pretty sure we understand each other loud and clear.
CHAPTER 2