Miraculously, my black moment with Miles matched up seamlessly with the black moment in the book I’ve nearly finished writing. Just a couple of more pages of depression, cue grand gesture, and bam…happily ever after. If only I could fucking write from home!
“Why are you here?” Lynsey asks, opening my front door without a knock to find me sitting cross-legged in my living room with my laptop open on my pretentious barnwood coffee table. Her face falls. “Oh my God, what is that horrible smell?” She opens my front door wide and waves the stench outside as my face heats with humiliation.
“It’s nothing!” I blow out the candle next to my computer and pop the lid on the tin to quickly stash the source of my embarrassment underneath the coffee table.
“It’s not nothing. It smells like…burnt rubber.” Her eyes go wide with realization. “Is that a fucking tire scented candle?”
She leaves the door open and dives on top of me, flattening me to the floor as we both grapple for the tin.
“Stop it! You’re going to make me spill wax on the floor!”
“Then let go so I can see what you’re hiding!” she squeals and claws her way up my arm, trying to reach my tightly gripped hand under the coffee table.
“No, you’re just going to make fun of me!”
“You’re damn right I am!” She redirects her hands to my sides where she starts tickling me mercilessly.
“Stop!” I howl and start laughing and screaming in unison as she assaults my tender sides and squirms on top of me. The ruthless bitch is going to leave bruises!
“What theeee fuuuuck?” a masculine voice stops us both midmotion. Lynsey’s face is only inches from mine, her hair falling around both of us providing a curtain of privacy.
I cautiously push Lynsey’s hair back to see Dean standing in my open doorway, gawking at us.
“Oh, thank God.” I exhale. “It’s just Dean.”
“Yeah, it’s just Dean,” he repeats and gestures with his hands for us to continue. “Please…don’t stop on my account.”
Lynsey and I both roll our eyes as she hauls herself off my body but not before she makes one more attempt for the tin. “Ah-ha, I got it!” she exclaims, but her face crumples in disbelief as she takes in the label on the tin. “Burnt rubber scented soy candle. I cannot believe this is a thing.”
She hands it over to Dean, and he winces as he takes a sniff.
“How much was that?” Lynsey asks, crossing her arms and tapping her foot like she’s preparing to scold me.
“Only $8.50 on Etsy,” I scoff and mumble, “I paid extra for expedited shipping.”
Dean booms with laughter. “Jesus H, you’ve got it bad, Kate!”
“I know!” I cry and stand up, staring at my manuscript still lit up in front of me. “I can’t write a damn word, and all I want to do is go back to Tire Depot.”
“Then go back!” Lynsey exclaims. “So you kissed him, and he turned you down? Big fucking deal! Your ex still technically lives in this house, and you refuse to move out, knowing full well he can come back any day. But one little kiss with the sexy mechanic, and suddenly, you’re a recluse again? I don’t think so!”
“She has a point, Kate,” Dean adds, completely unhelpful. “It’ll be awkward for a day, three days tops. It’s not like you have to gaze into his eyes from the waiting room. He’ll probably stay in the garage and avoid you too.”
I groan and drop down onto my couch, scrubbing my hands over my face. “You’re right. My house smells like shit now too, doesn’t it?”
They both nod down at me.
Lynsey adds, “You’re going to have to get someone in here to clean it.”
“Or throw a raging party when you finish this book, and we’ll trash it so badly that the smell of booze and puke will overwhelm the burnt rubber.”
Lynsey and I eye him with disgust.
He shrugs. “Just an idea.”
“Fine, I’ll go back,” I decide at last. “But only because burnt rubber is not the same as new rubber, and I couldn’t find a new rubber candle anywhere online. I wasted an embarrassing amount of time trying.”
I walk into the back door of Tire Depot with my head held high. I have a book to finish, damn it. Lynsey and Dean are right. I sure as hell shouldn’t stop sneaking in illegally and pilfering complimentary coffee in the CCC because of Miles and his hot and cold treatment.
It was one kiss. One kiss with some heavy petting. One kiss with some heavy petting and a boner the size of a fucking giant cucumber. This is nothing I can’t get over!
Thankfully, as soon as I sit down and sip my free long espresso, I get that buzz in my fingers again. The buzz that means I won’t need to stop for food because inspiration will be nourishing my soul!
And thankfully, I don’t even see Miles for the first few days I’m back. It’s nice—like the early days when I was literally invisible to everyone around me. Even Betty doesn’t notice me typing in the corner when she comes with a fresh cookie stash. And that’s good because I have work to do.
But on the third day I come in, I muster up the courage to wave at him through the window in the shop. It seems like a normal thing to do, considering I walk right past the garage every day and can clearly see him working through the window.
When Miles sees me waving like a moron, he blinks several times, like he thinks he’s seeing a ghost. Eventually, his face relaxes, and he gives me that lopsided smile that’s still sexy as ever.
It’s nice. It’s mature. We’re adulting.
The next day, it’s as if my wave to Miles in the garage was an olive branch he’s accepted because he comes striding into the CCC just as he’s done many times before “the black moment.”
“How’s the book coming?” he asks while grabbing a cookie out of the case and turning to look down at where I sit in one of the big, comfy armchairs.
Smiling shyly, I look over at the last couple of customers seated at one of the high top tables. One is on her phone, and the other is flipping through a magazine. Both clearly uninterested in our conversation.
Miles leans back against the countertop and bites into a cookie, his long legs crossed at the ankles, posture relaxed and friendly. I take a moment to drink in the enormous sight of him.
Freshly showered but not freshly shaved. Still hot as ever in simple jeans and a T-shirt.
“It’s coming along,” I reply, exhaling heavily. “This is the point in the story where I rip the couple apart and ruin everything they thought they knew about each other.”
“Ouch,” he states, pressing his fist to his heart in mock pain. “Can’t they just be happy?”
“What’s dramatic about happy?” I ask with a laugh. “My readers like the pain, the torture. They love when I rip stuff up and put it all back together.” I lean forward in my chair and lower my voice. “It makes the makeup sex that much hotter.”
He chuckles softly and shakes his head. “You know, my sister texted me and asked for your full author name so she could read some of your stuff.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Is that right?”
He nods. “I warned you that we were a family of readers.”
I eye him speculatively for a moment. There’s really no reason to keep my pen name a secret from him anymore. It’s not like we’re romantically involved. I squashed any chance of that several days ago.
Clearing my throat, I reply, “You’re going to laugh.”
“Why do you say that?”
I prepare to reply, but pause as a voice cuts through the overhead music and announces, “Jeremiah Park, your Honda Civic is done.” The couple sitting together both get up and make their way out of the CCC, leaving Miles and me alone once again.
Miles lifts his brows, clearly primed and ready for me to continue.
With a deep breath, I tell the unusual tale of how Kate Smith went from being a boring old copy editor to a bestselling erotic novelist, leaving out the whole real name part, of course.
“So my first book started off as a parody. I was actually working as a remote copy editor for a big publishing house and had no intentions of ever writing a book myself.”
“Okay …” Miles replies, crossing his arms over his chest and listening intently.
I do my best to ignore the way his biceps stretch the sleeves of his shirt and continue. “So my ex and I had this horrible experience at a bed and breakfast.”
“The ex who wanted you to lie to his family about what you did?” Miles asks, his jaw ticking angrily. I nod, and he clears his throat like he’s holding back some words.
Fuck, it would be so book-hot if he was jealous right now.
“Anyway,” I continue, “we show up at what we think is a normal bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere Colorado only to discover that we’ve walked right into a secret BDSM club.”
Miles’s eyes are bright and blue when he exclaims, “You didn’t?”
“We did! This is a true story!” I retort and keep going. “And somehow, they think we’re their honored guests for the evening. We think the people they were expecting never showed up. I guess. I don’t know, the details of that are still fuzzy.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“We kinda just rolled with it because we were tired and we thought, ‘all we need is a bed to crash in, who cares what this woman is doing with a dude on a leash. That’s her business.’”
“Your ex won’t tell his family what you do, but he was open-minded to that kind of scene?”
I bark out a laugh. “He was as high as a fucking kite! He had consumed three edibles in retaliation to the fact that I forgot to book a hotel room. I don’t know, he’s an idiot.”
“Agreed,” Miles adds with a scowl.
I can’t help but giggle at the serious tone in his voice. “I don’t think he even realizes what he’s seeing. Like I think he was actually seeing dogs on leashes, not human subs.”
A full-on belly laugh erupts from Miles, and he eventually asks, “What happened?”
My brows lift. “You mean, did we participate?”
“Yeah,” he admits with a shameless shrug.
“We did not,” I reply with a sad smile. “Since we were the honored guests, we were only there to watch. The Head Mistress was very clear about that. She ushered us into this Western-looking parlor room and seated us in frickin’ thrones, complete with sashes and crowns. Then, they basically put on a BDSM performance for us. It was frickin’ insane!”
“Sounds like it.”
“Naturally, I go to bed that night and think, I have to write down everything that just happened or no one will believe it. So I did. It wasn’t super hard for me because I was already a copy editor and a huge reader. But I was pretty much writing it like a book, not a journal. It was complete with dialogue, descriptions, and the whole nine yards. I thought it would be really fun to take creative liberties with the story, so I kept going. Next thing I knew, I had a damn book!
“I came up with this utterly ridiculous pen name when I was drunk one night. A crazy story deserved a crazy pen name, so I settled on…”
I pause for dramatic effect, and Miles rolls his hand out in front of him, encouraging me to continue.
“Mercedes Lee Loveletter.”
I shrug and giggle, enjoying the stunned look in his eyes right before he asks, “What’s your real last name then?”
I pause and bite my lip, quickly trying to decide how far I want to take this. It’s a quick internal debate, though, because I know without a doubt that I love being Mercedes with Miles ten times more than I’ve ever loved being Kate, especially with men like Dryston. “It’s Smith,” I reply honestly because it’s not like he’ll find me on Facebook or something. I removed my personal account a long time ago because it was too much to monitor that profile as well as my pen name.
“Smith,” he repeats with a nod, the corners of his mouth turning down with a concealed smile. “So why Loveletter then?”
“Well, because that was how the BDSM performance all started. This giant dominatrix removed a ball gag from her slave’s mouth so he could read a love letter he’d written to his mistress. It was really sweet actually. He even cried.”
Miles shakes his head. “That’s how your journey began then?”
“Yep,” I reply with an audible pop. “I self-published the story and didn’t even know it hit the New York Times until an agent emailed me to ask if I had representation.”
“Holy shit!” Miles exclaims, clearly impressed. “That’s an incredible story.”
“Book-worthy,” I correct with a grin. This is fun. It’s been forever since I’ve thought back through the whole saga, and Miles is lapping it up like a dog. “And it clearly gave me the itch to write because once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
“Until your slump with this book.”
“Until Tire Depot saved me.”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “And you said this book is the last in the series?”
I nod my head. “Yep.”
“And then on to the next book.”
“It’s like an itch I can’t stop scratching.”
I exhale heavily and watch Miles’s face morph into a warm, affectionate smile as he stares down at me. He’s mesmerizing when he looks at me like that, all sweet and masculine. It’s also totally frickin’ obvious that he’s thinking of a hell of a lot more than just the story I told him.
Damn it, men are confusing. How the hell can he look at me like that and not want to kiss me? The level of my urge to kiss him is at an all-time high.
I decide to smash the tender moment into pieces using the giant elephant in the room. “So does this mean we don’t have to be awkward?”
He chuckles, those crinkles in his eyes framing the steely blue of his irises. “I thought you telling me the story of you and your ex waltzing into a BDSM bed and breakfast pretty much confirmed that fact.”
“Fair enough.” I nod in confirmation. “So we’re friends, then?”
“Friends,” he approves with a panty-melting smile.
I pack up my computer and toss my bag over my shoulder. “Good, because, as a friend, I was wondering if you might help me with some research for my next book.”
His brows raise. “What did you have in mind?”