“The mussels for an appetizer, the Joyce Farms airline chicken for an entrée, and the drunken pecan for a cocktail.”
Hayley cocked an eyebrow. “That’s very specific.”
He nodded. “I’m a specific kind of guy.”
They kept talking, pretending Bree and I weren’t sitting at the same table with them. The silence on our side was oppressive, so I finally had no choice but to look at her. She was fixated on the menu.
“How are you?” I asked in a voice that was almost breathy.What’s up with that?
“Great,” she replied, her tone breezy and somewhat detached. “How is the filet mignon?”
“Expensive,” I replied.
She just blinked.
“It’s great,” I corrected quickly. “That’s what I’m getting. With she-crab soup. That’s my favorite thing here.”
“I love she-crab soup.” She looked wistful. Then she shook herself out of her reverie. “I’m getting the ghost orange mule too.”
“That’s my favorite.” I flashed a tight smile, frustrated because this conversation was so stilted. Things had been easy between us the last time we were together. They were theopposite now. “Are you looking forward to tonight?” I was desperate to find something to talk about.
She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I was. I guess we’ll see how things go.”
With that, we fell into silence again. This was obviously going to be a very long night.
15
FIFTEEN
Being around Brody was excruciating. Not because I hated him. No, it was the exact opposite. I wanted to be closer. It was impossible for me to avoid the truth a second longer.
I liked him.
I didn’t want to like him. I wasn’t in a place in my life where a relationship was a good idea. I had just moved into a new home. I had an idea for a new series that would take a lot of time. I was trying to … well, I was trying to be an adult. Brody would distract me from that mission.
Yet I liked him.
It was so frustrating. He had a ridiculously soft smile that made my heart do somersaults. His dry sense of humor matched mine, and I found myself laughing whenever we were in close proximity. He was hot to the point of doing strange things to my lady parts, like a scene from a book. Not one of Hayley’s books but one of the spicy ones I read late at night and never on a beach because the man-chest cover was a dead giveaway.
Brody was an engaging person who understood the difficulties of what I did for a living. That pretty much made him the perfect man.
This isn’t the perfect time, though.
And that was the part I couldn’t get over. This was not the time to be futzing around with a relationship, especially with a guy I had to see regularly for work. We were on the third of twelve planned events. If I took him home and rode him like the tingly parts of me wanted, then we would be hot and heavy for two weeks—that was always how my relationships went—and I would inevitably lose interest in him after. If that happened, these events would be torturous. Why make my life more difficult?
No, I couldn’t engage with the constant whispers from my lady parts. They might be encouraging me nonstop, but I was, above all, a realist. That meant I had to nip this attraction in the bud.
Fortunately, the readers served as a distraction after dinner. One in particular had caught my attention. His name was Andrew Fisher. He was thirty, worked as a tech developer, and supposedly loved mysteries. Despite the fact that he was there to meet different authors, I found him hovering around me the entire time. He had a lot of questions to go along with the cleft in his chin and a pair of dimples that definitely would have had me going weak at the knees under different circumstances.
“So, how do you decide what sort of creature you want to feature in each book?” he asked as I sipped my iced tea and eyed him warily.
“Creature?” The question confused me but only because my attention had been drawn back to Brody, who was two tables over, talking to an attractive blonde. Her shirt was so low-cut I was convinced she was trying to pretend her breasts were elves.
“Well, you said you write about witches, vampires, and werewolves,” Andrew prodded.
“Shifters,” I automatically corrected. “Almost nobody uses the wordwerewolfin paranormal fiction. There are shifters … and they’re not always wolves.”
“Really?”
