“Nothing,” I lied.
“Liar.” But he didn’t push. Just settled deeper into the seat, looking more relaxed than I’d seen him since we met.
I focused on the road. On the mountains rising up around us. On anything except the photo strips in my pocket.
This was dangerous. This whole thing—the easy conversation, the way he made me laugh, the feeling that maybe I could trust someone again—was absolutely, catastrophically dangerous.
I’d known Ollie for three months before we kissed. A year before I let myself believe it might be serious. Three years before I trusted him completely. So what was I doing, feeling this pull toward someone I barely knew? Someone who would be gone in a few weeks, back to his real life in Los Angeles, back to a world I couldn’t even imagine?
This wasn’t healing. This was a rebound waiting to happen. Two broken people reaching for each other because they were conveniently located and equally damaged.
That’s what the rational part of my brain insisted, anyway.
The irrational part—the part that had pocketed those photos, the part that had felt something shift in that cramped photo booth—that part wasn’t listening.
“Thanks for today,” Samuel said quietly, breaking into my spiral. “For the ride, and for not making me feel like a freak for panicking at the fans.”
“You’re not a freak.”
“I made a mustache out of my hair.”
“Okay, you’re a little bit of a freak.”
Chapter Nine
Samuel
Iwas staring at Farley’s hands again.
This had become a problem.
Somewhere between Charlottesville and the winding mountain road back to Ashford Gap, I’d developed what could only be described as an obsession with the way his fingers curled around the steering wheel. Elegant. Precise. The hands of someone who edited manuscripts and probably owned multiple fountain pens and definitely knew how to do things with those hands that—
Stop it, I told myself firmly. You’re a grown man. You’ve had sex before. You’ve had lots of sex. You should not be this undone by someone’s knuckles.
But God, those knuckles.
The drive back from Charlottesville had been... something. Something I didn’t have a name for yet. We’d talked about our exes, our jobs, our existential crises—the type of raw, honest conversation that usually took months to reach with someone, if you ever reached it at all. And through all our misfortunes, we’d come out the other side laughing.
Not the polite laughter of people making nice. Genuine laughter. The kind that made your stomach hurt and your eyes water.
I hadn’t laughed like that in years.
Now Farley was telling me about the time he’d accidentally sent a very detailed rejection letter to an author—meant for his colleague’s eyes only—that included the phrase “this manuscript reads like it was written by a golden retriever with a thesaurus,” and I was trying very hard to listen instead of cataloging the exact shade of brown in his eyes when the afternoon light hit them.
“—and of course, the author was the wife of our biggest distributor’s CEO,” Farley continued, his mouth quirking into that devastating half-smile. “I spent three months sending apology fruit baskets.”
“Fruit baskets?”
“It was all I could think of. My assistant eventually had to intervene because I’d run out of fruit combinations and was moving on to exotic cheeses.” He shook his head. “Roger never let me forget it. He called me the Fruit Basket Queen for two years.”
“Roger sounds like an asshole.”
“Roger is an asshole. Was. Is.” Farley’s jaw tightened momentarily, then relaxed. “But that’s a topic we’ve exhausted for today.”
I watched his profile as he drove—the sharp line of his nose, the stubborn set of his chin—and felt something dangerous bloom in my chest. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d come to the mountains to figure out my life, not to develop feelings for a prickly publishing editor with a wounded heart.
And yet.
