Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,1
But that’s average!
Not to authors, it wasn’t. I’d been blogging books since college, but a couple of years ago, one of my reviews—on one of Thomas Bane’s books—had gone viral, and my blog had exploded.
Let me tell you something—there were few perks to being someone’s top-rated negative review on Amazon, at least for someone like me who hated confrontation almost as much as I hated keeping my opinion to myself. Online, it was easy to be myself. With a screen firmly between me and the masses, my personality was bold and outgoing. Real life was another story. Put me in front of a cashier and watch me lock up like rigor mortis.
I cursed Janessa again for sending me here, wondering if she’d been intentionally cruel. Maybe she was hoping for me to return with some famous Thomas Bane quip or one-liner. Maybe she was hoping he’d confront me about my reviews, be an asshole, and load us up with material to write an article on.
Notorious bad-boy Thomas Bane. Model-dating, ultra-rich, devil-may-care, super-famous, fist-wielding, public-drunken and indecent-exposure Thomas Bane, fantasy author with a rap sheet the length of my arm.
“Do you want a picture?” I heard him ask. I thought I could hear him smiling.
“N-n-n-no, thanks,” the girl stuttered.
My guts turned to ice.
She’d been talking her brains out with her friend not ten minutes ago with sword-brandishing bravado about how she was going to French kiss him there in front of God and everybody. If she couldn’t answer a simple question from him, I was never going to make it out of the building.
I took another breath and straightened my spine, stretching me to the extent that my five-foot-one frame would allow. But when she moved out of the way, I almost went out like a candle.
His eyes shifted from the parting girl to fix on me, and the air left my lungs in a vacuum that would have snuffed an entire room full of candles.
They were dark as midnight, the iris indistinguishable from his pupil, his lashes thick and long and absolutely ridiculous. Ridiculous, every inch of him. The cut of his jaw, covered in a shadow from his casually kept beard. His nose, strong and long and masculine. Those cursed eyes, which had to be brown, but I couldn’t make out even a hint of anything but bottomless black. His hair, long enough to fall over his shoulders, wavy and so thick, I’d bet his ponytail was at least seven times the diameter of mine.
But the most ridiculous part of his absolutely ridiculous face was his lips, wide and full, the bottom in a constant pout, the top a little bit thicker, slanted at a ridiculous angle that had me wondering what it’d be like to suck on it.
Which was ridiculous in and of itself. I’d never even been kissed.
But whenever I was, God, grant me lips like those.
Hands planted themselves on my shoulder blades and shoved.
Thomas Bane laughed, and I was unsurprised to find that his smile was ridiculous, too. What utterly unfair bullshit that a man should be that gorgeous.
I wondered if anyone ever called him by anything other than his full name. He was like Celine Dion but with better hair. No one called Celine Dion just plain old Celine. I imagined even her kids called her Celine Dion, yelling through their multitrillion dollar home, Celine Dion, wipe my butt! I also imagined that on Sundays, she wore a ballroom gown and tiara to lie around on the couch and watch Netflix.
I cleared my throat and unloaded the books the paper had sent with me. I couldn’t meet his eyes again.
“Hi”—he paused, probably looking for the name tag stuck to my tiny boob—“Amelia. It’s good to see you,” he said as if we’d met a hundred times.
My lips wouldn’t move.
Say hi. Say hello. Say hi, Amelia, goddammit.
I made the mistake of looking up, and my tongue tripled in size.
Don’t look at him, you idiot! ABCs—acknowledge, breathe, and CHRIST, he is hot.
My eyes darted back down to my hands. I swallowed.
“H-hi,” I whispered.
God, I could feel him watching me. I could feel him smirking.
He took a book as I set it down, his hand entering my line of vision like a giant, manly, long-fingered version of my tiny pale one.
“Who should I personalize this to?” he asked.
“No personalization,” I answered before I lost my nerve.
Another soft chuckle as I added to the stack. “No problem.” The sound of a Sharpie scratching the page filled the silence.