By Chance (Accidentally In Luck #1)

1. The Run In - Cora

*Cora*

"Why are you making me do this?" I whined.

"You'll thank me later Cora and you know it," Elle replied.

I sighed. I hoped she was right, I really did. Right now, I wasn't much filled with enthusiasm about this. If only I'd have known then what was going to happen because of all this... who knows? Maybe then I'd have been more excited.

We had just left Pink, the store of dreams for Elle, my best friend of too many years, and she'd decided we just had to sign up for the contest.

You see, Theo Archer was having a contest. The Theo Archer. The most famous and hottest singer the world had ever known. And now he was releasing a new album.

Naturally, just like every other artist, there just had to be some type of something to hype the new release. Unlike most who just announced their upcoming tour and gave some free tickets and merch and things for certain lucky people, Theo Archer's was a little different.

His was still a contest, sure, but not like any contest anyone had seen before. He was allowing everyone and anyone to enter their name into a metaphorical hat to be hopefully drawn out by him or more realistically, one of his many assistants. The person whose name got drawn out got to go on a night out with the one, the only Theo Archer. (Roughly translated, this meant everyone that entered was a girl and the reward was a date. Not that that was how it was advertised, but everyone knew that's what it meant.)

Elle and I had been listened to his music for years now and Elle is obsessed. I'm a fan, sure, but Elle is scary when it comes to him. I listen to his music and bop along when it plays on the radio, but Elle could tell you ever little detail about him, where he hung out, who he was supposedly dating, everything.

So naturally, when she heard about this contest, she drug me to the mall.

I mean that she like literally drug me here. She'd barged into my room (without knocking), grabbed my hand and started pulling me out the door. I was lucky that I'd managed to shake her hand off long enough to squish myself into the decent, socially acceptable clothes of my usual over-sized shirt and jeans before she was shoving me out the door and to her car which she drove about 10 mph over the speed limit until we hit downtown traffic. Traffic here was a nightmare.

Come to think of it, LA was a nightmare. Even Glendale, the suburb we lived in, was a nightmare.

"Tell me why I'm doing this again," I repeated for about the hundredth time.

Elle replied robotically. She had already answered this question too many times. "I've told you this. He is quite possibly the hottest male specimen on this Earth and any chance we have to be in his presence is a gift worth dying for even though he is a complete dick," she said, rolling her eyes for about the hundredth time. "Oh, and when he falls in love with whichever one of us wins, you'll be thanking me. Count on it."

"Consider it counted." She wasn't totally wrong, though. Theo Archer was hot. Beyond hot, actually, with his deep brown hair, dark blue eyes, and fashion sense to die for.

I grinned at Elle's exhaustion with me. She was just a tad salty with me for asking so many times, but I knew the remedy to that. "Food?"

She side-eyed me suspiciously in her mocking, best friend way, but I maintained an innocent façade staring straight ahead. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her suspicion melt into a grin. "Duh," she finally said.

We walked to the food court just as the masses of teenage girls arrived. Well, I say we walked, but I'm pretty sure Elle was skipping. A flood of screaming girls rushed at us and I swear it looked like a stampede. I knew why they were here, everyone did, but I didn't understand why now. Elle and I had been signed up for like 15 minutes now, how were they only just now getting here?