“Took you long enough,” he said.
“Twat.”
His grin went full-on smile. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling back even if I’d wanted to.
“I read Haunted Bonds last night.”
“Oh, yeah?” I just might drop dead from heart failure on a Manhattan sidewalk.
“Yeah. I made it to chapter seven.”
My heart wedged into my throat, threatening to gag me.
“I really, really like it. It was hard to put down.”
Relief coursed through me, so profound that I might just faint.
“It’s a bit creepy though,” he stated.
“It’s supposed to be. It’s paranormal,” I dryly told him.
He glanced over at me. “I meant, the description of Donovan. I guess I can see why I was asked to be on the covers.”
“Right?” I blurted. Then, I composed myself as quickly as possible.
“And Lindsey Sparks kind of reminds me of you.”
If my face got any redder, it would burst into flames. I had to be shimmering with my own personal mirage. “Really?”
“Yeah. Except your eyes aren’t green.”
Well, I had always wished my eyes were greener than the mud-and-algae mix I had going on. As the author, I’d taken the liberty of making Lindsey everything I wished I were—like the fact that she had killer abs that had come from wrestling with vampires, not the muffin top I had going on from sitting at a computer for hours.
I took a sip of my coffee.
“What chapter do they have sex?” he asked.
Choking on my coffee, I managed to splutter, “El-ele-”—cough—“eleven.”
Ollie released my hand to pat me on the back. We stopped walking in order for me to wheeze the coffee from my lungs.
“If Elaine’s sex scenes are as crazy as the rest of her book, I might not be able to look her in the eyes on Friday.”
There it was—the berating of my mental faculties once again. A fiery flash of anger blazed through me.
Haunted Bonds was mine, my baby. It was my absolute victory over all the reasons I had felt I shouldn’t publish. It’s stupid. No one will like it. No one will understand it. People will laugh at me.
Some had. People had called Elaine H. Ford a freak, sick in the head. My therapist in Oxford had earned quite a bit of money after it had released. Plus, I had paid for the long-distance calls to her while I’d been living in Amsterdam. But they could never take away the simple fact that I had had the balls to put my brainchild out there.
Nevertheless, my readers enjoyed the sick, twisted inner workings of my mind. Apparently, Ollie was now one of them, too. A part of me wanted to rub it in his face. He was hanging out with someone he thought was mad.
“You all right?” he asked, pushing his sunglasses up his forehead.
I raised my watery gaze to his and nodded. Then, I washed more coffee down my throat. “I’m good.”
We started walking down the street again, and I was disappointed that our hands were no longer clasped.
Ollie
Today, Xanthe was sweet and tempting, hesitant to flirt. When she had tucked her hand in mine, I’d thought it was fantastic how she’d radiated ten shades of red. I had to wonder if she didn’t date much.
More than anything, I wanted to take her hand again. I liked her hands. Her fingers were long, dry, and callous. She kept her nails pared short and unpainted. But, more than wanting to touch her, I wanted to let it sink in for her that I liked touching her. I had the feeling that she wasn’t used to that, and I liked that feeling, too.
When we went through the north entrance of Central Park, I couldn’t take it anymore. Reaching out, I took her hand in mine. She lightly clasped my hand in return.
I wanted to fill up my camera with shots of Xanthe in the North Woods. With the bright sunlight filtering through the dense vegetation, it was the perfect fairy-tale setting for a woman with the name of a goddess—even if she were wearing black-rimmed hipster glasses.
“Will you take your hair down for me?” I asked as we went off on a smaller pathway.
She reached up and tugged out her knot, her thick curls catching streaks of sunlight. It shone with a dark inner fire.
Earthy and natural, Xanthe was breathtaking. She was slowly revealing something incredible to me. Perhaps that was the enchantment.
The desire to see all of her was overwhelming. I wouldn’t be satisfied until she was standing before me in all her glory. I sensed that she had the power to surprise me indefinitely, and I wanted to explore this, her, all of it.
My camera was out of the case and in my hands, and I felt that thrill I always got whenever I held the weight of it. I was ready to capture the world and clutch it in my grasp.
This wasn’t a digital camera. Xanthe deserved the time it would take for me to sit in my dark room with the film and watch each photograph develop, revealing their secrets as she did. After attaching the scope, I raised it to my gaze and saw her through my beloved lens about ten feet ahead of me. I snapped a few shots before she turned her attention on me.
“Are you photographing me?”
I smiled. “I am.”
“I thought you wanted Central Park.”
“I want you…in Central Park.”
Yes! I loved her blushing.
Unsure of herself, she didn’t know where to look or what to do with her body, and I found it refreshing. I wanted her as she was, showing me what was going on in that head of hers.
“What should I do?”
“Just be yourself,” I replied.
She looked off into the distance. “In this very minute, I’m not sure of who I am.”
I lowered my camera. “What do you mean?”
She faced me, and I felt her gaze like a swift kick to the gut. There was rawness in her expression. She was exposed, vulnerable, and…dark—not in an evil sense, but…something inside her was maybe more than mysterious, like a brutality, a protective viciousness that set her apart from the norm. The hair raised on my neck and arms.
“Take your shot,” she said softly.
I certainly didn’t want her uneasy with me, but the humanity in her expression was far too compelling. Raising my camera, I took a few more photos.
“What’s going through that head, Xanthe?” I asked, clicking away.
Refusing to look at the camera, she answered, “I’m not sure what you want from me.”
“I want to take pictures of my wonderful Xanthe.”
That shocked her. It shocked me, too.
She stared hard at me for a few seconds before she cracked a joyless, self-deprecating smile. “Is that how you make your models express emotion? Just say things that stun the shit out of them?”
“Sometimes,” I replied, defensive.
I hadn’t meant to say that to her at all. It had just popped out. There’d been no need to coax anything out of her. She was showing me everything, all on her own terms.
“Can we…” Her voice trailed off into the cool breeze.
“Can we, what?”
“Walk for a bit?”
I lowered the camera once more, and we stared at each other across the space between us.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked softly.
“A few things,” she replied.
That was no answer at all.