Ten Thousand Words (7 page)

The second course was served, and Xanthe’s eyes lit up like fireworks at the sight of the mountain of meat placed between us.

“What do you have planned for tomorrow?” I asked her.

Dragging a particularly juicy chunk of beef onto her plate, she replied, “We’re finalizing some details about the cover of my book.”

“Well, if it’s anything like the one I had to shoot today, you’re going to have a very grumpy-looking person on it. Apparently, I have a hidden talent for looking irritated.”

There went that laughter again, and it just filled me up unlike anything else ever had. It was like a warm, cinnamon-scented breeze moving into all the corners inside me.

“I have the afternoon free,” she said in an offhanded sort of way, like if I didn’t ask her to do anything with me, she’d be cool with it.

“I was thinking I owe you a coffee.”

“That you do. That was heartbreaking, Ollie. I had this magnificent triple-shot mocha latte, and you robbed me of it. I’d only had the teeniest taste of it, and you just knocked it out of my hand, as though I hadn’t just spent five dollars on a cup of hot liquid goodness.”

I blinked at her. I couldn’t even think of a rejoinder to that.
No wonder she’s a writer.

She’d just made me feel like the lowest bastard in the world for taking away her simple joy of coffee.

“I…” I said. And nothing else.

She busted out laughing, enchanting me all over again. “You’ve already made up for the coffee,” she told me.

I shook my head. “Let me get you a triple-shot mocha latte tomorrow.”

“Hmm…”

“Please?”

I didn’t want to be out of this woman’s debt. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to find every way of making up for being an asshole to her.

“Sure.”

Throughout the rest of the meal, she kept me laughing with her smart-ass wit, regaling me with stories of trips she’d taken with her father to ancient sites around the world. Although she had attended actual schools throughout the years, she had been partly homeschooled while on location with her father. Xanthe spoke of how she’d been fascinated with the dead for as long as she could remember and how they’d inspired her to write about the paranormal.

“You weren’t frightened or anything?” I asked. “Didn’t you find it even a little creepy to be around all those dead people?”

Xanthe shrugged. “It’s not like they could hurt us. They were dead. Besides, they had lived once, so they’d had stories of their own. I just always wondered what they were.”

I’d never really given much thought to death. The only person I knew who had passed away was Trey’s mother, and I had been very young at the time. Hell, all four of my grandparents were still living. But Xanthe thought about death, what it entailed, if there was anything after life. It made me begin to wonder, too.

It also made me think of Elaine and if she thought about death the way Xanthe did.

We decided to skip dessert. Xanthe had tackled the meat mountain with as much gusto as I had, and there wasn’t room left inside either of us. Sneaking off under the pretense of needing the restroom, I went ahead and paid for our dinner.

“Ready?” I asked as I approached the table, finding her rubbing her belly. Surprisingly, that had to be one of the sexiest things I’d ever seen, and that was saying something.

“Do we pay on the way out?”

I rolled my eyes.

“You already paid it,” she said flatly.

“So?”

Huffing, she pulled herself out of the booth and headed for the door, giving me the immense pleasure of walking behind her. Now, my hands were itching to smack that sweet bubble butt. She shrugged on her jacket, and I grew a second pair of balls and plucked the hair tie from her hair.

“Hey!” She whipped around to face me.

I tossed the tie at her, and she caught it midair and stowed it in her pocket once more.

“Can I touch it?” I asked her as we stood at the curb to hail a cab.

“Can you touch what?” she asked.

“Your hair.”

“Only if I can touch your beard.”

“Deal,” I replied.

I buried my hands into that thick mass, rubbing my fingertips into her scalp. With a quirky little smirk on her face, she reached up with both hands and dug her fingers into my beard, getting down to the skin. It felt so…
damn
good
. Goose bumps erupted all over my body, and my groin and nipples grew tight.

“People must think we’re weirdos, standing on the sidewalk, molesting each other’s hair,” she said.

“We’re in New York. There’s weirder shit going on than a couple of follicle-obsessed oddballs waiting for a cab.”

“Yeah, probably.”

After we released each other, it took a few minutes to hail a taxi, and too soon, we were back at The Plaza, our first date over.

“May I walk you to your room?” I asked her as the elevator stopped on the tenth floor.

She thought about it for a few heartbeats. “Okay.”

At room 1013, we stopped and just looked at each other. Surprisingly, it wasn’t awkward at all.

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, finally breaking eye contact.

“Xanthe?”

“Yeah?”

“I’d really like to kiss you,” I told her, my heart speeding up in tempo.

She blushed prettily and smiled. I was done for. Closing her eyes, she turned her face up to mine.

I had been thinking of doing it all damn day. Bending forward, I pressed my lips to that adorable black freckle, my beard scratching against her cheek. I breathed her in, intoxicated with the heady scent that was Xanthe.

She sighed softly.

“Thank you for an amazing date,” I whispered against her cheek before taking a step back.

Looking down into her eyes, I had no idea what she was thinking. Her face was a blank canvas. Then, she smiled, and I witnessed true joy in her.

“My pleasure,” she replied. Then, she turned and slid her key through the lock. Pushing open the door, she looked at me over her shoulder. “See you.”

Xanthe

Mandy Arthur opened the door to her office, all professional grace and decorum, ushering me inside. Then, she shut the door, spun to face me, and squealed, flapping her hands around her face and jumping up and down. “Oh my goodness!”

I was experiencing the same feeling, and I bounced and squealed right along with her.

Mandy and I hadn’t actually met in person. Initially, we’d met through social media before I had finished writing
Haunted Bonds
. We were fans of another author and had met in a forum promoting that author’s work. Her honest reviews had prompted me to ask her to read my manuscript before I published, and she’d absolutely loved it.

When the workload of writing and staying active on social media platforms had become overwhelming for me, she had volunteered her services as a PA. She’d believed in me that much. She wasn’t just
my
PA. She had a list of clients she provided the service for, and she had several others working beneath her.

Over the years, we had struck up a strong friendship, messaging and sending emails, until eventually video-chatting on Skype.

“I can’t believe it!
Finally
!” she cried.

“I know!” I cried back.

We launched ourselves at each other and hugged tightly. Ollie was right. Her breasts were big and magnificent squishy mounds that I enjoyed smooshing myself up against. After fangirling over each other, we got right down to business, going over the schedule for the convention and then photos from Ollie’s shoot the day before.

The photos were breathtaking. Ollie was a talented photographer, but he was also intense and engaging in front of the camera. With ease, he’d captured the essence of Donovan—sexy, soul-crushingly intimidating, and drop-dead gorgeous.

“I have to tell you, Xanthe, that man drips sex. He’s Donovan in the flesh! When I first saw him at the hotel, it was like watching your pages come to life!”

Ollie was Donovan Colt down to each minute physical detail. That he’d agreed to do this was just plain awesome for me.

“I know,” I replied, a thick note of guilt in my voice.

“What is it?” she asked, shrewdly eyeing me.

I met her gaze. “I don’t think he’s very happy about it.”

She gave me a startled look. “He told you that?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“He told me he’d never met you,” she stated.

My guilt increased a hundredfold. “He doesn’t know me as Elaine.”

“What?”

“He…we met on the flight over. I…I introduced myself as
myself
. He doesn’t know that Elaine is me, that
I
wrote the Paranormal Hunters series.”

“But…”

I ended up telling her the whole of it—the coffee incident, the apology, the fact that he thought Elaine was a nutjob, his disappointment at being chosen as a model and not a photographer, and that we’d totally hit it off.

“Holy poop, Xanthe!”

Mandy never used cuss words. It was one of the weirdest, most endearing aspects of her personality. She just refused to use them. She even claimed to change the words in her head while reading—which I just couldn’t fathom. Her term for pussy was
precious petals
. I had no idea how she worked in this industry without expletives.

“It’s
you
,” she accused. “
You’re
his flippin’ person of interest.”

I dropped my face into my hands. “You have to promise me, you won’t say anything. I know he has to find out—”

“Before Friday? Yeah, that might be a good idea,” she said, her voice oozing sarcasm. “He seems absolutely smitten with you. When he was texting you, his face was just so…” She sighed dramatically. “It was like this heavenly light was shining from his eyes—”

I ripped a snort of laughter. “Way to lay it on thick, Arthur.”

“I was totally jealous. I wished I were the one making that light shine out of him. Is he good in bed?”

“How the hell would I know? We just met!”

“So?”

“So, no, we haven’t had sex. He took me to dinner last night though, and I’m meeting him for coffee when I’m finished here with you.”

“What did you do to him on that flight?”

“I have no idea. I asked him about his photography, and he couldn’t bloody shut up after that.”

Last night, when Ollie had mentioned meeting Mandy, I’d debated on telling him that I was Elaine right then and there, but when he couldn’t answer why he wouldn’t think I was any less insane than he thought Elaine was, I’d decided not to ruin the meal. We’d been having a good time, really enjoying each other’s company.

It’s not like I forced him to do this. He could’ve backed out of the contract after reading the book and making the assumption that Elaine was a psycho. I would have found someone else.

Why am I bothering with him at all?

Because, despite his obvious mistrust of Elaine’s mental faculties, I had a huge crush on him. He was attentive, charming, and I was totally enchanted with him. And it wasn’t like he seriously thought Elaine should be locked up in a loony bin somewhere. In fact, his assumptions had been mild compared to some of the things reviewers of my books had said about Elaine.

Moreover, he found
me
very interesting. Me, as in Xanthe Malcolm, the weird-ass writer who worked in her great-aunt’s bookshop. I didn’t want that to end. Elaine H. Ford was just a pen name.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I lifted my ass off the seat to dig it out. Before I saw who it was, I knew it was Ollie texting me.

Almost done?

I glanced at Mandy, and her face split into a wicked grin.

“Get out of here,” she told me.

No need to tell me twice.

Stepping out of the elevator and into the lobby of the business center where Mandy had her office, I called up Ollie.

“Hello?” Ollie’s deep and smooth voice answered the phone.

“Hey, I’m finished with my meeting. Where are you?”

“I’m at a café, waiting for you.”

He gave me the address, which was only a couple of blocks over. We stayed on the phone as he placed our coffee order, and I hurried, excited to see him again. Looking around, I spotted the café a little way down and across the street.

“I can see you,” he told me before hanging up.