CHAPTER SIX

BRANDON

The glowing screen of the laptop stared me down, the blinking curser of my word processor taunting my writer’s block with every flash. For two whole hours since returning home from whatever strange phenomenon had occurred at the bookstore, I had attempted to work on the fourth installment in the Breckenridge series. My busy brain just wasn’t having any of that nonsense, despite the urgency that Nick and my publisher had stressed on me just days earlier. They wanted the next book, they said. They wanted to keep the momentum going, they said. And while I understood all of that, I couldn’t get myself fired up enough to add anything more to the already existing 50,000 words.

I blamed her. Holly.

Since the day we met, she had haunted my mind with the memory of her smile, whispering to me like a restless ghost. The sadness hidden in the golden flecks of her eyes begged for a reason to smile more often, cried for a reason to sparkle in the magical way they did when she laughed. God, to be the man to make sure she never stopped having a reason to smile …

With a discouraged sigh, I admitted defeat and closed the laptop. Maybe I’m not cut out for this anymore, I thought, and stood from the high-backed leather office chair. I took a quick glance around the circular room lined with custom bookshelves that hugged the walls before walking my way to the leather sofa in the middle of the floor. I laid across the length of the couch, shoving a suede throw pillow under my head and resting my feet on the arm rest. My eyes stared upward towards the wrought iron chandelier, the soft glow of the bulbs shining down upon me like the stars I seldom saw living in the heart of suburban Long Island, and my thoughts drifted to those minutes in the Reade’s parking lot.

She had kissed me, and dammit, I kissed back. My own willing participation had shocked me. But what was more startling was I had been two pairs of pants away from having sex with her right there in the parking lot, and without a care of who might have been watching. A careless act of carnal behavior on my part, only stopped by my respect for her, and reluctance to feel for someone new; not the possibility of some cell phone photograph winding up on the internet the next day. Because with her, I realized, I wasn’t B. Davis, famed author of a fantasy book series that rivalled the likes of Tolkien and Martin. This was blatantly apparent to me when I realized I hadn’t once mentioned any of the personal details of my career to her. It wasn’t a secret I had purposely hidden—just genuine forgetfulness that was perhaps a subconscious effort to keep myself from being anything more than Brandon the Nice Man.

God, what am I doing?

I knew that she was in the process of mending a broken heart and making sense of her fragmented life, and of course, I was more than aware that I was a troubled man on the verge of permanent celibacy, living in a vacant shell of a house. And while a small glint of optimism whispered to me that we could be exactly what each other needed to pick up the pieces and super glue them back together, that required so much work, and I wasn’t sure I was prepared to put in the hours.

I pulled myself up from the couch and headed out of the room, taking another quick glance around the space—full of memorabilia, pictures, and books from throughout my short career—before leaving B. Davis behind, and I closed the doors.

I pulled the fitted t-shirt over my head as I walked down the hall, casting it aside on the floor of my bedroom before flipping on my nightstand lamp. Tolkien promptly jumped from the bed to sniff the garment. I watched her as I unzipped my jeans, and laughed when she backed away abruptly with repulsion. She turned to look at me with what I was sure was judgement, and oh, perhaps just a bit of jealousy.

“Don’t worry. You’re still the only girl in my life,” I said to her, bending over to scratch her behind the ears, while ignoring the stirring in my heart that wished that weren’t true.

On my way to the four-poster bed, I caught a glimpse of myself wearing nothing but my boxer briefs in the floor-length mirror. While I didn’t fancy myself a vain man, I was never ashamed to admit that I was proud of the way I looked. It had taken years to achieve that amount of muscle definition, and hours of pain to earn the tattoos that covered much of my torso. But that had its own downfalls. It was also my appearance that had set me apart from other authors. Few of them had received countless modeling offers from various companies, and I was fairly certain that most had never been made to pose shirtless for magazine covers. It was this type of publicity that I was convinced brought in the marriage proposals on social media and the grabby fans at various events, although Nick insisted it was the “killer jawline and the dreamy eyes.” So, what did I know.

Tolkien jumped onto the plush comforter and turned herself around several times, kneading her paws into the fabric before she settled down for what was probably her hundredth nap of the day. I threw on an old t-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants before climbing into bed after her.

Left in darkness, my thoughts sprung back to life with a vengeance. I wanted nothing more than to flip a switch and turn my brain off, just long enough to allow for slumber to settle in. I could have dreamt about her and have been fine with that, just to have gotten some sleep, but God, I couldn’t stop thinking about her—about Holly and her lips and her laugh—and I couldn’t decide if I hated myself for it or not.