HER BUSH

PENELOPE BLOOM
 CONTENTS
1. Nell

2. Harry

3. Nell

4. Harry

5. Nell

6. Harry

7. Nell

8. Harry

9. Nell

10. Harry

11. Nell

12. Harry

13. Nell

14. Harry

15. Nell

16. Harry

17. William

18. Nell

19. Harry

20. Nell

21. Harry

22. Nell

23. Harry

24. Nell

25. Epilogue - Nell

Please don’t forget to leave a review!

Reading Guide
Also By Penelope Bloom
 1

NELL

T oday was the first day of my new life. Sure, I’d started to
lose track of how many first days of the rest of my life
I’d had, but this time would be different. Beauty school hadn’t
worked out, having a long-term boyfriend hadn’t worked out,
and following my dream of being an artist hadn’t worked out.
Today was the day I took the past and kicked it in the balls.
Maybe I’d even kick the future in the balls, while I was at it. It
was my first day as a professional bush sculptor, and I wasn’t
going to screw it up.
There might have been a few minor details that were
making me nervous about my first day. The biggest hurdle was
that my only experience in my new line of work was
brutalizing a bush outside my apartment with kitchen scissors.
But hey, it had been years since my high school art teacher
said there must not have been an artistic gene in my family
history, even if you went back to the stone age. I’d been
making sculptures in my spare time since then with the hope
that I’d be able to go back and slam one down on her desk
triumphantly. I was still kind of working on that part. Either
way, I’d practically trained to trim this bush my whole life,
and I was going to nail it. Probably.
I just needed to focus. The eye of the tiger. Eye on the
prize. Two birds in the bush—
I closed my eyes. Mental diarrhea wasn’t going to help.
All I needed to do was decide this would be the first time I
didn’t screw everything up. I wasn’t going to fail. I couldn’t
fail. I might only be twenty-two, but a person could only
handle so many miserable failures before it started to drive
them crazy. I was pretty sure I’d already reached that point, so
I really, really needed this to work. I needed it to work for my
own sake and especially for my little sister’s sake. She wanted
to go to music school, which my parents couldn’t and
wouldn’t pay for. I’d secretly been saving money to help her
pay her way through when she graduated high school next
year, but I’d only put away enough to get her through her first
year.
The van bumped and jostled us around like it was rolling
on cinderblocks instead of wheels. After nearly half an hour,
my nose still hadn’t acclimated to the smell of the guys who
were riding with me. If you took an old sock, dipped it in
vinegar, and then scrubbed it with cheese, you might get close
to the smell of my new co-workers.
“You with me over there, Nell?” Davey asked. He’d been
my best friend since Kindergarten, and he’d helped me get this
job. “You’ve got that stupid look on your face.”
“I don’t get stupid looks on my face.”
“It’s not that you look stupid. It’s that I know you’re
thinking about something stupid. Remember when you asked
me if caterpillars know they’re going to become butterflies?
Or if Ryan Gosling was going to legally change his name to
Ryan Goose when he got old enough?”
“Yes, and those are not stupid questions.”
Davey pursed his lips. “Objectively? Yes, they are. So,
what is it this time?”
“I don’t want to tell you now. You’re going to make fun of
me.”
“I probably won’t.”
I sighed. “I was just thinking about how if I breathe out
hooh, it’s cold, but if I breathe out, haah, it’s hot.” I’d actually
been thinking about where I’d find enough cardboard to make
my house if I got fired from this job, but I didn’t feel like
bumming Davey out.
 Davey put his palm to his forehead for a few seconds
before laughing. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.
Even from you.”
I raised an eyebrow at him in challenge.
“What?”
“I’m just waiting because I know you’re dying to try it out
and see if I’m right.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It’s…” Davey sighed,
then turned his head slightly and breathed into the palm of his
hand twice. Hooh. Haah.
I smirked in triumph.
“Just because you’re right, it doesn’t make it any less
stupid,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure being right means it’s not stupid by
default.”
The guy beside me snorted a little like he’d just woken up.
“Hell yeah,” he grunted.
“See?” I said. “He agrees with me.”
Davey leaned closer and lowered his voice. “That’s Carl,
and Carl is going to agree with anything you say because you
have boobs.”
“Still,” I shrugged. I also wondered if Carl would be as
enthusiastic about my boobs if he knew how much magic my
bra worked for me.
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, even though it
was hard to relax with the way the van was bumping me
halfway out of my seat every few seconds.
I still couldn’t quite believe I was here. Just a few months
ago, it had seemed like everything was on track. I had a
boyfriend. I was starting beauty school. I was going to be a
hairdresser, and I was going to be doing something that
excited me finally. I wondered if any of the guys sharing the
van with me ended up here the same way—like this was some
kind of smelly purgatory for people who realized they weren’t
cut out to chase their dreams.
Or maybe they were just as poor as me and weren’t about
to turn their noses up at paying work.
Thankfully, I was never the type to wallow. Yes, my
situation sucked. No, I wasn’t going to let it bring me down.
Besides, I wasn’t just doing any kind of gardening. I was a
“bush sculptor.” Last time I checked, any sort of sculpting was
art. In other words, I was now a professional artist.
Davey was currently trimming his nails, even though the
van was shaking enough that I thought he was just as likely to
take off a finger. It was either brave or stupid. Knowing him, it
was a bit of both. I’d never tell him as much, but I only
introduced myself to him back in our Kindergarten days
because he reminded me of a little turtle. He had an oversized,
slightly pointy upper lip and a slow, wobbling way of walking.
I also still secretly very much enjoyed his turtleness, but I
didn’t think that was the sort of thing he’d want to hear.
He nudged me. “You’ll be fine, Nell. Relax,” He tapped
my clenched hands with his knuckles like he was trying to
crack an egg.
I smirked, forcing myself to relax. “Do I look nervous?”
“You look like you’re trying to shit a diamond the size of
my fist.”
I scrunched up my face. “First of all, I don’t shit. I’m a
lady. I relieve myself in a polite, proper manner. And even if I
did… poop, it would smell like roses and be daintily sized.”
Davey grinned. “It sounds like you forgot we’re
roommates because there was nothing polite and proper about
—”
I kicked his foot, which, thankfully got him to stop. Some
of the other guys in the van were throwing curious glances our
way. “I might be nervous, but it’s only because I want to do a
good job.”
“It’s just trimming bushes, Nell. How badly could you
mess it up?”
 “Oh, I don’t know.” I pointed to my hair, which was
currently a bold shade of orange. It was just one little reminder
of my glorious exit from beauty school. Maybe I should’ve
taken it as a sign that I wasn’t ready for the test when I
practiced on myself and failed the night before my exam. I’d
been aiming for a gentle kind of blonde—just a touch lighter
than my natural brown. Whoops.
Davey looked thoughtful at that. “You do kind of have a
tendency to screw up everything you touch, and I mean that in
the most supportive way possible.”
I grinned. “Thanks. I don’t know what I’d do if you
weren’t around to remind me that I’m a professional at
sucking.”
Davey snorted. “I didn’t need to know what you’ve been
doing for cash on the side.”
I glared, but couldn’t help grinning, even though I was
pretty sure the other guys in the van thought I was batshit
crazy by now. “I’m going to ignore that. And no, I’m not
going to mess this up. I need this job.” I leaned in and lowered
my voice. “And I won’t forget that you put your ass on the line
to help me get it.”
He nodded. “My ass is yours.”
I gave him a wry smile. “Not exactly what I meant, but…
thanks?”
“Oh, look. We’re here.”
A quick glance out the window showed me that Davey
hadn’t been kidding when he told me most of The Gardening
Gnome’s clients lived in mansions. I’d been nervous before,
but now I thought my stomach was going to fall out of my ass.
Calm down, Nell. You can do this.
History implied that, in fact, I probably couldn’t. If I
wanted to let my past dictate my future, I might as well find a
dark corner, curl up in a ball, and avoid trying to do anything
for the rest of my life. All things considered, the path forward
seemed pretty clear: keep trying, even if it ends up turning into
another disaster.
 I thought about my little sister, Ashley, to take my mind off
visions of burning bushes and me with a pair of gardening
shears jabbed through my chest. Sometimes, when everything
got too hard, I’d just pull up one of the videos on her YouTube
channel of her singing and playing guitar. She put so much
heart into her singing, and even if I was biased, I thought she
was incredibly talented. I couldn’t watch her videos without
tearing up with pride. That little booger deserved better than
what I’d managed for myself. She wasn’t a chronic failure like
me, and she actually had talent. So I was going to do
everything I could to make sure I didn’t screw up this
Gardening Gnome job, for her.
And for Davey, I guessed, to a lesser extent, considering
he’d definitely get fired too if I messed this up.
If only I had some slight idea of how to properly sculpt a
bush. I mean, I did watch a couple videos on YouTube last
night… what could go wrong?
 2

HARRY

M y closet looked like it was shared by a group of

entirely different men. There was the assortment of
business appropriate clothing, from suits to sport coats and the
pants and shoes to match. Then there was the athletic section
that held clothing and gear for running, basketball, tennis, and
several other sports I enjoyed when time permitted. Another
part was riddled with camouflage and bright, neon-colored
gear that I used for hunting. I’d even had a custom room built
into the back of my closet where I kept all my guns, bows, and
spearfishing gear. I’d never admit it to anyone, but I also had a
big ass sword in there I liked to swing around when nobody
was looking—and yes, I made swishing sound effects.
I stood in the center of my closet wearing nothing but my
underwear as I decided which Harry Barnidge I would be
today. It was a bitter thought. Somewhere along the way, my
life had become a series of separate existences. The friends I’d
made through hunting had no idea I enjoyed basketball or
tennis. The people I knew from my work as a literary agent
had nothing to do with my life as a hunter. I couldn’t put my
finger on when it had happened, but every passing year only
seemed to make the lines between those parts of me even more
profound. Some part of me knew the right woman would
likely help bring everything back into focus, but I still didn’t
know if I was ready for all that again.
Like most mornings, I threw on some clothes for a
workout and headed to the gym in the East Wing. The walk
from my bedroom to the gym was long, and it gave me time to
observe the gardens in front of the house. I immensely enjoyed
them, whether I was looking out over them from the second-
floor windows as I headed to the gym, or just finding a bench
among the bushes and flowers to sit and absorb the smells and
sounds. More and more, I found myself seeking out those
pockets of quiet, like little rocks that provided temporary
shelter from the current, which always tried to push me along.
I had gardeners coming in about an hour to touch
everything up and sculpt some centerpieces into the huge
hedges by the fountain. I was throwing a release party for two
of my authors tonight, which meant I wanted everything to be
perfect. If I had to choose one key to success in my line of
work, it was that appearances were everything. Even my home
and garden would play a role in how much publishers offered
my authors for their books.
I was a little surprised to see my brother was already inside
the glassed-off home gym when I arrived. Considering my
brother was a married, grown-ass adult, I had more than a few
questions.
I pulled open the door and paused the music that was
blaring. “Everything good?” I asked.
Peter dropped the dumbbells he was holding to the mats at
his feet. He grabbed a towel and mopped some sweat from his
forehead. My brother had darker hair than me, darker eyes,
and a darker, angrier natural resting face. He was the kind of
guy people were afraid to ask the time of day. “Why wouldn’t
it be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the fact that you’re at my house at
four in the morning and working out?”
“Simple explanation. Violet is out of town with Zoey, and I
couldn’t go. I also decided to have some remodeling done at
the house. So… right now my bedroom doesn’t have a roof,
and my home gym is a construction zone.”
“So you got in your car at, what, three in the morning to
drive over here and use mine?”
 “Which part is confusing you, exactly? Do you want me to
draw you a diagram?”
I grinned. “You’re an ass. And you’d tell me if something
was wrong, right?”
“I came here to lift, not for a therapy session. So no, I
probably wouldn’t. Speaking of therapy, though, how did that
talk with Nathaniel Cross go?”
“About how I expected. Cross wanted to remind me that he
has all the important publishers by the balls, and by extension,
he has me by the balls.”
Peter laughed sourly. “Was it worth it?”
“What, punching his son in the nose? Yeah. It was worth
it.”
“I still think you missed an opportunity. That woman you
pulled him off of looked like she would’ve happily gone home
with you instead.”
“Wasn’t interested then, just like I’m not interested now.
I’ve got too much on my plate to get involved in a relationship
again.” I tapped the panel on the wall to turn the music back
on. “You’re doing those wrong, by the way. You keep letting
your pinky rotate above your thumbs, and you’ll wind up with
a shoulder impingement.”
“Impinge this,” Peter said, flashing me his middle finger.
I ignored him and went to the small pantry and fridge I’d
had installed in the room. I personally hated eating healthy, but
I’d learned I had to at least force down powdered supplements
if I didn’t want to feel like shit all the time. I mixed up my
chalky tasting cocktail and gulped it down, wincing when I
was finished.
Something about the complete exhaustion and exertion
from lifting heavy weights always seemed to clear my head.
Within ten minutes, I was already dripping sweat. I let the
barbell drop from my hands and clatter to the ground.
Movement at the window caught my eye. I walked over to
get a closer look. The green Gardening Gnome van was
parked out front. What caught my eye was that the crew
wasn’t all male like usual. There was a woman with hair the
color of an orange construction cone. I squinted. She was far
away, but I thought I could tell from the way she moved that
she was attractive, even with the bizarre hair.
I shook my head. Usually, lifting cleared my thoughts. I
might as well have been sitting on some serene mountaintop
chanting om.
Usually.
For some reason, my thoughts were far from clear. I kept
finding myself drawn back to the window where I watched the
woman approach the long row of hedges that led all the way
down the driveway and up to the front of the house. She spent
almost a full minute kneeling, tilting her head, and holding her
hands up like she was trying to visualize a picture before she
even picked up her shears.
When she finally started working, she was literally cutting
one leaf at a time. All I could do was stand at the window and
watch. She’d cut a leaf, step back, apparently spend a full
minute thinking and visualizing again, then cut another leaf. It
was like watching somebody try to mow a golf course with a
pair of scissors.
After close to five minutes, I finally peeled myself away
from the window and went back to my workout.
Peter was watching me with knowing eyes from the bench
where he sat, dripping sweat. “Bird watching?”
“Yeah. You know me.”
“I do. And knowing you, if you saw a bird out the window,
you’d probably be looking for a gun so you could shoot it out
of the sky.”
I held up a finger. “Hey, now. I’m not a cold-blooded
killer. I enjoy hunting, but I only hunt game that is in season,
and I only hunt what—”
“I know. I know. You only hunt what you plan to eat and
use. I just like seeing you get all pissy.”
 I wanted to roll my eyes, but I knew that would only add to
his enjoyment. Instead, I picked up the barbell again and
pictured Peter’s face on the ground every time I dropped it to
the mats between sets.
I kept finding myself taking my rests near the window, just
watching the gardener with hair like fire. She was clearly out
of her mind, but that only seemed to make me more interested.
I tried to dig through my own thoughts and decide why I felt
so suddenly ready to step away from my hiatus on
relationships. A string of bad breakups last year led to me
swearing off dating for a while. I was sure if I weren’t
currently drenched in sweat and exhausted, I wouldn’t have
such a hard time remembering that. Hell, I couldn’t even see
her well enough to know what she looked like, so why did she
have me so distracted?
Because I was an idiot. That seemed like the only
reasonable explanation. I’d learned time and time again that
relationships and I did not work out. I was apparently a picky
bastard, and I was tired of wasting time putting people through
a series of tests I knew they couldn’t hope to pass.
“Thought so,” Peter said. He had walked up beside me at
the window and followed my gaze. “I’ve never seen a bird
quite like that.”
“Yeah, me either,” I said distractedly.
Peter laughed. “Damn. Is it that serious?”
“Hardly. Just looking.”
Peter punched my arm. “In all seriousness, I think a
woman would be good for you. This whole thing you’ve been
unofficially doing isn’t natural.”
“I don’t know what thing you’re talking about.”
“You haven’t admitted it, but it’s pretty obvious. I haven’t
seen you flirt with or so much as look twice at an attractive
woman since… what was her name?”
I sighed. Peter and I usually had a kind of understanding. I
didn’t ask him uncomfortable questions, and he didn’t ask me
any. So why was he trying to dig through my dirty laundry?
“Is this why you really came here? Like some kind of
intervention?”
“You really do have a talent for seeing straight through
people. I have to admit, I’m envious of it. Sometimes I feel
like I can’t even tell if I know what Violet is thinking when
she comes out and tells me herself.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a mixed blessing. Sometimes you’d rather
not know what people are really thinking.”
“Is that it? Women are hurting your feelings?”
I laughed. “No. I wanted to uncomplicate my life. Women
were a pretty big complication.”
He gave me a skeptical look. “And how long do you plan
on living the simple life, exactly?”
“Is there a magical answer I can give here to end the
interrogation?” I walked away from him to the barbell and
yanked it up again.
Once I was done, Peter was still watching me. The bastard
wasn’t going to give it up.
“I got tired of looking for something I was never going to
find, okay?” I snapped.
“Elaborate.”
“Fuck you. How’s that?”
Peter smiled. “It’s good, probably. It sounds like somebody
has a lot of pent up anger. Anything else you want to get off
your chest?”
“Those new sunglasses you got a few months ago? They
make you look like a douchebag.”
Peter frowned. “Okay, that was more personal than I was
expecting. It’s also hurtful.”
I couldn’t help smirking. “Good.”
Peter gestured toward the window. “You could go talk to
her. Finding the right person isn’t supposed to be easy. Maybe
it’ll take you five more years or fifty, but you sure as hell
aren’t going to find her by glaring out a window and slamming
heavy weights against the ground.”
“If I talk to her, will you leave me alone about it?”
“Probably not. I’ve got a wife now and a stepdaughter.
Maybe I’m starting to realize my job as your brother is more
than just writing books and letting you take your agent’s cut
out of my big ass royalty checks.” He reached out and
squeezed my shoulder with a rare, empathetic look on his face.
“I wouldn’t mind seeing my brother happy again. That’s all.”
 3

NELL

W e arrived at the house before the sun rose. Even in the

darkness of early morning, it was clearly the home of
somebody who was incredibly wealthy. We had been let in
through an ornate gate, driven up a winding, perfectly
manicured path, and ended up in front of a classical style
mansion. It was impossible to look at the place and not
imagine being transported back to some Gatsby-era world,
where well-dressed men and women in huge, stiff dresses
wore travel hats and spent their evenings dancing outside on
crisp, cool grass.
The only slight bummer was that my uniform made it hard
to enjoy the daydream. In my little fantasy, I wouldn’t be
wearing a loose-fitting jumpsuit with a “Gardening Gnome”
logo on the front, complete with a picture of a winking gnome
who was flashing a chubby-fingered thumbs up.
I could also see why it was going to take an entire team of
gardeners to work the property. It sat on top of a softly sloping
hill, which gave an unhindered view of what had to be acres of
land. There were never-ending rows of lush, green bushes,
flowers of every variety, statues, and even several huge hedges
that I imagined were going to become my canvas soon.
Davey did the egg-cracking move on my head this time.
“You okay in there? They’re just plants. And the client is just a
mega-millionaire who could ruin all of our lives.” He added
the last with a touch of sarcasm, but I wasn’t entirely
convinced he was kidding. Just beneath the humor, I knew he
was nervous. For both of us.
 “Try to loosen up,” Davey said. “If you go sculpting
bushes all tight like that, you’ll end up making the world’s
biggest, greenest penis or something.”
I laughed. “For somebody who claims to be straight, you
always seem to bring conversations around to penises.”
“I can admire the hardware without wanting to put it in my
mouth.”
I squinted at him. “I don’t even know what to say to that.”
The driver of the van got out and opened the double doors
at the back. The men we rode with all grabbed their tools and
hopped out of the van to set off in different directions across
the property.
Davey pointed to a row of hedges that must’ve been a
hundred yards long. “Just square up that row of hedges until
the client comes and tells us what he wants done with the big
centerpiece bushes, okay?”
“He’ll come out himself?”
“He’s not a vampire. He’s just a rich guy. So, yeah, he
usually comes out himself.”
I started working on the hedges but couldn’t shake the silly
image of a vampire dwelling inside the huge house. I imagined
the prototypical Victorian-era hunk, and then I blasted him
with a heavy dose of vampire, stylish hair and clothes, and
then a vampire-worthy bulge between his legs.
Once I was satisfied with my mental image, I let the
fantasy play out. He’d emerge from his coffin and find me
trimming his bushes. I grinned a little at that because I was
about as mature as a seven-year-old sometimes. He would
recognize me as the down-trodden treasure I was—sarcasm
included—and my vampire man would decide I was far too
precious to be outside doing manual labor. He’d sweep me out
of the disappointment my life was quickly turning into. He’d
also be nothing like he-who-shall-not-be-named, my ex. I was
enjoying the daydream, and my stupid ex wasn’t going to ruin
it.
 I’d like to say my fantasy took several girly, very
wholesome turns past that point, like finding love and
happiness. Instead, it just got pervy, and I explored the many
ways a vampire’s superhuman strength and speed would be
fun in the bedroom.
“Does it always take you this long to trim a bush?” a man
asked from behind me. From the tone of his voice, he was far
from pleased.
I had a bad habit of getting lost in my head, as in, really
lost. A quick glance at the sky told me I’d been zoning out for
at least an hour if the rising sun was any indication.
I looked at the bush I’d been working on. I could vaguely
remember trimming it one leaf at a time to get the edge
absolutely straight. The one or two feet worth of bush I’d
managed to trim did look good, but at this speed, it would take
days to finish the job.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s my first day. I like to really get to…” I
trailed off when I turned around and saw who I was talking to.
I’d been expecting one of the guys from the truck. Instead, I
thought I saw my vampire. He was missing the silly details I’d
tacked on, but the base model was there. He was the kind of
hot guy you could play dress up with in your head for hours
and never find a combination that didn’t work. Breathtaking.
Belly clenching. I could practically feel my ovaries start to
rumble like two old, unused machines purring to life.
Calm down, old girls. If my life were a racecar, it would be
scraped across the wall of the track, burping out black smoke,
and about to erupt in flames. The last thing I needed to think
about was hitting the gas and trying to take another lap.
Still, my hormones didn’t seem to care about any of that.
My not-a-vampire was wearing a button-down shirt in the way
hot guys seemed to have a patent on—a single button undone
to give just a tantalizing hint of his chest. And if forearms
were the male equivalent of cleavage, this guy’s rolled-up
sleeves were like cleavage to drool over. No sleavage, and yes,
sleavage is a thing. Note to self: coin the term, “sleavage”
later and make millions.
 I tried to move my eyes around until I found some part of
him I could look at without feeling like I was gawking. I
eventually settled on a spot a few inches above the top of his
head, because even his ears were hot.
“Hi,” I said. Look casual. Collected. Act like the little
people inside your head aren’t running around in a panic
while alarms are blaring. I decided to go for the lean move.
People always looked more comfortable and confident when
they leaned on something. Unfortunately, the something I
decided to lean my elbow on was a bush.
My elbow sank right into the bush, and the rest of me
followed closely behind. In a scratchy, confusing second, I
was completely horizontal. I’d fallen through in a way that
made it look like someone had shot me from a bow and arrow,
but only my head made it through to the other side. The rest of
my body, except my feet, was completely jammed into the
thing.
I could hear muffled laughter from the other side.
“You know,” I said loudly enough that I hoped he could
hear me. “Maybe you should just push my legs all the way
through. I’ll run away, and we can both pretend this never
happened.”
The bush shuddered, and I felt strong hands take me gently
by the shoulders and pull me back through. It was a little bit of
a scratchy trip, but I was back on my feet a few seconds later.
“Or that,” I said. I cleared my throat. Despite my best
efforts, I looked up at his face again.
His eyes were practically twinkling. They were a
mesmerizing shade of brown. Light with little flecks of gold
that caught the rising sunlight and shot it back at me. “In one
hour, you’ve managed to trim about twenty leaves and put a
gaping hole in one of my hedges. Remind me why I’m paying
you?” he asked.
I opened my mouth and couldn’t think of any real grounds
to disagree with him. “That’s an unfortunately accurate
summary. I promise I’m a fast learner.”
 “I see. And you’re the one who is supposed to be creating
the centerpiece sculptures, too?”
“Yes?”
He let out a breath. Was that an annoyed breath, or just the
kind of breath you used to flush the carbon dioxide from your
system? God, he was terrifyingly handsome, too. One moment,
he looked approachable and kind. The next, the heat in his
eyes made me want to dive back into the bush and hide.
“Well,” he said. “I guess there are worse first impressions
than shoving your head into my bush. Probably, at least.”
I felt my composure threatening to crack. His face was
completely straight, but I could’ve sworn he was teasing me. I
also had to remember this was almost surely the rich guy. The
one who owned everything I was looking at and the one who
could end my budding career as a bush sculptor before it
started.
“It was a joke,” he said. “You can laugh.”
Unfortunately, all my nerves bubbled out in a shrill cackle.
His eyebrows crept up.
I swallowed hard, then laughed again, more normally this
time. I couldn’t help shaking my head at myself when I
replayed the last few seconds and thought about how crazy I
must already seem.
I expected him to be cringing back from me, but he was
just watching me with a thoughtful expression. “You’re sure
you’ve done this before?”
“Yep,” I said through a tight throat. “Trust me, this will not
be the first bush I’ve trimmed. Not by a long shot.”
His lips twitched into a smile. “Is that so?”
“Plant bush,” I corrected. “You thought I meant—” I
forced myself to take a deep breath and slow down. “I’ve done
this sort of work before. I was only going so slow because I
get very personally invested in doing a good job.”
 “Oh, I’m sure you’re very thorough. I always admire
somebody willing to throw themselves into their work.”
I bit my lip but still couldn’t help smiling. He had to be
doing that on purpose. On the surface, he seemed irritated by
me. Just beneath that, I thought I could sense amusement.
This time, he smirked back, but it wasn’t an entirely easy
smirk. It was the kind of expression that said, I’m enjoying this
conversation, but I’m also still considering whether I’ll
destroy you when it’s finished.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He was bending his neck down
to get a better look at me since he was so damn tall.
“Totally,” I said quickly. “I was just trying to remember if
you already told me your name.”
“Harry,” he said. “Harry Barnidge.”
I suppressed the urge to wiggle my eyebrows fancily. It
was a very fancy name, and bit by bit, he was fitting into my
fantasy. “I’m Nell.”
“Just Nell?”
I shrugged. “I mean, I have a last name. It’s just kind of an
unfortunate one because my parents had a terrible sense of
humor.”
He waited in complete silence. It only took a few seconds
of the building pressure to make me crack.
“My last name is Snell.”
Harry tried and failed to hold back a snort of laughter. It
was the first time I’d seen him laugh, and the first definitive
sign that he was at least a little human. “Nell Snell. That’s
unique.”
“You don’t have to try to be nice about it. Trust me, I know
how stupid it is.”
“Do you plan on marrying someday?”
It felt like someone grabbed me by the lungs and squeezed.
I must have looked as confused as I felt because Harry shook
his head.
 “Sorry. I meant because you’d get a new last name. I
wasn’t—” He lowered his eyes and smiled. It wasn’t exactly a
shy gesture, but it was another dose of human for the man I’d
been starting to suspect had a stick up his ass. For that flicker
of a moment, I could see there was a regular guy underneath
the distracting packaging and the serious eyes.
“Right,” I said quickly. I was desperate to change the
subject, so I glanced toward his house and said the first thing
that came to mind. “So, what do you do for a living, if you
don’t mind me asking? This is quite the place.”
“I’m a literary agent. My brother is an author, Peter
Barnidge.”
“Oh, wow. I’ve seen him on TV a few times.”
“Yeah. It’s a necessary evil.”
I felt more than a little star struck. Harry was talking about
his brother appearing on national TV shows like it was as
ordinary as getting a haircut. Coincidentally, my life started to
feel aggressively dull by comparison. This was a man from a
completely different world than me. Harry had the money and
resources to have anything he could possibly want. To go
anywhere he wanted. Thinking about it was making my head
start to hurt, so I decided to steer the conversation back to my
world—to the mundane. “So, they said you’d tell me what you
wanted me to sculpt out of those big bushes?”
“Right.”
I was surprised to see Harry looked slightly put off by the
way I’d changed the subject. It was almost like he had wanted
to continue making small talk with me.
“I was thinking something kind of humorous,” he said.
“We’re throwing a release party for a pair of my authors who
are known for their thrillers. Their thing is kind of adding in a
heavy dose of comedy, though.” Harry stared at one of the
bushes and thought for a few moments. “I don’t know, a
penguin building a snowman? Just something goofy like that
would probably be fitting.”
 I looked at the single, towering structure of the bush I was
expected to use as my canvas. I was hoping I’d be asked to
sculpt something a little more basic. Like maybe a square?
“Is that a problem?” Harry asked. “You’ve got this sort of
look on your face right now.”
“Oh, no. You say fall, I’ll say how hard,” I cleared my
throat. Jump. The expression was about jumping, not falling.
“It’s just that I take my art pretty seriously. I’m trying to
visualize the piece right now. You know, feel it. I’ve got to
find the energy.” I had to try very hard not to look at Harry. I
knew I was neck deep in bullshit and still shoveling, but if he
saw my face, he’d know too.
“I see. Does the penguin idea conflict with your, what was
it? Artistic energy? We could make it something else.”
“It’s fine. It’ll be great.”
“Well, I’m excited to see what you come up with.”
Once Harry left, I amended my little fantasy. I couldn’t be
the demure damsel who laughed softly and shocked vampire
Harry with her wit anymore. Clearly, any wit I might have had
dried up and died when I was around him. The only way to
continue to enjoy my little ongoing fantasy was to add the fact
that I’d suffered some kind of trauma in my youth.
Unfortunately, it had left imaginary me completely mute.
I wanted to curl into a ball and give up on life when I
thought back on the conversation I’d had with him. Was I a
little odd at times? Yes. Was I as crazy as I must have seemed?
No way.
I decided the only thing I could do to redeem myself was
nail this penguin and his snowman. Figuratively speaking, of
course. On the other hand, I hadn’t even decided what my true
motivations were for wanting to impress Harry. The man
might look like he belonged in a pair of pristine white pants
and topless on the back of a horse, but I couldn’t quite read
him.
I decided to stop worrying about the guy and focus on the
job. At the end of the day, I was just a sculpture. A bush
sculpture. How hard could it be?
 4

HARRY

I ’d always had a thing for boats, even when the nicest one I
could afford was rusted through and barely big enough to
hold a cooler. More often than not, I missed the days when my
brother and I would head out to the lake after school in our
shitty little boat to catch some fish. I missed when things were
simple—when my biggest concern was how long it was until
deer season or how I’d manage to fit in some fishing over the
weekend between football games.
Right now, I was fitting fishing in between a release party
and my overwhelming temptation to find my way back to the
garden and talk to Nell again before she was out of my life—
maybe for good.
I leaned back and let the sun sink into my skin. I tried to
put everything from my head and go back to those simple days
when I was younger, but I just couldn’t do it. I’d done what
everybody tries so hard to do: I’d “made it.” I got to worry
about the kind of things everybody thought they wanted to
worry about. I worried about which accountants could handle
my money best. I worried about whether “my money was
working for me,” as the saying went. The most fun was
worrying about what every new person in my life’s angle was.
Everybody had an angle. That was a lesson I learned really
early on once the money started rolling in.
But I coped. I had my ways. Today, it was being out on the
boat and my early morning workout—even if the addition of
my brother had been unexpected and somewhat irritating. Both
experiences were also filled with visions of the orange-haired
girl in the garden. During my workout, I had barely been able
to stop staring out the window at her. Now I could hardly form
a thought without circling back to her—imagining how her
lips had looked so inviting when they spread into that crooked
grin of hers. I only wished I knew if my quickly growing
obsession was real, or if my brother had managed to
artificially implant it in my brain with his comments in the
gym.
I let the sound of the water lapping against my small,
single-engine boat draw me out of my thoughts. I listened to
the chirp of insects along the water and the rustle of wind
against the trees. With my eyes closed, I could let those
familiar sounds take me back to all the times I’d been on the
water before, to the times when it felt like my mind was right.
Today, it wasn’t enough. Even a perfect, serene day like
today couldn’t compete with the buzzing background noise of
Nell. Half of me was sure she’d turn out to be like all the other
women. The other half of me wanted to believe my instinct
that there was something different about her. I nearly turned
the boat around right there and just got it over with, but I still
had to handle my brother’s conference call in a few minutes.
Taking things farther with her would be a mistake, anyway.
I knew how that story ended before I even opened the book.
“You with me?” Peter asked.
I stirred a little, then glared. My brother knew the fishing
code. He was supposed to respect the silence of the moment,
especially when I was obviously deep in thought. Fishing had
never really been a passion of his, even if he wouldn’t admit it.
Peter was even grouchier than I was, so owning up to the fact
that he just came out on the boat for an excuse to enjoy some
brotherly bonding would’ve been too much for him. I let him
keep his little secret.
He was sitting across from me on the only other spare strip
of wood to sit on in the small boat. He looked out of place in
the simple fishing button-down and khaki’s I’d let him borrow.
Unlike me, Peter didn’t seem to be a different person
depending on the situation. He was always Peter. Always
contemplative, a little grumpy, and intelligent. You could’ve
put him in full camouflage and still marked him as an author
from thirty paces away.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”
Peter glared right back. Ever since he’d met Violet a
couple months back, he’d softened a bit. Good for him, but he
could still go screw himself. “They are going to call in a
couple minutes, and you probably want to be conscious when
they do. No, let me rephrase. As my agent, I definitely want
you to be conscious when they call because you’re supposed
to be getting me a better deal. And you promised coming out
on the boat right now wouldn’t screw it up.”
“I’m good. I was just thinking.”
“Yeah, I know you were thinking. You were brooding so
hard I could practically feel the boat vibrate.”
“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t vibrate when I brood.”
“What has you brooding this time?”
“Is this going to be a new thing? Because I’ll change the
locks if it is.”
“Until you stop looking so miserable when you think
nobody is looking? Maybe it is. And I’ll break your fucking
windows if you change the locks, so go ahead.”
I smirked. “Look. I appreciate that you’re looking out for
me. I do, even if it’s weird. I just… I went on autopilot for a
long time, and I guess when I finally stopped and looked
around, I wasn’t sure I liked where I ended up.”
Peter nodded seriously. “You thinking about stepping away
from being an agent?”
“No. I enjoy the work. I enjoy my hobbies. Something’s
missing, though.”
“Yeah, a woman.”
I immediately pictured Nell. I’d done this to myself. By
avoiding dating for over a year, I should’ve known when I
finally wanted to jump back into a relationship, I’d fall
dangerously hard.
“Did you ever have issues with women and your money?”
I asked suddenly.
“What, like gold diggers? Sure.”
“I was thinking more like people changing once they got a
taste of it. I don’t think most people are mentally ready to have
more money at their disposal than they know what to do with.
It breaks them.”
Peter grinned. “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”
“No. Think about it. How many times did you meet
someone who completely changed once they got a taste of
your money? Or how many people have we known who
became unbearable once they got their hands on some of their
own?”
Peter shrugged. “Quite a few, I guess.”
“Exactly. And how many people would still wake up and
go to work every day if they didn’t need the money?”
“Not many, probably.”
“Yeah. Money is the carrot on the end of the stick. It
makes a long work week feel like it was a valuable use of
time. It makes taking shitty jobs more bearable because you’re
getting something you need out of it. But once you unplug
from the system? You immediately alienate yourself from
everybody who is still plugged in. How is somebody working
sixty hours a week going to relate to any of your problems if
you’ve got tens of millions in the bank?”
“And this ties back to your problems with women? Just
date women who already have money. Problem solved.”
“But it doesn’t. I don’t fit in with all these people. Not
really. I need somebody real. Just a normal person, but if it
gets serious with a woman like that, the money ruins them.”
“Don’t give them money, maybe?”
 “What happens if I get married? And how long am I
supposed to expect girlfriends to suffer financially while
knowing I could solve all their problems with the stroke of a
pen? It’s not that easy.”
Peter sighed. “Obviously you’ve thought about this a lot
because you’ve got a thousand reasons to keep being
miserable. Let me be an author for a second here and ask you a
metaphorical question: If you were stuck in a hole and you
knew there was almost positively no way to get out, and no
help was coming, what would you rather do? Would you rather
sit down and wait to die, or would you rather spend your last
days trying everything you could to get out?”
“It pisses me off when you make good points. Even
metaphorical ones.” I thought about Nell again. The truth was
I wanted to try, even if I was almost sure it wouldn’t work. I
wanted to fight for it to work because my gut told me she was
worth a fight, as crazy as that sounded. I’d barely spoken to
her. For all I knew she could belong to some crazy extremist
group. Worse, she could be a vegan.
The only thing I knew was that my pulse spiked when I
remembered her face, from the exotic angle of her eyes to the
way her mouth moved—almost crooked and always with a
playful expression, turned up at the corners looking
mischievous.
My phone rang, snapping me back to the moment. I
answered it on speaker phone.
“Harry and Peter here,” I said.
We exchanged formalities for a few minutes before getting
to the part where Peter’s publisher tried to low-ball us on their
offer for his newest book.
I absently set my hook with some fresh bait and tossed it
back into the water. “This is what’s going to happen. I’m
hanging up the phone. You all can take a few minutes to think
about whether you really want to motivate us to call around
and see what another publisher would be willing to pay. Then
you call us back and make a respectable offer. If we don’t like
it, we’re walking.” I hung up the phone.
 Peter raised his eyebrows. “Do you always have to be such
an ass to the people we’re trying to get to pay me?”
“It’s negotiating. I doubt we’d actually get a better offer
anywhere else, though.”
“And what if they just tell us to go screw ourselves?”
“Then it’ll turn out that you shouldn’t have trusted your
brother to be your agent. But they won’t. We have something
they want. They’ve already told us what they’re willing to pay.
Offending them isn’t going to change their mind.”
The phone rang again just a minute later. Once we listened
to the slightly improved offer, I spread my hands at Peter and
gave him my best shit-eating-grin.
After we’d wrapped up the call, I felt the usual, warm glow
of nailing a deal. In a way, negotiating was an addiction for
me.
“There’s a real smile,” Peter said. “I just wonder if it’s
from getting the deal, or because you’re imagining giving this
orange-haired girl the business.”
I kicked his leg and laughed. “Can I have my normal big
brother back? The one who is too interested in himself to
notice if I’m on fire?”
Peter punched my shoulder. “You mean go back to
pretending I don’t keep an eye on you? Sure. For now. And
good job with the contract, by the way.”
“Yeah, well, I’m on a constant mission to prove I don’t
work for you just because I’m your brother. I work for you
because you couldn’t find anyone better if you tried.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Yeah, now if you don’t mind, I’ve got to turn this boat
around to take care of something.”
Peter gave me a sly look. “I’m glad my pep talk worked.
And you also realized you were going to lose our bet over who
brought home the most fish.”
I looked over at Peter. “How many fish have you caught?”
 He scrunched up his eyebrows. “None. We just got here.”
“Just making sure.” I gave my line a little twitch and
immediately felt the tug of a fish biting. After a few moments
of pulling my line in, I lifted a nice-sized sheepshead out of
the water. “I win,” I said.
Peter made an annoyed sound and dropped his tackle box
to the bottom of the boat.
As much as I hated taking advice from anyone, especially
Peter, I had to admit he had some decent points. Based on the
few minutes I’d spoken to Nell; I couldn’t possibly know if we
would be a good fit. All I knew was I liked how I felt when I
talked to her, and I wanted a little more of it. For once, I just
needed to stop trying to think about what was going to happen
down the line. I needed to enjoy the moment, and at this
particular moment, I wanted to see the gardener girl again.

The sun was out, but it had turned out to be a pleasantly cool
day. I could see gardeners all over the property as I headed
toward the large bushes where Nell should’ve been working.
I’d only stopped in the house long enough to shower and get
changed before going out to find her.
I paused when I saw her bush.
It was… interesting.
Nell was on a small ladder with a pair of garden shears
while she made adjustments to what I had to assume was
supposed to be the penguin.
“Wow,” I said.
Nell turned. She apparently forgot she was standing on a
small ladder, because the movement immediately sent her
toppling backward, bringing the ladder with her. If I hadn’t
steadied the ladder myself, the whole thing—Nell included—
would’ve crashed to the ground.
“Thank you,” she said once it was steady. “You scared the
crap out of me. I mean, not literally. I’m potty trained.” Nell’s
cheeks started to burn a bright red, and she was staring into the
distance, almost like she had stepped into an alternate universe
where she had to re-live the last few seconds for an eternity.
“That’s good. But if you weren’t, I guess it wouldn’t be so
bad, considering your line of work. Human waste makes great
fertilizer.”
The sun had risen since our first conversation, and it
seemed like I was fully seeing her for the first time now. The
afternoon light made her orange hair glow like actual fire,
which made for a shocking contrast between her dark
eyebrows and blue eyes. There was a patch of freckles I hadn’t
noticed across her delicate, sloped nose, too. Tiny beads of
sweat formed there, still small enough that they seemed to
defy gravity as they clung to her soft skin.
“I really—” she cleared her throat and deepened her voice.
“I think maybe it would be best if I just communicated with
you through hand gestures from now on. Every time I open my
mouth, it’s like I’m trying to convince you I’m a bumbling
idiot.”
I thought about that. I could see why she must’ve felt that
way. From the green monstrosity that was towering behind us
to the way she’d fallen in the bush earlier, I guess I normally
would have considered her to be too much of a mess. So why
did none of that seem to bother me? “No,” I said after a few
moments. “I don’t think you’re an idiot.”
She bit her lip as she descended the ladder and turned to
face me. Then she made a kind of upward brushing motion on
her chest.
I narrowed my eyes. “Is that sign language?”
She nodded.
“I see. If you’re a sign language expert, can you tell me
how to say, ‘is that bush supposed to look like a giant cock and
balls?’”
Nell’s eyes widened in horror as she looked at her work.
The “penguin” was nothing but a tall, cylindrical shaft so far.
It looked like she had tried to show where its neck was, but the
head was slightly larger than the rest of the shaft, which made
it look like she’d actually tried to sculpt the rim of a penis.
Then there was the snowman I’d asked for the penguin to be
building. I guessed it was supposed to be at the point of
construction where nothing but the bottom-most section had
been set down, and the middle ball was being shaped. Except
both balls were conveniently set at the “feet” of the penguin.
In other words, the giant penis also had two lopsided balls.
“Well, this is just the part where I kind of do the outlines. I
really wouldn’t put much…” she trailed off and put her hands
on her hips. I absently wondered how small and fragile she’d
feel if those were my hands there—if I was lifting her to sit her
on my bed. “Okay. Yeah. It looks like a big penis.”
“I’d say this is sort of like a Freudian slip on your part, but
I think those are supposed to be small. I’ve never seen one this
big.”
“That’s disappointing to hear.” Nell clapped a hand to her
mouth, and her eyes bulged.
I chuckled in surprise. I hadn’t seen that coming from the
woman. She seemed cripplingly self-conscious at first, but the
more I spoke to her, the more I saw there was an unquenchable
flame inside her. What interested me was how her lack of
confidence managed to coexist with what seemed to be an
unstoppable force of will. “You’re more dangerous than you
look.”
Nell’s cheeks were bright red. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know
where that came from. But no, I’m not usually dangerous.
Unless you’re a big bush whose deepest, darkest fear is being
turned into a giant penis and balls, at least.”
“And what if I’m a man who wasn’t planning on becoming
infatuated with a gardener?”
Nell smiled with what I was coming to realize was her
trademark lip bite accompaniment.
“Well,” she said carefully. “I’d be curious to know what
would be so bad if you became infatuated with a gardener? Is
there something wrong with her?”
 I eyed the bush penis and balls with a grin. “Probably.
Yes.”
“Did you consider that the gardener girl may not welcome
your infatuation?”
I studied the way she was watching me with that lopsided
smile of hers. “No. I’m fairly sure it would be mutual.”
“You’re certainly a cocky one, aren’t you?”
“Considering the evidence at hand,” I said, gesturing to the
bush. “Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to call me
cocky?”
Nell laughed. “Do you normally flirt with your hired help?
Is this some kind of rich guy ritual, I mean? Like you all
gather around campfire’s fueled by dollar bills and talk about
the housemaids you’ve deflowered?”
“Almost. We usually use hundred-dollar bills.”
“Funny. But you’re dodging my question.”
“No. Believe it or not, I don’t make a habit of flirting with
anyone—hired help or otherwise. I kind of swore off
relationships a year back. Every woman I dated just left me
feeling more and more empty. Before long—” I cleared my
throat and lowered my eyes. “And I also don’t know why I’m
telling you all this.” Since when did I ramble on and open up
in front of people I barely knew? There was just something
about Nell’s wide, inviting eyes and easy smiles that made it
feel all too natural to get comfortable.
Nell licked her lips. “I just got out of a bad relationship a
couple months ago. I also make this kind of snorting, choking
noise that’s really gross when I laugh too hard.” She paused,
probably noting the confused look on my face. “I’m making us
even. You gave me a slightly compromising bit of information,
so I didn’t want you to feel like you were out on the ledge
alone.”
I found myself smiling. “What’s the catch with you?” I
asked.
“Pardon?”
 “Forget I said anything.” Inwardly, I was still smiling. I
couldn’t tell her what I was thinking without making myself
look strange. I just didn’t understand how somebody like Nell
could practically fall into my lap like she had. For years, I’d
desperately tried to manufacture a spark between myself and
dozens of women. I had begun to believe that love and
infatuation were myths—just wishful thinking on the part of
desperate men and women who were tired of being alone.
Love, I had decided, was a delusion. It was nothing more than
a mental trick to cope with the lie we’d all been fed by books
and movies.
Except Nell was making me question everything I’d
believed. With nothing but a few coy smiles and a handful of
looks from those sparkling eyes, she’d lit something in me that
was exciting and frightening. There was certainly nothing
manufactured about the feelings she was stirring up inside me.
“Hmm,” Nell said. “Forget you said anything? That’s
usually the kind of request people make when they realize the
truth is too juicy to share.”
“Nah.” I found myself shifting uncomfortably and rubbing
the back of my neck. Obviously, she was completely right in
this case. Except the juicy truth would probably creep her out.
Normal, functioning adults didn’t start falling this hard, and
this fast for somebody they just met. And if they did, they
definitely didn’t talk about it.
Nell looked skeptical, as she probably should.
I needed to say something or the awkwardly thick air
between us was going to become suffocating. “There’s going
to be a party here. Tonight,” I said. “You should come. You
could be there to see how everyone likes your huge cock and
balls.”
Nell laughed. She had a hearty, genuine kind of laugh that
made me like her even more. She seemed like the kind of
person who was easily amused but in the best kind of way. “If
you don’t stop teasing me about it, I’m going to actually try to
make this thing look like a penis.”
 I squinted at it. “If this is you trying not to make it look
like a penis. I’m wondering what it would look like if you put
your mind to it.”
Nell crossed her arms. “Assuming I am considering your
offer of coming to this party, what would I need to wear?”
“A dress. It’ll be a black tie for the men kind of event.
Something fancy.”
“Okay. I can do that.”
I bottled up the excitement I felt inside. For all my worries
about whether I was making the right choice by coming back
to talk to her, I hadn’t even stopped to wonder what would
happen if Nell hadn’t welcomed my interest. Thankfully, it
seemed like I wasn’t going to need to worry about it, and the
realization made me want to fist pump. Instead, I smiled as
calmly as I could. “Perfect. I’ll see you tonight, then?”
“Normally, I don’t really do stuff like this. But for once…
sure. Why not?”
“Here’s my number,” I said, fishing out one of my business
cards. “That’s a direct line to my cell. If you text me your
address, I can have you picked up and brought here.”
She looked a little skeptically at the card. “Provide me
with a ride, huh?”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that I’ll be stuck here
making arrangements for the party and can’t slip away to give
you a ride. I was trying not to presume you had reliable
transportation is all.”
“My transportation is extremely reliable, thank you very
much.”
I grimaced. I could see that I’d annoyed her. In my head, it
had seemed better than asking if she had a car or money for a
cab. “I’m sure it is. I hope you’re still planning on coming
tonight. It would really be a shame if the dick sculptor weren’t
here to represent her work.”
“The dick sculptor? I actually prefer the title of
cockitecht.”
 “I’ll be sure to get it right when I have the plaque made up.
By the way, were you planning to finish this in time to, uh,
erect the other bushes, or is leaving them un-sculpted also part
of your artistic vision?”
She looked to the two remaining bushes, and I could
clearly read the dread in her eyes. The gardeners were
supposed to be wrapping up in about an hour, and it had taken
her several just to create the one masterpiece. “You read my
mind,” she said quickly. “It’s a message about contrast and
that sort of thing. Behind every great bush, there’s actually a
huge cock and balls.”
“Like a twist on the whole behind every great man is a
great woman?”
“Sure,” she said.
I laughed. “Right. Well, I’ll be looking forward to tonight.”
“I can’t wait.” She half-breathed the sentence, then seemed
to replay it in her mind and winced a little. “Let me rephrase
that in a less pathetic way. I will see you tonight, and I won’t
spend the next few hours thinking about it.”
“That makes one of us.”
She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it
abruptly. She made that same upward brushing gesture from
before on her chest and smiled.
I chuckled. Back to sign language, it seemed. I hadn’t been
kidding when I said I was going to look forward to having her
join me at the party. One minute, I’d been trying to convince
myself the spark I felt was a recipe for an explosion down the
line—and not the good kind. The next, I had practically jogged
across the property to catch her before she left.
When I thought back on it all, it was honestly pathetic. My
resolve to stay away from Nell hadn’t even lasted a full day.
But maybe that was a good sign. Maybe it meant she wasn’t
going to end up like every other woman I’d dated. It was a lot
of “maybe’s,” but I guessed I wouldn’t have to wait that long
to find out.
 5

NELL

D avey looked me over and gave a nod of approval. I was

standing in front of a tall mirror in the apartment he and
I shared. If it were anyone else, the co-ed roommate thing
would’ve been pretty weird. Fortunately, Davey and I wanted
a romantic relationship about as much as a brick to the face.
We lived together because we got along without drama,
and it was cheaper to split the rent than living alone. It was
that simple.
Our place was small. To be more precise, it was so small
that my bedroom had to double as a dining room during the
day so we could designate what should have been the kitchen
as Davey’s bedroom.
I was standing in front of the collection of small mirrors
I’d hung on the wall by the front door. It turned out that a full-
sized mirror cost significantly more than a bunch of small
ones. My general lack of money also meant I didn’t have an
impressive collection of expensive dresses, but I did know my
way around a needle and thread. I’d made a couple subtle
modifications to the dress I was wearing in hopes that it’d look
more expensive and elegant.
“You look very ritzy,” Davey said. “Like a hooker from
Vegas who hasn’t been emptied out by the hard life yet.”
“Ritzy is good. I’m not a fan of the Vegas part. Maybe I
could look like a mysterious, worldly woman who might be
hiding some kind of exciting past? Like I was a Russian spy
who had to kill her partner to protect her own identity?”
 “Umm, no. Not really. You look more like somebody who
would probably rather read a book than go skydiving. The
dress is nice, though.”
I frowned. “Is that skydiving thing supposed to be an
insult? Because, to me, that just sounds like you’re saying I’m
not insane.”
Davey shrugged. “You look great, Nell. I’m sure he’s
going to love it.”
I signed. “Would you actually tell me if I didn’t look
good?”
“No, but I’m a bad liar. You’d see right through me.”
“Well, thank you.” I groaned and flopped myself down on
the couch. I was careful not to mess up my hair, which I’d
spent half an hour trying to get perfect. “Did you see the
penguin I sculpted this morning?”
Davey laughed. “Oh, it was supposed to be a penguin? Did
you start with its crotch and forget to finish the rest?”
I couldn’t even correct him. At the end of the day, I had
accidentally crafted a giant, green penis and balls that were
going to be on display at Harry’s fancy, rich person party
tonight. On top of that, I still wasn’t sure if he was inviting me
because he liked me, or because he thought it’d be fun to laugh
at me in front of his party guests.
That wasn’t entirely fair, I decided. Nothing about Harry
had made me think he would do something cruel. My inner
skeptic was just trying to find a way to prepare myself for the
inevitable let-down. Things like this didn’t happen to me.
Handsome men who had their lives together didn’t just swoop
down from their mansions and invite me into their lives. There
had to be a catch. The only way I could avoid heartbreak was
to keep reminding myself of that fact.
Maybe he had bodies in his basement. Or perhaps those
flickers of some inner black cloud I’d glimpsed through his
eyes were the answer—except the thought of Harry being
somehow damaged only made me feel more drawn to him.
Whatever it was, the idea that he simply liked me felt hard to
grasp. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I was worth liking. In fact, I
was probably my favorite person. Nobody could make eggs as
good as mine, I could tie shoes with one hand, and my shower
singing was absolutely on point. Trivial talents aside, I was
also proud of myself because I still refused to give up, even
when it felt like the universe was desperately trying to tell me
to stop going after my dreams.
But the universe could suck it because I was too stubborn
to quit. I might not exactly know what my goal was or have
any concrete plans to achieving my vague, half-formed
dreams, but that wasn’t going to stop me from trying.
“You know,” I said, still lying on the couch. “It’s not that I
don’t think I’m worth being liked by Harry, but I don’t exactly
get it.”
“So you think he should like you, but you don’t get why he
likes you?”
“I understand how the world works, Davey. There’s a
pecking order to things, especially dating. Everybody has their
invisible score—it’s like some combination of their social
status, personality, and attractiveness get averaged out. A guy
like Harry is at least a ninety-five out of a hundred, and that’s
only because I’m docking five points on the assumption he’s
not as perfect as he seems. Maybe he pees all over the seat
every time he goes to the bathroom or likes cats more than
dogs. Something has to be wrong with him.”
“Something is wrong with him. He has the hots for you.”
I lobbed a pillow at Davey, which he easily dodged.
“Seriously, though,” I continued. “I’m like a seventy out of
a hundred on a good day. Tops.” My job was a shakily held
sham. My bank account was a joke. And I wasn’t exactly the
kind of pretty that had people lining up to plaster my face on
advertisements and beauty products. I was pretty enough for
nice old ladies to stop me and compliment me, but not pretty
enough for hot guys on motorcycles to try to get me to roll
down my window on the road. Then again, my windows didn’t
work so the joke would’ve been on them, anyway.
 “I’d give you at least a seventy-two,” Davey said.
“You’re lucky. I’m out of pillows.”
“Obviously your little system doesn’t work. If these
invisible scores are so important, his is either a lot lower than
you’re thinking, or yours is higher. What matters is a guy isn’t
going to invite his gardener to a fancy party at his house unless
he’s interested. Stop trying to figure it out and just accept it.”
“Yeah, well, after the mess with Chuck, I guess I want to
make sure I really get what a guy wants and expects out of a
relationship before I commit.” Looking back, I kept thinking I
would’ve seen more warning signs with him if I’d just been
paying closer attention. So, Davey could make fun of me if he
wanted, but I wasn’t planning on making the same mistakes
twice. My time was too important to me to waste it on another
jealous, manipulative scumbag masquerading as a good guy.
Davey nodded slowly. “I get it. I’m not saying you should
rush into anything. I’m just trying to say that emotions don’t
always have a good, logical explanation. Maybe your number
system is right, and maybe he is way out of your league, but he
likes you anyway. Are you going to turn him down just
because it doesn’t make sense to you?”
I sighed. “No. And you’re making a good point. I’ll… try
to stop thinking about it so much, but I can’t promise anything.
Mental diarrhea is kind of my thing.”
“Maybe we should talk about something else. Get your
mind off this guy for a little bit.”
“You know,” I said suddenly. “I’ve always wondered why
restaurants don’t give you scissors when they serve spaghetti. I
mean, you could spend all day twirling your fork, or you could
just take a quick snip and get the perfect bite.”
“I changed my mind. Let’s go back to talking about
Harry.”
I laughed. “What more is there to say?”
“How about how you managed to be so absolutely horrible
at bush sculpting that you ‘accidentally’ made a huge ding
dong out of his bush?”
 “A better question is why anyone asks to have their bush
turned into a penguin building a snowman, anyway? It’s like
he was begging me to make it phallic.”
“Oh, sure. I wouldn’t ask anyone to sculpt that unless what
I actually wanted was some cock and balls.”
“Maybe that is what you really want,” I suggested.
“I have nothing against cock and balls, but I prefer the soft
touch of a woman, Nell.”
I smirked. “Then we need to find you one. Maybe if you
could forget to be so shy for a few hours, I could help set you
up.”
“I’m not shy when it comes to dating, I’m practical. Look
at me. I’m not exactly the prototype of a sexy guy. Obviously,
I’ve got a great personality, a killer sense of humor, and an
amazingly low center of gravity that makes it hard to knock
me down, but let’s be real, none of those traits are headline
material for Tinder.”
“Oh, come on. You’re perfectly datable.”
Davey scoffed. “What would you rather eat, a perfectly
edible apple, or a scandalously delicious dessert?”
I grinned at him. “Is that what you want to be, Davey?
Scandalously delicious? Maybe we could get you some assless
chaps, then.”
He laughed. “Scandalous, yes. That would be. Delicious?
No. Not unless you were starving for some shame and regret.
You, on the other hand, are very datable. You need to stop
trying to convince yourself it doesn’t make sense for him to
ask you out.”
“I don’t even know if this is a date. He just asked me to
come to the party.” I mockingly batted my eyelashes and
struck a hoe-pose. “Maybe he just wanted some hotties to be
wandering around.”
“What does that have to do with him inviting you?” Davey
asked with a completely straight face.
 I glared. “I was joking. But you’re not supposed to act like
it’s such a ridiculous idea, asshole.”
Davey laughed. “You’re not hot. You’re wholesome. Look,
I mean this in the nicest way possible, so stop looking at me
like that. I’m going to explain. Guys want hot girls when they
are in the no-commitment stage. They screw around with
them, have some fun nights, and move on. Nobody in their
right mind seriously expects to settle down with the typical hot
girl. But wholesome girls? Those are the ones guys start
looking for when they get serious.”
I had my arms crossed. “I hear you trying to dig yourself
out of that comment, but all I can see is you getting deeper and
deeper into the hole. Feel free to keep digging, though.”
Davey smirked. “Think about it. You know it’s true.
You’re a catch. You’re just the kind of catch that most guys
start trying to reel in once they’re done being idiots. The kind
of catch a guy isn’t just going to want to have some fun with
and then toss back into the river.”
“I think you lost your metaphor a little there, but I’m going
to give you a pass because I think you’re not trying to be a jerk
—even if you are unintentionally being one. And for future
reference, you probably don’t want to try to compliment a girl
by telling her she’s not hot. Even ‘wholesome girls’ want to be
hot. Plus, look at this and tell me it’s not sizzling,” I said as I
hopped up from the couch and whipped my hands down by my
hips, twinkling my fingers.
Davey laughed. “When you make that face? It looks like
you just had some bad Indian food, and you’re signaling to
somebody that you need to know where the bathrooms are.”
I sighed. “How did we get off the topic of you being too
shy to get a girlfriend and onto me?”
“I think we should be more worried about making sure you
learn to not suck at bush sculpting. Once this party is over,
we’re going to train. I’ll drive the car behind you while you
jog and run you down if you go too slow. Whatever it takes to
make you an artistic wizard with those shears.”
 “That might not work as well as you’re hoping if tonight’s
date goes badly. I may just let you run me down so I can end
the shame.”
“Would a little optimism kill you?”
“Optimism has probably killed way more people than
disease and famine combined. I can totally make this jump. I
don’t need ropes to climb this mountain. Taking a selfie with
this gorilla would be a great idea!”
“Okay, for starters. You’re way under-estimating the toll
disease and famine have taken on the human population. But
you also kind of have a point. Let me rephrase. Optimism
might kill you, but it’s better to die of optimism than live in a
stinky, depressing bucket of pessimistic fear for the rest of
your life.”
I held up my hands in surrender. “Okay. Okay. I never said
I wasn’t going to go, anyway. I was just thinking out loud.
Calm down. I’m going, I just can’t promise it won’t end up
being the social equivalent of a nuclear explosion.”
“You mean the scientific pinnacle of chemistry?”
I laughed. “No. I was thinking more about the part where
everything explodes, and the only thing left is a radioactive
wasteland where life and happiness once used to reside.”
“Great. I’m glad you’re really getting the hang of this
optimism thing.”

I drove my beat-up Corolla that sounded like it had been chain

smoking cigs for thirty years down Harry’s driveway. Every
single car I passed was gleaming, sleek, and worth more than
I’d probably earned in my entire life. I decided to double back
and park a little distance away from everyone else. I usually
wouldn’t have cared about people knowing I was dirt poor, but
I was so far outside my comfort zone already—the last thing I
needed was to give myself more reason to feel nervous.
I walked up the long driveway to his house and started to
hear the distant sounds of a party. It even sounded like a rich
party.
There was music, but it was live music and instrumental
with no vocals. It made me imagine being decked out in pearls
with lace gloves. It was the sort of music that told everybody
to bring their fancy laughs, not just the usual crap you busted
out for good internet memes and funny gifs. No double chins
while breathing out your nose unenthusiastically here, folks.
This was where you brought your best moves and your
fanciest laughs. It was the kind of party where you, under no
circumstances, no matter what would even consider reaching
back to scratch yourself in an undignified way. Instead, you’d
shimmy, shake, and find something to discreetly rub yourself
against, because admitting you had normal bodily functions
would get you kicked out of the cool kid’s club.
While I was still far enough away from the party that I was
sure nobody would hear me, I gave my sophisticated laugh a
few trial runs. I put my fingertips to my chest and tried to
imagine my hedge fund manager had just told me a ridiculous
story about how he almost had to fly commercial and suffer
through what they considered “service” in first-class. I threw
my head back and did a sort of, hau hau hau. It still didn’t feel
snooty enough, so I lifted my free arm and let my wrist go
limp so my hand just kind of flopped there uselessly like a t-
rex’s arm. I tried the laugh again. Better.
“Wow,” a woman said. “That’s really good. Let me guess,
practicing your rich person laugh?”
I jumped a little in surprise. I apparently hadn’t done a
good enough job of scouting the area. “Thank you,” I said. “I
was just—”
“It’s okay. I’m pretty sure it’s a more normal reaction to
coming to these things for the first time than you’d think.” She
was smiling. It was a kind smile—the type of smile that made
me feel like I was already friends with her. “I’m Hailey, by the
way, and I’ve only been coming to this kind of party for a
couple years now. I totally get how it seems at first.”
I widened my eyes a little. “Oh my God! I know you!
From the—the show, right? The cooking show? Hailey
Chamberson.”
She smirked. “Yep. The Bubbly Baker.”
I lowered my voice and tried to look less excited. “I’m
sorry. You probably hate getting gushed all over by people
who recognize you.”
“It’s completely okay. I’m just the perfect amount of
recognized. I don’t get it everywhere I go, so when somebody
does recognize me, it’s a nice surprise. Don’t even apologize,
seriously.”
“Then, will you sign my boob?” I asked.
Hailey opened her mouth to respond but looked a little
confused.
I blurted out a laugh. “I’m sorry. My sense of humor is
terrible. Not funny at all, and totally inappropriate.”
She smiled. “If you met my husband, you’d understand
that I’ve been desensitized to inappropriate humor from about
five minutes after I met him. I also happen to enjoy it, so no
apology necessary.”
“This is going to sound kind of stalker-ish, but I think I
know him. I mean, I don’t know him. But I saw you guys on
TV once. Bruce, right?”
“Close. Bruce is his twin. My husband is William.”
“Is he here?”
“No. It probably wouldn’t sound so civilized over there if
he were.” Hailey looked toward the party, which we were still
very much on the outskirts of. “What brings you here? Do you
work for a publisher?”
“Oh, no. I’m just, sort of, friends with Harry Barnidge.
What about you?”
“I wrote a cookbook slash autobiography. Harry happens
to be my agent. He said it would be good for me to show up to
a few of these ‘pitch parties,’ as he calls them, before my own
in a few months.”
“Can I ask you something a little weird?”
 “Sure?”
I licked my lips and leaned a little closer. “Is Harry the
kind of man who you might catch… Well, I don’t know the
polite way to phrase it. Buggering the maid?”
Hailey burst out a surprised laugh. “Buggering?”
I grinned. “I don’t know. British phrases always seem a
little more polite. Boning? Doing the deed? Burying his
sausage in the pepper mill?”
“Burying his—” Hailey shook her head slightly and
smirked. “To answer your question, no. Not really. For a guy
in his position, he’s actually pretty low key. When you first
meet him, you’d probably think he’s super social and all that,
but he’s a lot more of a loner than he lets on. Very thoughtful
and prone to bouts of brooding. I heard he was more of a
playboy a year or two back, but everyone says he’s changed.
Nobody seems to know why, though.”
“I see.”
Hailey knuckled my arm and gave me a reassuring smile.
“If he invited you here, it’s probably because he likes you.
That’s my opinion, at least. Anyway, I’ve got to go mingle and
make sure people know I have a book in the works. But if
things keep going well with Harry, I’m sure we’ll see each
other around.”
Once Hailey left, I had no choice but to try to gather my
courage. The thought of just waltzing into the fancy party and
wandering around until I found Harry was a little terrifying.
That wasn’t even considering the fact that I’d probably
manage to pee myself the moment I started talking to him
again.
I walked in a small circle and took some deep, calming
breaths. Contrary to what circumstances might suggest, I
needed to remember, I was pretty awesome. As long as you
didn’t ask me to explain why that was, exactly. My positive
qualities were what the sports world would call intangibles.
Need somebody who can find a reason to enjoy any movie and
won’t fall asleep? I was your girl. Want somebody with an
encyclopedic knowledge of useless facts? Yeah, that was me.
Oh, and sound effects were kind of my specialty. Like it or
not, you could bet your ass I would enhance any average story
with at least one highly accurate sound effect, especially if it
involved lightsabers or explosions.
That’s right. I was a catch, and Harry should consider
himself lucky he met me. I had to keep telling myself that,
whether I was ready to fully buy in or not. I could do this.
I took one brave step toward the party and managed to
walk into a spider web.
I did what any sane person would do and lost my mind.
First, I ducked and flailed my arms, then slapped the back of
my head a few times. Next, I did a kind of high-stepping,
running in place move and shook my arms frantically, letting
my limp wrists flop around. During all of this, I made a low,
hurgle sound in the back of my throat that was definitely
giving me a few extra chins.
I kept picturing a family of spiders crawling all over me.
Every tickle from the web was an eight-legged nightmare who
wanted to lay eggs in my ear.
“Are you okay?”
I reacted to the sound about like a sleeping cat would react
to a bomb going off. Considering I didn’t have much practice
in heels, it meant I almost went toppling to the ground. Almost.
“Completely okay,” I said once I saw who it was. Harry.
“Of course, it’s you. I’m starting to think if I’m doing
something dumb, I should just expect you to appear.”
“What were you doing exactly? It almost sounded like you
were trying to knock a hairball lose while doing an interpretive
dance.”
I bit back a smile. Play it cool, Nell. You can still salvage
this. “I can’t really explain that to you.” I swallowed and tried
to hold eye contact. Maybe if I made him think I was a woman
of mystery, I could begin a slow, insidious seduction
campaign. Who knew, he might even start to wonder if I was a
Russian spy.
 “I see.” Harry’s eyes twinkled with equal parts amusement
and confusion. “I was actually just grabbing some of this
firewood. Mind giving me a hand?”
There was a giant pile of chopped wood beside the
driveway. Maybe that had been what attracted the spiders in
the first place. “Oh, sure. Don’t you have a servant for this or
something?”
“I can see why you’d assume that. I haven’t done much to
make you think I’m anything but a stuffy rich guy.” He
scooped up a big handful of wood and tucked it under his arm.
“Before all the money, though, I was kind of a brute. I just
pretend to be civilized.”
“Oh, me too. You should see the way I open boxes. From
the bottom. Every time.” I tried to scoop up as much wood as
Harry, dropped half of it twice, and then finally just grabbed
two smallish pieces.
“No kidding. Your sculpture is already the talk of the party.
And that, uh, interpretive dance thing you were doing. Very
barbaric.”
I lowered my eyes. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stop
imagining how I must’ve looked to him. “Wait,” I said. “My
sculpture is the talk of the party?”
“Yeah,” Harry said as he led me up the driveway toward
the garden, where it looked like the majority of the guests
were gathered. “See for yourself.”
There was a little bonfire that looked completely out of
place raging in the center of a cobbled pathway surrounded by
perfectly manicured hedges, bright flowers, and a marble
statue. Harry set down the firewood beside it and added a
couple logs.
I wasn’t surprised to see that his return to the party didn’t
go unnoticed, or that I currently had about fifteen women
trying to glare holes through me. Apparently, Harry was a hot
commodity, and the other women here were already deciding I
was any number of unsavory things to be walking beside him,
where I’m sure they thought they belonged instead. From the
looks in their eyes, they decided I was either a maid he’d
plundered or a lady of the night.
A pair of women approached Harry while he was still
stoking the flames with an iron poker. They could’ve been
sisters. Both had matching, short, silky brunette hair, and
slightly crooked but white smiles. Thankfully, they didn’t
seem angry like all the others.
“Nell,” Harry said, gesturing to the women. “These are
two of my authors. Mary and Elizabeth Fredericks. They co-
write thrillers.”
Both women reached out to take turns shaking my hand.
“I’m Mary,” the one on my left said. “People say we look
like twins, but I’m the one who doesn’t have a fat ass.” She
twisted her hips to show me that, sure enough, she was not
about to win any fat ass contests any time soon.
Elizabeth proudly turned herself to the side and made a
Vanna White gesture toward her rear. “I knock things off
tables all the time if I’m not careful. Turn to the side and
smash.”
“Wow. Twins except when it comes to your jeans,” I said
with a stupid smirk.
My bad pun was met with confused silence. I cleared my
throat. Maybe I’d need to go back to sign language soon.
“This party is celebrating the release of their newest
book,” Harry said. He leaned in and lowered his voice.
“Basically, it’s our way of trying to make it look like
everybody is excited about it. The more excited publishers
think other publishers are, the more willing they are to throw
offers at us.”
“So, it’s not really released yet?” I asked.
“We’re celebrating the imminent release,” Harry said. “As
in, once somebody here takes the bait and makes an offer.”
“I see,” I said, even though I didn’t fully understand.
Judging by the house Harry owned, I was willing to just accept
that he knew what he was talking about when it came to
business.
A tall man who bore a striking similarity to Harry
approached and said something quietly to the two women, and
smiled as they took their leave.
“Is this the girl?” the man asked.
Harry cleared his throat. “The girl I invited to the party?”
he asked in a tight voice. “Yes. This is Nell. Nell, this is my
brother, Peter.”
I smiled. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you.” I couldn’t help myself
from comparing the two men. Peter had dark, almost black
hair and a look on his face would’ve made you think twice
before even asking him the time of day. He was undeniably
attractive, but he was full of sharp lines and edges like there’d
be no way to handle him without getting hurt. To my surprise,
there was a wedding band on his finger. Apparently, some
woman had managed to thread her way through those
brambles of his.
Seeing Peter next to Harry made me appreciate what Harry
had going for him even more, not that he needed much help in
that department. Harry’s hair was a lighter shade of brown,
and though it was hard to put my finger on exactly why, he
looked infinitely more inviting. Maybe it was the combination
of thick, expressive eyebrows and those soft brown eyes of
his. He was also built with a little more muscle on his frame
than his brother. Peter might’ve passed as a baseball player,
while Harry looked like he could throw on a football uniform
and give a couple concussions.
“Peter,” Harry said. “I can see from the look in your eye
that I want you to walk away and not attempt to make any
conversation here. So, if you wouldn’t mind…”
“You’d like me to leave before I divulge any embarrassing
information? Of course. I wouldn’t want to end up letting it
slip that you brooded all day over her. I definitely wouldn’t tell
her that I haven’t seen my brother dive so deep into thought
because of a woman in as long as I can remember.”
 I blushed. I tried not to let my embarrassment show
because I didn’t know if he was telling the truth or simply
going out of his way to make his brother look bad.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “That’s exactly why I wanted you to
get lost. Why don’t you go admire the penis bush? Take some
time to think about how it’s possible for someone who never
met you managed to capture the essence of your personality so
beautifully.”
“We’re immortalizing ourselves in bush form now?” Peter
asked. “When is she going to start on the steaming pile of
bullshit for yours?”
I had to cover my mouth to hide my smile. I didn’t think of
Harry as a bullshitter, but the image of a bush fashioned into a
swirly, neat little pile of soft serve poop was bringing out my
not-so-inner child.
“You know,” Harry said. “This is exactly why I was
hoping you’d leave before you started talking. Are you done?”
Peter took a sip of his drink, nodded to me, and
disappeared into the crowd.
“Your brother is interesting,” I said. “He’s married?”
“Believe it or not, yeah. And he’s still an ass, just not as
much of a raging ass as he used to be before he met Violet.”
“So,” I said. “What are your duties at a party like this?”
Harry discreetly drew my attention to a well-dressed,
elderly man who happened to be standing near the penis bush.
“I’m glad you asked. I actually need to handle something. You
can tag along and see for yourself.”
I trailed after Harry or tried to, but he subtly made sure I
stayed beside him—not behind. Harry didn’t appear interested
in treating me like a casual acquaintance. Considering I still
didn’t know what this whole thing was, I couldn’t stop
searching for hints about his intentions. Was it a date? Was he
just trying to get more people to fill out the party? Was he the
kind of guy who thought about long-term relationships, or was
he only hoping for a quick, one-night stand?
 I needed to peel my thoughts away from ‘what if’s and
focus on the present. I had a hard enough time not making a
fool out of myself in front of Harry when I was focused. The
last thing I needed was to be distracted. Then again, I hadn’t
even completely decided on what my own goals were. I
probably needed to come up with a battle plan. I mean, what
was I going to do if Harry unexpectedly dragged me into a
closet and started undressing?
I decided to just roll with the punches. It felt like a good
enough plan. For my whole life, I’d been screwing things up
mostly because I tried too hard or overthought everything.
Maybe if I just relaxed and let things play out for once; I’d get
a break.
We moved beside the elderly man, who was standing in
front of a gently rippling fountain. Judging by the way he cut
off the people who were talking to him mid-sentence and
turned to reach for Harry’s hand, he seemed to think highly of
Harry.
“Lonzo,” Harry said. “This is Nell. Nell, this is Lonzo. He
is head of acquisitions for Marble Press. They’re one of the
most exclusive and prestigious publishing companies in the
US.”
Lonzo made a half-hearted attempt to defer the
compliment. “Hardly. Harry is just trying to blow smoke up
my ass because he’s hoping to get a contract from me tonight.”
Harry smirked. “If I had to blow smoke up your ass for
contracts, I’d have lung cancer by now.”
I distantly wondered how that expression had ever come to
common usage. Was there some freaky nobleman in the past
who liked when his subjects blew smoke up his ass? Wouldn’t
that dry things out down there? I had so many questions, but
they were all making me picture nasty, smoked assholes, so I
decided to let my questions die.
Lonzo laughed. “I suppose you would. You do realize this
song and dance isn’t necessary by now. Don’t you? We both
know nobody has made an offer on the Fredericks’ book.
Maybe I just came for the free drinks and food.”
 Harry shrugged. “We wanted to work with Marble Press,
but my authors are more concerned with how much they‘re
being offered than who’s doing the offering. Considering we’re
already getting offers well beyond what I told them to expect,
they’re practically begging me to let them sign. I’m not trying
to push a hard sell on you. But we’re friends, and I wanted you
to know where it stands right now.”
Lonzo narrowed his eyes. I watched with interest as he
clearly tried to figure out if Harry was lying or telling the
truth. It wasn’t a complicated game the two men were playing,
but something about it was oddly thrilling when I imagined the
kind of money at risk here. Because of what Harry had already
told me, I knew Lonzo was right. Nobody had made an offer
yet. He wasn’t selling the book to Lonzo, he was trying to sell
the idea that people wanted it. I could also see how Harry had
found so much success in his work. Everything, from the
subtle changes in his features to his body language, made you
want to like the man. I could hardly believe my first
impression was to be slightly intimidated. Maybe that was just
a testament to how skilled he was at showing the world
whichever face he wanted, which made me wonder if I’d seen
the real Harry yet, or just one side of his personality.
“Let me guess,” Lonzo said. “You’re going to play coy
with me if I ask you who is offering you what, aren’t you?”
Harry made an apologetic face. “We go back, Lonzo, but
you know I’ve still got to protect my clients. How about this?
You pass on this book. Let us publish it with someone else,
and you can see how it performs. You know I don’t usually get
into making promises about how a book is going to do, but I
have read this one. I’m not going to say New York Times
Bestseller, but I’m not going to not say it. So, who knows,
maybe you’ll be willing to play ball on the next one. I just
wanted to give you a shot to get in on the Fredericks girls
before they’ve got the pedigree to demand a monster advance
and royalties.”
Lonzo tapped his chin and watched Harry with evident
annoyance. He finally let out a long sigh. “I’ll send you an
offer within twenty-four hours. You’re also an asshole, Harry.”
 Harry reached out and shook Lonzo’s hand. “And your
love of assholes is always appreciated.”
What was it with these two men and assholes? Wasn’t I
allowed to go two minutes without that mental image?
Lonzo rolled his eyes before setting his drink down and
leaving.
“Wow,” I said. “So, you just tricked him into making an
offer?”
Harry scrunched up his face and tilted his head. “When
you say it like that, it sounds really scummy. No, I just used
persuasion tactics to make sure my clients have a publisher for
their wonderful book.”
“Right. You tricked him. Is it really as good as you said it
was?”
Harry grinned. “Okay, I might’ve fibbed about reading it.
But I’m sure it’s great.”
I laughed. “You’re terrible. And you’re a frighteningly
good liar. Should I believe anything that comes out of your
mouth?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
I tapped my lip as I thought his question over. “So, it’s just
a matter of you needing a good enough reason to lie?”
Harry laughed. “You really are a dangerous one. You’re
too sharp to be trimming bushes all day.”
“Dangerous? Hardly. I’m about as dangerous as a wet
paper bag.”
“Exactly. Nobody thinks a wet paper bag is dangerous
until it’s too late.”
I smirked. “I’m pretty sure nobody has ever suffered the
consequences of underestimating a wet paper bag. Actually, I
guess you could assume a wet paper bag was capable of
holding your lunch. Then it’d fall out and get dirty, but I mean,
that’s hardly too dramatic as far as consequences go…”
“I like that about you,” Harry said.
 “What? My ability to imagine hypothetical wet paper bag
scenarios? Because if you like that, I can tell you what would
happen if we added some mud. Or maybe even mayonnaise?”
I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively.
Harry chuckled. “No. I mean that you don’t take things for
how they are. You want to peel everything back and look at
what’s beneath.” His eyebrows knitted together, then he
nodded. “Other people just let the world take them for a ride,
but that’s not enough for you, is it?”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say. When I thought about what
he said, I realized he was right. I’d never been satisfied as
easily as my friends growing up. Everybody else seemed to
just jump into things head first and ask questions later.
Meanwhile, I’d be standing on the sidelines trying to run
through all the ways it could go wrong. I guess a lifetime of
that meant I had a habit of turning ideas over from every
possible angle instead of just letting them slide past me.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said, misinterpreting my silence.
“Listen to me getting weird. Forget I said anything, okay?”
“What point am I supposed to start forgetting from? Like
do I need to ask your name again, or do you just mean the last
minute or so?”
He grinned. “How about you go back to the time where
you liked me the most?”
“Okay,” I said. “You mean, right now?” How’s that for
rolling with the punches? I mentally high fived myself for the
smooth line. Because it was a mental high five, I didn’t miss
and hit myself in the elbow, or the eye like I probably
would’ve in real life.
Harry fixed those dazzling eyes of his on me. He put his
hand on my side, and I couldn’t tell if he was pulling me
closer or if I was just being drawn in by some kind of
mysterious, hot guy magnetic force.
Was I supposed to put my hand on his side, too? Was it
weird that I was just standing there with my arms hanging
limp? Should I start dancing?
 For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me, but
somebody loudly cried out nearby and shattered the bubble we
seemed to be in.
Harry followed my eyes toward the big green penis bush.
A group of men and women were surrounding it in a circle and
talking excitedly. A woman at the center of the group seemed
to be the leader. She was dressed extravagantly in flowing
clothes with a scarf and bright blue-rimmed glasses. She
looked sophisticated and more than a little eccentric.
“I think you should introduce yourself,” Harry said. “I’m
sure they would love to meet the woman behind the piece.”
I started to object, but Harry was already walking toward
the crowd. I trailed behind him, keeping enough distance that I
could still run or dive for cover if he tried to draw attention to
me.
I finally let out the breath I’d been holding since he put his
hand on my side. It had felt like we were both getting pulled in
a direction that I wasn’t sure I was ready to be pulled so soon.
Closer. Deeper. Whatever you wanted to call it. One thing was
for sure: I’d never met a man who made me feel so electrified.
It was as close to magic as anything I’d ever seen. Just being
near him made my skin tingle, and my mind feel like it was
running at five times the average speed.
Unfortunately, I was using that extra speed to come up
with dumb, embarrassing things to say at five times the
standard rate. Shouldn’t I have been able to win two chess
games at once or something?
The group didn’t pay us any attention until Harry cleared
his throat and hopped up on a small stone bench. “Ladies and
gentlemen,” He said. “I’m thrilled to introduce someone very
special to you all. The cockitecht.”
The cockitecht. I could’ve slapped him or laughed. I wasn’t
sure which would’ve been more appropriate, but I knew I’d
already missed my window of opportunity to escape. A dozen
pairs of eyes were watching me with obvious interest.
 The woman with the blue glasses and silver hair
approached me with an outstretched hand.
“I’m Maya North.”
I took her hand and shook it. She had cold hands, which
made me understand why she was wearing so many layers
despite the relatively warm night. “Hi. I’m Nell.”
“The cockitecht,” Maya added in a reverent whisper.
I smirked. “That’s just Harry being—”
She leaned in, still speaking in hushed tones. “Don’t
apologize for being unique, dear. Be bold. Take the world by
the balls and twist. Fuck ‘em.”
I laughed, even though I felt more confused than anything.
I was pretty sure ball twisting wasn’t great foreplay, but then I
guessed I also wasn’t the most experienced when it came to
the whole sexual experience department.
Maya straightened as the rest of her little entourage caught
up with us. Harry was watching from behind them with an
amused look on his face. I wouldn’t have minded grabbing
him by the balls and twisting right about now. Then again, I
had a feeling putting my hand anywhere near Harry’s balls
would lead me in an unintended direction. Maybe it was good
foreplay…
Maya spoke as if she was addressing a class of interested
students. “Nell,” she said loudly now. “We were speculating
on the meaning of your piece. We’d be honored to hear the
artist’s own interpretation. Using a medium as unconventional
as a living organism to make a statement like this. It’s just
brilliant, and we want to know more.”
I cleared my throat. I wanted it to say, hey, I’m a penguin
building a snowman! Aren’t I cute? I wasn’t about to admit
that in front of all these apparent art critics. Roll with the
punches. Don’t overthink it. “Well,” I said, taking the time to
give Harry one very dirty look. “I actually don’t like to
divulge the secrets of my art.”
I watched Maya and her friends as I spoke, and from the
way her eyebrow twitched up, I thought I was going in the
right direction.
“You see,” I continued. “The most powerful art, to me, is
art that creates discussion. Something that makes people think
and challenges their beliefs.” I guessed I wasn’t entirely
bullshitting. I never quite managed to figure out what I wanted
to do with myself, but I knew I wanted to do something
creative—something that challenged expectations and excited
people.
“Brilliant,” Maya said.
As if her approval flipped a kind of switch, the rest of her
entourage all nodded and started whispering excitedly. I
noticed one man at the back of the group who wasn’t
whispering or looking anywhere but directly at me.
Maya pulled a glossy card out and handed it to me. “This
is my number. I’d be honored to show one of your pieces at
my gallery. I don’t normally take new art this close to a show,
but I can squeeze you into our biggest gala of the year. It’s in
one week.”
I stepped fully into my fictional role as a serious bush
sculptor and nodded as if I’d expected something like this to
happen. On the inside, I was in full-blown panic. “Of course.
The honor would be mine.”
Maya nodded. She started to leave, then paused. “Oh. I
almost forgot. I’m having a smaller showing for a few close
friends tomorrow night. You should come.” And just like that,
Maya walked off with her little crew, leaving me standing
there with my mouth still hanging open.
“Wow,” I said once Harry came back to my side. “That’s a
good thing, right?”
“Are you kidding? It’s great. Maya is the kind of art
purveyor who shows pieces that sell for millions.”
“Millions of what, dollars? You’re being serious right
now?”
Harry pointed to his face. “Does this look like the face of
somebody who’s kidding?”
 I made an undignified squealing noise and leaped at his
chest, kind of like a forward-oriented trust fall. Harry caught
me in his arms—his very strong arms, I noted—and held me
there. “It looked like the face of somebody I wanted to hug.”
Harry said nothing, and I felt the awkwardness seep into
me until I wanted to turn into a puddle and slide off into the
darkness.
I peeled myself away from him but noticed that he kept his
arms around my waist. “I’m happy for you. And I’m glad you
wanted to hug,” he added with a half-grin. “I just wasn’t
expecting it.”
“Yeah. Me either. Looking before leaping has never been a
specialty of mine.”
“Maybe a little bit of you would be good for me, then. I’ve
always had the problem of spending so long looking that the
chance to leap passes me by.”
I chewed my lip. “Oh? And are there any particular ledges
you’ve been considering jumping off lately? I’d be glad to
help give you a little push.”
“There’s one ledge that I was considering,” he said.
I had to sneeze. It was absolutely the worst possible
timing, which was just like my stupid body. “One se—” I held
my finger to my nose and took a step back, looked up at the
stars, squinted, made all kinds of faces, but nothing was killing
the growing sense of need.
“Are you okay?” Harry stepped closer and put his hands
on my shoulders before bending to look in my eyes.
“No, no, jus—” And then it happened. I sneezed directly in
his face.
The only slight piece of silver lining was that it wasn’t the
sort of sneeze where some rogue mucousy thug had been
lodged so deep in me that my body decided to launch it at the
speed of sound. Nope. I just gave Harry a nice, unpleasant
misting of God knew what.
 He raised his eyebrows. For a long, horrifying few
seconds, I thought he was going to slap me. Maybe a
backhand. Maybe a forehead. Maybe just an uppercut. But I
thought the only appropriate response was some sort of
physical violence. Naturally, I waited and stared back with
wide, shocked eyes.
“Oh,” he said finally. “You were trying to sneeze.”
“Trying and succeeding,” I said, noting the light mist of
moisture dotting his beautiful face. I reached up and started
trying to wipe him clean, but when my thumb brushed against
his lip, I froze. “Oh my God. I’m making it worse. Now I’m
groping you.” I pulled my hands back and held them behind
my back. “Is there a lake nearby? I could just jump in and, you
know, stay underwater.”
Harry laughed. I also noticed he didn’t seem to be in a
hurry to run and grab a napkin to wipe the rest of my disaster
off his face. It was gross and endearing at the same time. “I’d
prefer you alive. If you drowned, who else could make sure
my immune system was still working properly?”
I hesitantly reached up and wiped the last little speck of
moisture from his cheek. “You’re not grossed out?”
“No. I spent time on a farm when I was growing up. I’ve
been elbow deep in some things you wouldn’t even want to
imagine. I don’t think getting sneezed on by a pretty girl is
going to make me flinch any time soon.”
“Wait, somebody else sneezed on you tonight?”
“Ah, no. Actually, I was talking about you.”
I inwardly groaned. Stop trying to be funny, Nell. Funny
isn’t your thing. Not when it’s intentional, at least. “No, I just
don’t know how to take compliments. I kind of short circuit so
you probably shouldn’t say nice things to me. It’ll be awkward
for everyone.”
“So I shouldn’t tell you that I’m really enjoying tonight,
and don’t want it to be our last date?”
“Um, well,” I said. “You could say that. It’s more of an
indirect compliment.”
 “I’m enjoying tonight because I really like you.” Harry’s
eyes twinkled as he watched me. Bastard.
“Yep. I’m starting to feel like I don’t remember how to
walk or breathe properly. I hope you’re happy.”
“If you want to make me happy, why don’t you let me help
you with this whole Maya North thing? I can make
arrangements to get that huge penis of yours mobile. I’m not
exactly an art agent, but in the meantime, I can at least try to
protect you from making any major mistakes.”
“I couldn’t let you do all that. I mean, don’t get me wrong.
I really appreciate the offer, but—”
“Please. I’ll make it up to you by taking you on a really
low budget date. Then we’ll basically be even.”
I found myself smiling. How did I go from bumping
around in a gardening van full of smelly guys to standing
here? Did I accidentally body swap with some poor,
unsuspecting woman who actually had good things happen to
her? I discreetly checked the freckles on my arm. Sure enough,
all the usual suspects were there. Except…
I licked my thumb and rubbed at a freckle I didn’t
recognize on my thumb. Yep. That’s what I thought. Chocolate.
“I mean, if you’re going to insist,” I said with a smirk. “I
would hate to make you ruin your nice suit by getting on your
knees to beg, which I can only assume is where this goes if I
refuse again.”
Harry returned my smile. “Perfect. Then we’ll turn this
gallery event that’s coming up into a date and a business
partnership.”
A date and a business partnership. It was perfect and also
very much, probably not perfect. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t
have needed to go far to find historical examples of thousands
and thousands of times when mixing business with pleasure
went horribly wrong. Thankfully, I didn’t have a history of
making everything I touched go horribly wrong. Whoops, did I
forget to turn the sarcasm switch off?
 6

HARRY

G etting Nell’s penis and balls to Maya’s party had been a

bit of an undertaking. The first obstacle was getting the
damn thing out of the ground without doing any damage to the
bush. I had a team of professionals assure me it would survive
the journey once they potted it and made it portable. They also
promised to stay on as staff to make sure the plant was kept
healthy and thriving. I also hired an artist to document the
current shape of Nell’s bush cock and maintain it exactly as it
was. I wasn’t about to say as much to Nell, but I was
reasonably sure the final form of her art had been mostly a
happy accident, so I didn’t want her to have to try to maintain
the thing until the gala next week.
I met Nell at Maya’s home about an hour before the party
started. She looked stunning in an appropriately bush green
dress. With her bright orange hair, she looked like some kind
of nature goddess. I instinctively wrapped my hand around her
waist when I saw her and pulled her in for a hug. “Tonight is
going to be perfect for you,” I said in her ear. I also couldn’t
help noticing how small and fragile she felt in my grip, as well
as the subtle press of her breasts against my stomach.
She pulled back with a smile. “Why is that, exactly?”
“Because everyone is going to love your bush.”
“Hmm,” she said with a playful smirk. “I was only
planning on showing that to somebody special when the time
was right.”
 I had just taken a sip of my drink and nearly spit it out. “I
walked right into that. I’ve referenced your bush and your
penis so many times while I was getting this all organized that
I think I became desensitized to how crazy it sounds.”
She nodded. “And now we get to watch my friendly green
giant slide out of a truck in a completely non-phallic way.
You’re sure it’s okay that I’m basically uprooting one of your
bushes and turning it into an art exhibit?”
I laughed. “Are you kidding? I can’t think of a more noble
way to lose one of my bushes.”
“Well, thank you. For everything.”
We were standing in Maya’s driveway as the bush was
wheeled out—backwards, of course—from the back of a
moving truck. “I feel like we need a team of middle schoolers
to follow this thing around and document every joke they
make. This one would definitely be a ‘your mom’ joke.”
“Oh, for sure,” Nell said. “That’s what it looked like when
I tried to bang your mom, Tyler!”
“Tyler?” I asked, laughing.
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to get into character.”
A team of workers moved the bush past us and carefully
got it in through the wide front doors of Maya’s house. “Well,”
I said. “Joking aside, this is a big night for you. Do you think
you’re ready?”
“Um, you might as well ask me if I’m ready to fly an alien
spaceship. I wouldn’t know until I got in there.”
“That’s what I’m here for. I’ll be by your side all night,
okay? Whether you like it or not,” I added. I had the fight the
urge to pull her in and hug her again. On that note, I found
myself fighting the urge to have my hands on her. Period.
“Have you ever met a woman who wouldn’t like it if you
were by their side all night?”
I knew she was just being playful, but there was a bitter
kind of truth in the question I didn’t want to ignore. “No. But
those women wanted me there for the wrong reasons.
Somehow, I think you’re different.”
“Is thinking you’re one of the kindest men I’ve met the
wrong reason?” Nell asked with an adorable smile.
“No,” I said. “I happen to like your reasoning, even if it
leaves me wondering what kind of dirtbags you met before
me.”
Nell laughed sourly. “My fair share of them, actually. But,
somehow, I think you’re different.”
I chuckled. “I see what you did there.”
“Nell!” Maya called loudly from the front of the house.
She came walking out to us draped in some sort of a cross
between a bathrobe, a cover-up, and a lacy suit of lingerie.
Thankfully, she was wearing a nude colored dress beneath it
all, or the outfit would’ve been extravagant, even for Maya
North. She reached Nell and grabbed her by the hands, smiling
wide. “I just saw them wheel your big boy in.” Maya bit her
lip and wagged her eyebrows. “I wasn’t sure he’d fit in the
front door, so I almost asked the boys to let him come in the
back door.”
“Back door, front door. What’s the difference?” Nell asked
whimsically.
I choked back a laugh, which caught Nell’s attention. From
the look of sudden horror on her face, she had utterly missed
Maya’s innuendo, but it was dawning on her now.
“Dirty girl,” Maya said. “I like it. Also, the difference is
lube. A lot of lube. Take it from experience.” She gave Nell
and I both a meaningful look.
I cleared my throat. “I’m sort of acting as Nell’s interim
agent until she can find somebody who specializes in art. So if
you get any offers or interest on her tonight, be sure to pass it
along my way, okay?”
Maya sized me up. “Yes. I think you’ll do. For now. I’ll let
it circulate that Nell needs representation. Most of the biggest
agents will be sniffing around tonight. I’m sure one will bite.”
 “Thanks, Maya.”
“Of course. Now, the party won’t be starting for at least an
hour—and only the lame people are going to show up on time.
Why don’t the two of you go check out my dock?”
“Is that…” Nell asked, lowering her voice. “Some kind of
sexual thing? Because I’m flattered, but I don’t—”
I nudged her and drew her eye to the back of the property.
“Nell. It’s a dock.”
Maya smiled. “She’s so innocent. Don’t spoil her, Harry.”
“Spoil her? What kind of man do you think I am?”
“The kind that has a functional cock and a man brain that
is drawn to innocent women like a child to freshly fallen
snow.”
“I’m not that innocent,” Nell said. “I’m just a little socially
awkward.”
I bit back a smile. “See? You’re just making her nervous,
Maya. Maybe you should give us some privacy.”
“Privacy,” Maya said with a heavy dose of skepticism.
“Because alone time with an attractive bachelor who happens
to be a millionaire on the top of his game isn’t going to make
this pretty little thing nervous?”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you out of here before Maya
talks you into being afraid of me.
“Too late,” Nell muttered.
We crossed the back lawn of Maya’s property, which was
an expanse of cleanly trimmed grass and wooden pathways
that wound down the hill to a dock. The dock shot out over a
lake that looked inky black under the night sky, and I didn’t
doubt a man with the right bait and a few rods could pull in a
haul enough to fill the freezer within hours.
“This is so pretty,” Nell said quietly.
“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “Unless you were
hoping to catch some fish, at least.”
 “Maybe Maya got me a little nervous. I’m afraid if I startle
you, I’ll unleash your inner bachelor at the top of his game. A
poor, innocent little thing like me would hardly stand a
chance.”
“Hardly. I’m not like that. I just want somebody down to
earth. Somebody that isn’t going to flip a switch and change
on me.”
“What do you mean?”
We stopped halfway down the dock and leaned on the
guard rail to look out over the water. The view really was
beautiful. There was even a slight, cool breeze to take the
dragging heat out of the air. “Women I’ve dated before. I know
everybody is always on their best behavior for the first few
dates, and that’s natural, but it always seems like more than
that. I lost track of how many times I’d think I finally got past
the artificial stage with a woman, but then I’d realize they
were still putting on a show for me.”
Nell’s eyebrows were drawn tightly together. “I can get
that. You feel stupid. You look back and think how you
should’ve seen the signs all along because they really were
right there in front of you. But you wanted to think the best of
them, so you were blind to it. When the dust settles, all you’re
left with is this sinking feeling in your gut that you were
duped. Worse, you let yourself get duped because you were so
desperate.” She laughed suddenly. “Wow. Okay. Sorry. I didn’t
mean to go Dr. Phil on you.”
“No. You’re completely right. Damn. You said it better
than I could have. Yeah.”
We were quiet for a comfortable minute or two before I
decided to reach out and put my arm around her shoulder. She
leaned into me and rested her head on me. I thought I was long
past the days of butterflies in my stomach and chills running
across my skin, but my body lit up at the innocent contact. She
was more than just a pretty face and an adorably sexy
personality. She got me. Nell understood me on a level she
probably didn’t even grasp yet.
 I wasn’t sure when it happened, but she ended up cradled
into my chest and looking up into my eyes. I knew I was going
to try to kiss her, even though I wasn’t sure how she’d react
until I tilted my head down slightly and her eyes closed as she
brought her chin up to meet me.
Then the sound of laughter made us both stop. I turned to
see a rowdy group of men and women heading down the dock
toward us.
As quickly as that, the moment passed. Nell half-jumped
back from me and smiled nervously. “Yeesh,” she said. “Put
me on a dock with a bachelor at the top of his game, and I go
all googly-eyed.”
“Don’t apologize. I was the one seducing you.”
Nell laughed. “Is that what it was? Well, now I can stop
kicking myself for being ready to kiss you so fast.”
“It’s our second date. You really are innocent if you think
that’s fast.”
“Hey, now. I’m more of a hand holding and sharing the
same straw until the third date kind of girl. My body is a
castle.”
“A temple, you mean?”
“No. A castle, like it’s going to take a prolonged siege and
a few month’s worth of supplies and dedication to breach the
walls.”
I burst out with a surprised laugh. “God. You’re adorable.
Also, that may be how long it took other guys, but I’m
confident I’ll find a secret passage and avoid the siege
entirely.”
“If you’re suggesting the back door, that’s going to be a
big no-go from me.”
“Nothing so obvious,” I said with a smirk.
We made our way back to the party and spent more time
laughing about the ridiculous pieces of sculpture and pseudo-
sculpture that were on display. Maya had converted the
impressive first floor of her gleaming mansion into a
showroom, and every corner, nook, and stairway was
displaying some kind of bizarre art. Statues were standing in
rows, but upside down. One room was full of lifelike animals
playing card games and engaging in other, much more
disturbing activities. There was even an entire human skeleton
that appeared to be in the process of launching itself from the
ground on a stream of rainbow-colored marbles that were
subtly strung together with clear tubes of glass.
“Did you ever imagine your gardening job would lead you
to a place like this?” I asked. We had sat down on one of the
art pieces which was made into a kind of bench. The piece was
a glossy sculpture of two naked men who looked like they
were trying to gouge each other’s eyes out while contorting
into an unlikely, but convenient bench-like position. The only
drawback was the improbably sized erections we had to avoid
when sitting.
Nell leaned her elbow casually on the erection to her left,
which came almost up to her shoulder. “Oh, yeah. This is
exactly where I pictured I’d be today.”
I grinned. “Seriously, though. How are you handling this?
It has to be strange.”
Nell lowered her arm and stared off into the distance for a
few moments. “I don’t think it has really sunk in yet. I mean,
right now, nothing has really changed. Sure, I got invited to
this crazy thing, and there’s the gala in six days. But I don’t
even know if anyone will actually buy the bush. Let’s be
honest, the thing was a total accident. Why would anyone buy
it?”
“Why do people buy giant canvases of spilled paint for
millions of dollars? Modern art is like a psychology
experiment that got out of control. It’s really not so different
from my job when I think about it. Selling art is about selling a
story. People want to believe the art means something, and if
they see it in the right context, they’ll assume that meaning is
there. Maya North is your context. She could grab a plastic
bag from her pantry, nail it to the wall in here, and somebody
would end up buying it for a few million dollars.”
 Nell nodded slowly. “Yeah. I see what you mean. It’s kind
of sad, really. You know? Say this works out and I make a
bunch of money. It’ll basically be like I tripped over a bag of
cash on the street. I won’t have earned it, and I’m still not sure
how I feel about that.”
“You don’t have to feel any way. Money is money. It
doesn’t have to be a status symbol or some way to measure
your worth. You just take it and use it to live your best life.
Chase your dreams. Help your family, you know?”
She turned and looked up at me in a way that made my
heart start beating faster. God. Those eyes of hers were like
drugs. Just having her look at me felt like it dulled my mind to
everything but the moment, like all my stress could melt away
in an instant. “Thank you, Harry. You’ve been a huge help.
With everything.”
“Of course.”
She leaned her head against my shoulder, and I leaned
gently against the over-sized, glossy erection to my right.
There were two more cocks in this moment than I would’ve
preferred, but it otherwise felt perfect.
And then the last person on Earth I wanted to see walked
into the room.
 7

NELL

H arry smelled so good. I tried not to be obvious about it,

but I was breathing in way more than was natural as I
tried to memorize the scent. It brought all kinds of images to
my mind, but the clearest was Harry. In this image, he was
glistening, absolutely naked, and laying in a churning sea of
diamonds. It occurred to me that none of my images actually
carried a smell except for Harry, so my mental exercise was
more of an excuse to picture him all naked and shiny. But I
was okay with that, too.
I noticed Harry stiffen slightly. I’d been leaning on his
shoulder. I scanned the room for what he could’ve seen, but
the only thing I saw was a tall, handsome man approaching us.
I felt a little awkward cuddling on Harry in public like I
was, so I straightened back up.
“Hi,” the man said.
I looked up at him. Apparently, rich people parties drew
attractive men like moths to a flame, because the man in front
of me was incredibly handsome. I felt immediately weird. In
my head, I knew Harry had nothing to worry about. Even if it
was possible for somebody to be more attractive than Harry—
which I doubted—I’d come here with Harry. I didn’t know if I
could say he was my boyfriend yet, but I knew I wanted him
to be. Maybe more of the reason I felt weird was the
unavoidable flashbacks. My ex had practically had a mental
breakdown if a guy so much as looked at me. The evening
would end in him making a total ass of himself and later
blaming me for “forcing” him to be that way.
It didn’t help my unease to see that this man was a
prototype of attractiveness—almost too perfect and standard
issue to be exciting. Harry was uniquely attractive, with those
eyebrows that could’ve been too bold for some and the nose
that was sharp and angular. The guy standing in front of us
looked like somebody used a computer program to average
together the faces of a hundred male models.
I instinctively gave an awkward smile. “Uh, hi. I’m Nell.”
“Damian Cross,” he said. “Maya told me you needed an
agent who actually has experience representing artists. You
may get some interest from the others here, but I can guarantee
you I’m the best there is. I’m also the only one who won’t
rope you into a contract that is designed to milk every last
penny from you.”
“Oh,” I said. I felt a surge of relief. He wasn’t trying to hit
on me in front of Harry, he was just here to offer to represent
me. I looked at Harry when I realized he had been unusually
quiet. His fists were actually clenched so tight his knuckles
had gone white. Was he jealous? Or maybe he just hated this
Damian guy.
The thought of Harry already getting that jealous made a
spike of dread run through me. So far, Harry had almost
seemed too perfect. But the one thing I couldn’t handle after
Chuck was jealousy. Chuck had always been jealous. It was
the main reason we’d broken up. Aside from the part where he
asked for an open relationship, and then I learned he had
already cheated on me, of course. But the underlying problem
was that Chuck had started out just a little jealous, too. It
seemed innocent at first, but that was all part of his subtle
manipulation. Everything always got a little worse every time,
so I was blind to it. I’d look back and wonder if it really had
gotten that bad, like I couldn’t even grasp the severity of it
unless I thought back to the beginning.
I’d sworn I wouldn’t put up with that again. Ever. I’d run
at the first sign of trouble, and I desperately hoped Harry
proved he wasn’t about to make me do that.
“Well,” I said slowly. “That actually sounds really good.
And you’re sure you’ve seen the sculpture I made?”
“I’ve seen it. And I can sell it. So, what will it be?” I
thought I caught a subtle glance from Damian to Harry. There
was something more than just neutral curiosity in that look,
but I couldn’t quite decide what it was. “Let me represent you,
and you’ll get the most you can possibly earn from the piece. I
can promise you that.”
“Actually,” Harry said. He slid his arm around my
shoulder. “She’s good.”
I stiffened slightly. The way he was trying to mark me like
territory pissed me off. Worse, he seemed oblivious to the fact
that this was a legitimate art agent offering to represent me.
Did he care more about his jealousy than my future? Was what
he said about taking the money I could get just some bullshit
he’d fed me to sound kind?
“Wait,” I said. “Why?”
Harry’s jaw was flexing, and his eyes looked like hot
coals, but he seemed content to say nothing.
Damian looked down at him. “I’m curious too,” Damian
said. “Why should she turn down my offer?” I thought I saw
something pass between the men. There was clearly something
between them, something neither of them was going to say
aloud. But why wouldn’t Harry just tell me if something was
wrong with him?
“I told you I’d keep an eye out for your best interests,”
Harry said. “I think you should listen to other offers. That’s
all.”
Other offers from agents who aren’t attractive?
“Tell me something, Harry,” Damian said. “Are you sure
this is the way you want to handle the situation?”
Harry locked eyes with Damian for a long few moments,
then he stood. He put his broad back between Damian and me,
and then there was a sudden rush of movement. Harry was
gripping the front of Damian’s suit. The men said something I
couldn’t hear over the struggle.
I stood and tried to pull Harry back, but he lifted his hands
from Damian and held them in the air as if he was making
some sort of statement.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked. I felt like pulling my
hair out. One minute, I’d been so happy to be with a guy who
felt right for once. The next, it was like Chuck was standing in
front of me again.
“Nothing,” Harry said tightly. There was an obvious
question in his eyes, though. He was trying to figure out if I
was only interested in Damian’s offer because of how he
looked. If he had been able to stop himself from acting like a
child, I might have given him the truth. No, my interest had
nothing to do with Damian’s looks, but I also didn’t think I
should have to spell that out for Harry, especially when he
seemed so eager to assume the worst in me. God knew I’d
already had enough of that in my life.
“Here,” Damian said. “That’s my card. You can give me a
call later when it’s a better time. But don’t put it off. We need
to get on top of this quickly.” He looked at Harry and stuck out
his hand. “No hard feelings?”
Harry waited an awkward length of time before he took
Damian’s hand. Damian pulled him into one of those bro hugs
guys like to do, but he held Harry there long enough to say
something quietly in Harry’s ear that made his jaw twitch.
Damian’s lips twitched in amusement. He held Harry’s
eyes for a few moments before finally letting go of his hand
and walking away.
I turned to Harry, which coincidentally forced his arm off
my side. “What was that?”
“That was me looking out for your best interests.”
“You barely know me. What makes you think you know
what’s best for me, exactly?”
“Nell,” he said softly. He reached for my hands, but I
flinched back. Harry set his jaw and sighed. “You’re in over
your head, here. This is my world, and you need to trust me on
this. That’s not a guy you want to get involved with.”
“Yeah? Funny. There’s a lot of that going around tonight.
Thanks for everything, but I think I should go.” I regretted the
words almost as soon as I’d said them, but my blood was still
boiling. I couldn’t stop thinking of all the times I’d been too
stupid to see what Chuck was doing and how hard I’d
promised I wouldn’t be that innocent, naïve girl again. I
needed to get past my doubts. Those same doubts were what
made me stay with Chuck so much longer than I ever should
have.
“Nell. I’m an agent. Art would be new to me, but I could
represent you. You don’t need to resort to working with that
guy. He’s—”
“Is that what this is about? At least before I thought you
were jealous because you liked me. So, which is it, you like
me? Or you like the idea of taking advantage of—” I looked
toward the giant, penis bush and almost laughed despite
everything. “You know, I’m not even going to get mad about
it. I’m just done. So thank you, seriously, for everything. I
wouldn’t have had this opportunity if you hadn’t. But as far as
everything else goes? I’ve got to look out for myself and take
advantage of this opportunity, no matter how ridiculous it is.”
“Nell. Wait—”
I waved over my shoulder and left before he could say
more.
Once I got into my car, I laid my head on the steering
wheel and groaned in annoyance. I knew I’d been unfair. I
could’ve at least let Harry try to explain himself without
cutting him off, but that was also precisely what I’d always let
Chuck do. I’d let him talk until he was blue in the face, until
he could wear me down and convince me everything had just
been some huge mix-up, that it would never happen again.
Being a little unfair was a small price to pay. I didn’t want to
let another Chuck into my life. I could handle the failures I
seemed to attract like a magnet, but I couldn’t give up on my
self-respect. If I respected myself, I’d do every last thing in my
power to avoid a guy who wanted me for the wrong reasons.
I pulled out the card Damian had given me and chewed my
lip. I wondered what Harry could possibly know about the guy
that would make me want to steer clear. What Damian said
had made sense. I knew nothing about the art world, and if
anyone could find a way to screw this up, it was me. I did need
his help. But what was with all the unspoken tension between
the two of them? Had they fought over the same girl in the
past? Was this just a power play by Damian to steal me out
from under Harry? I decided I didn’t care what it was. I
needed an agent. Damian was an agent. I had no romantic
interest in the guy, and it was that simple.
I looked toward the party one last time. I saw the silhouette
of a tall, broad man standing on the driveway. I was almost
positive it was Harry, and I was sure he saw me. But why
wasn’t he coming closer? Chuck would’ve been yanking on
the door handle by now. He’d pull me out of the car by my
arm and scold me for embarrassing him. So why was Harry
just standing there?
I almost got out of the car and went to talk, just to explain
why the way he acted had been such a big deal to me. Except
that’s what the old me would’ve done. She would go out there
and try to fix everything. As much as I wanted to know what
was going through Harry’s head, I couldn’t let myself get out
of the car, because I knew my resolve would break.
 8

HARRY

I closed the folder on my desk and slid it across to Hailey

Chamberson. “That’s everything you asked for. Release
date, promotion dates, potential secondary contracts, and what
we’re doing to pursue them.”
Hailey smiled. “Thank you. I’m sorry to be so needy. I’m
honestly just so excited about this whole book thing. I want to
know every little detail.”
William was standing in the corner of the room with his
arms crossed. Hailey got up to leave, but William nodded for
her to go on without him.
Great, I thought. The last thing I needed right now was
alone time with William Chamberson. I’d always been bigger
than most people, so it was unusual for a man to be my
physical match. William was at least as tall as me, even if he
was built a little leaner.
The door closed, and William walked up to my desk,
planting his hands on the wood. I had the urge to stand up.
William was somebody I considered a friend, but we hadn’t
known each other for very long. My brother’s wife was friends
with a friend of Williams, which had eventually led to Hailey
asking me to represent the launch of her book.
“You know if you screw this launch up,” William said.
“We’re going to have a problem.”
I knew William well enough that I shouldn’t have let his
comment offend me. Normally, I would’ve smiled it off.
Except I still felt sour and bitter after everything that happened
with Nell last night. The more I thought about how I’d left
things, the more I felt like an idiot who had tried to hold on to
a fistful of sand by squeezing tighter.
I met William’s eyes. “If I screw up the launch of her
book, it’ll be the first time I’ve screwed up a book’s launch in
years.”
William’s serious expression melted into his usual, laid-
back smile. “I was going to keep taunting you for fun, but…
You look like somebody just told you bananas are going
extinct. Do you want to open up, or should I employ
persuasion tactics to get it out of you??”
“Bananas are… what? Are you making that up?”
William gave me a smug little shrug. “Guess you won’t
know until you look it up. But I know somebody who is going
to be super pissed if it’s true.”
“Do you have a point you were planning on making?”
“Just that I’m an easy guy to talk to if something’s on your
mind. Oh, and that people should stop taking things like
bananas for granted. You never know when they could
disappear.”
“Right… You’re a lot of things, but I don’t know if easy to
talk to is one of them.”
“Ouch,” William said. “Well, your choice is to spit out
what’s wrong, or I’m going to start guessing. I’m not going to
stop until you tell me I’ve got it, and I’ll warn you—I’m a
shitty guesser, so this could take a while.”
I leaned back in my chair and glared at him.
“Have it your way,” he said. William started to pace
around the room while stroking his chin theatrically. “You
were actually born to a convent of nuns, but you had a sex
change and escaped years ago. Now they’ve found you, and
they’re coming for your penis? Pun intended,” he added with a
wiggle of his eyebrows.
“That’s…” I closed my mouth and shook my head. “What
kind of person even comes up with something like that?”
 “No? Okay, I got it. Hold on. You witnessed an alien
abduction when you were a kid. Up until yesterday, you
thought it was all just some weird dream induced by the
aggressive case of chronic diarrhea you suffered from—and
still suffer from to this day. But yesterday, those little green
men came back, and now your world is shaken. Why? Because
you’ve secretly harbored romantic feelings for them this whole
time, and now you’ll have to face your budding sexuality for
the first time.”
“Are you seriously going to keep this up unless I tell you?”
“Hmm. Not right, either? Okay, this time I really have it. It
all started in the African jungles seven years ago when you
found yourself trapped deep in the wrinkly clutches of an
elephant’s rectum. With no hope of escape, you realized the
only choice you had was to go deeper. Only you went too
deep. You dreamed too big, and now you can’t—”
“I give up,” I said. “I’ll tell you because I don’t think I can
survive much more of this. I’ve been in a little bit of a dating
rut for the past couple years, and—”
“Let me stop you there, partner.” William held up his left
hand and pointed to his wedding band. “I’m flattered. Really.
But one, I have a strict no sword crossing rule. And two? I’m
spoken for.”
“Are you finished?”
He took a second to think about that, then shrugged.
“I invited this girl to a party last night. An old…
acquaintance of mine ended up offering to represent her.
Except he’s a piece of shit, who uses his job like a pick-up
service. All he cares about is sleeping with his clients and
employees. His father is also one of the most powerful men in
the industry, and he could ruin my career if he wanted. He
actually took the opportunity to remind me of that fact, too. He
said if I so much as breathed a word of the truth to her, he’d
ruin me, and everything I’d ever touched.”
“Can I guess again?”
“Is it going to matter if I say ‘no’?”
 William resumed pacing the room. He stopped and pointed
at me. “Got it. Instead of doing the logical thing, which would
be explaining to her why she shouldn’t work with this goon,
you just vaguely implied she shouldn’t. In the process, you
looked like a jealous asshole.”
I sighed. “Not exactly. I just didn’t get to the point fast
enough. She cut me off and stormed away from the party. Now
she wants nothing to do with me, and after having some time
to think it over, I’m not sure I can tell her the truth. I was
ready to last night, but shit. It’s not just my ass on the line,
here. Your wife, my brother… everybody I represent. Besides,
she made her choice, and I need to respect that.”
“I may not know you that well, but you remind me a little
of my brother. Not as bad as him, obviously, but a little. You
know what Bruce’s problem was? He nearly let the best thing
that ever happened to him slip by because he was too worried
about how it could go wrong. Just something to think about.
And I’ve got Hailey’s back. If needle dick comes after her,
he’s going to realize real fast that his daddy’s big, scary dick in
the publishing world is nothing compared to my big, scary
dick.”
I squinted at William. “What?”
William cleared his throat. “Yeah. That didn’t come out
exactly how I intended. The point is not to worry about Hailey.
You do what you have to do.”
“I’m not worried. I’m realistic. I screwed up, and I blew
my chance.”
“All I’m saying is you’re making a classic mistake. It’s a
simple misunderstanding. You find a way to explain to her
why you were acting that way, and who knows, she might
forgive you.”
I sighed. “Thank you, William. I think if I dig through the
stupid, you actually make some good points. Except the truth
is going to be a lot less convincing now that I’ve waited this
long. It’s going to look like I made it up because I’m jealous.
And it’s not quite the classic mistake. The reason I can’t
explain the misunderstanding is that a narcissistic daddy’s boy
is threatening to destroy me if I do.”
“You know the funny thing about truth is that it’s like raw
chicken. You can hide it. You can freeze it. You can bury it,
but eventually, that shit starts to smell. Bad. One day the
power will go out, and that frozen, nasty ass chicken will stink
up the house. Your girl will come home and want to know
what the hell is with that stench. And you’ll be standing there
like an idiot, twiddling your thumbs, saying you just didn’t get
around to putting it in the trashcan when you should’ve, five
years ago.”
I narrowed my eyes. “The truth is like raw chicken…”
William looked impatient. “You’re stuck on that part? I
thought you were supposed to be a smart guy.”
“I get it, I just…” I sighed. “I think I’m just offended that
what you’re saying makes sense. Kind of.”
“Yeah,” William said. “I get that a lot. Anyway. Throw that
chicken out, or it’s going to stink. I promise you that.” He
winked, then left, closing the door behind him.
I tapped my fingers on my desk in annoyance and started
toward my door. I hated to admit it, but William’s words kept
ringing in my head—the idea of getting so fixated on what
could go wrong that I could let something good pass me by.
He also had a point about hiding the truth from Nell. Except, I
could only see two outcomes. One was telling her the truth too
soon and looking like the jealous asshole she already assumed
I was. That path almost surely would be the end of my chances
with her, if I still had any left. The other option was holding
the truth back until the right time—only as long as it took to
regain her trust enough to survive the backlash from the truth.
Damn it. I’d never made a habit of doing stupid things, but
I had a feeling I was about to set out on a path that was lined
with stupid decision after stupid decision. I straightened my tie
and got up to leave.
 9

NELL

I met Damian at his offices in downtown New York. I’d

been expecting an art agent to work in some dingy, small
building. Instead, I found myself looking out the windows of a
skyscraper that had amazing views of the city. The decorations
were very modern and… artsy. There was a giant, metallic
jelly bean by the elevators, a hanging arrangement of
something that looked like ramen noodles, and countless eye-
catching pictures on the walls, one of which appeared to be a
vagina that was also a doorway to another dimension full of
vagina-shaped galaxies.
Apparently, my big green penis was right up the art
world’s alley—like the perfectly shaped key to open all the
vagina doors in this business. How poetic.
I felt a slight pang of sadness to actually be in a place like
this under the circumstance. I thought back to that day in high
school, when my art teacher had almost thoroughly convinced
me to give up that particular dream. I’d still guiltily held a
fragment of it inside, like a little ember that I was careful not
to let it catch and grow into a flame. It was a silly, stupid
dream, but it was the one I’d never completely let go of.
And now I was here, except it was because of a fluke
instead of somebody actually appreciating my art.
The room itself was extremely open, which let me
immediately see that Damian only shared the floor with a
couple of other people. Judging from the way his glass-walled
office was tucked in the corner and everybody else was
scattered across the open space at white desks, I assumed
Damian was in charge here. That was also a slight surprise. I’d
been expecting him to be one of many people manning a desk,
maybe in a cubicle.
He came out to greet me a few moments after I left the
elevator. He reached to shake my hand softly but cupped it in
both of his big hands and smiled warmly. “Nell. I’m so glad
you decided to come.”
“Thanks,” I said a little sheepishly. “Me too.” In reality, I
hoped I’d be glad that I came. The jury was still out on that
one. All I knew was that my little blow up last night had
probably cost me my shot with Harry. I just needed to make
sure I remembered that it was likely for the best. Even if Harry
was an upgrade on Chuck in the looks, personality, and money
departments, I needed another jealous boyfriend in my life like
I needed a pair of testicles. For the record, testicles seemed to
require way too much adjustment and scratching to be worth
all the hype, so, no, I did not need them.
I also needed to remember that Ashley’s future was more
important than some romantic fling I might be missing out on.
I could do this, if not for me, then for her.
“Come on, we can talk in my office.”
I caught the brief look he threw to the rest of the floor,
where his staff—predominantly young, pretty women—were
shooting me death glares. That made the second time in two
days that I’d suffered from a group glare. Once had been at
Harry’s party when every woman there seemed to assume I
was trying to seduce or manipulate him. Now here? I’d
understood the party, but I thought it wasn’t a good sign if
Damian’s employees were looking at me like I was
competition—and maybe not in a business sense.
He closed the door of his office. Considering the walls
were completely glass, it just meant we couldn’t be overheard.
Damian leaned against the front of his desk and gestured for
me to take the chair that was uncomfortably close to him.
“I know this is all really new for you,” Damian said. “But I
had an idea for how we could make the transition easier.”
 “Okay,” I said. I awkwardly slid into the chair, which
involved arching my back a little so I didn’t brush against his
legs. Once I was in the chair, I tried to quietly scoot it back,
but the metal legs made a loud, screeching noise against the
floor. I cleared my throat and folded my hands in my lap.
Damian smirked, then continued. “We’ll skip the contracts
and fancy paperwork for now. How about you just let me
coach you up for this gala and represent your best interests.
We won’t even talk about a contract unless I get you an offer
you like.”
“Really?” I asked. “Do you do that for all your new
clients?”
“Only the pretty ones.”
I felt myself blushing. My emotions were more than a little
conflicted. I had no reason to feel like I “belonged” to Harry
Barnidge in any way, but whatever was happening with
Damian felt wrong. It felt like a betrayal. I wasn’t sure if the
compliment was his attempt at hitting on me, or if he was just
doing the typical salesman thing and trying to be charming.
Whatever it was, I decided the smartest move was to show no
reaction.
“Sorry,” Damian said with an easy chuckle. “I have a bad
habit of speaking before I think. Won’t happen again, I
promise. This is strictly business, and I don’t need to give you
any reasons to think otherwise.”
I smiled and nodded. “Where do we start?”
“Image,” he said. “If you were born a few hundred years
ago, you could sell your art based on the art. Today, though?
You’re selling the idea of yourself almost as much as the art.
The bright hair is a nice touch, but I think something even
bolder might work. After all, you’re the cockitecht now, and
we need to convince people you’re ready to make a
statement.”
I frowned. I hadn’t expected the strategy to go in that
direction. “I’m not sure I really feel comfortable changing the
way I look to…” I shook my head. “I don’t know. It just seems
so fake.” Then again, what had it been when I bullshitted my
way through the conversation with Maya North back at the
party? It wasn’t even really that different from what Harry had
done to sell books for his clients. If anything, it was worse.
And would I be able to look Ashley in the face and tell her I
could’ve got the money to put her through school, but I was
too stubborn to dye my hair?
“You’ve got to decide how you want to tackle this,”
Damian said. “It’s your choice, at the end of the day. But I will
tell you this much: if success were easy, everybody would do
it. You’re at the beginning of a new chapter in your life. The
only thing I can guarantee you is that the fastest path to failure
is choosing the path of least resistance. Easy doesn’t make
winners, Nell. Winners do what it takes, especially when it’s
hard.”
I stared at the ground, feeling my nostrils flare as I thought
his words over. I’d tried failing. I’d tried it way more than I
liked to admit, and I was ready to win for once. If it meant
telling some white lies about myself and dying my hair again,
was that really such a big deal?
“Oh, and there’s a party tonight that I really think you
should come to. I can have your bush brought there. What?”
Damian asked suddenly. “What’s so funny?”
“Sorry. It’s just the whole bush thing. It…” I trailed off
when I saw he had no idea why I thought it would be remotely
funny. Harry would’ve laughed with me. That thought bubbled
up like an unwelcome burp—not that somebody with my
ladylike tendencies personally understood what it was like to
burp, that was. Stop it, Nell. Even if I was wrong about Harry,
this whole ridiculous bush thing was my shot at changing my
life for the better. I needed to stay focused if I didn’t want to
screw it up. All I had to do was remember that I had two
choices. On the one hand, I could worry about chasing some
chemistry I’d felt with Harry Barnidge. On the other hand, I
could stay focused on this art thing for a couple weeks and end
up earning enough money to change my life.
“Anyway,” Damian said. “I’ll send a stylist to your place
in a couple hours if that works. We can meet for a late lunch,
and I’ll give you a game plan for what to say at the party.”
“O-okay.”
“Great. Oh,” he said, standing up suddenly and reaching
for his wallet. “Here’s some cash to get you started.”
“Started on what?” I asked. My eyes widened when he
fished out a handful of hundred-dollar bills and extended them
toward me.
“Looking like you’re worth the kind of money we’re going
to be asking for that piece.”
I flinched back from the money. “I can’t take that.”
“Lesson one,” he said seriously. “If you want to demand
serious money for your work, the first step is believing you
deserve every penny of it. Take the money.”
I hesitated. “Maybe that can wait until we figure out if
somebody is actually going to buy the piece.”
“Seriously? Nell. It’s just money. Take it.”
I wanted to say no. My gut was telling me to say no.
Instead, I reached out and took the money before slowly
sliding it into my purse, as if moving slowly could somehow
reduce the effects of the guilt. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.
I tried to tell myself it was for Ashley’s college, but that
didn’t help either. I still felt like crap.
I stood up, then paused, reaching in my wallet for the
money. Damian put his hand on mine and shook his head.
“Keep it. I’ll be offended if you don’t, okay? Think of it as
an advance on the money you’re going to make because trust
me, you’re going to make money off that sculpture. Maya
North’s personal invitation to the gala automatically gives
your piece value. My job is to crank that value up to the
absolute limit.” He smiled. “Now, go relax a little. You’ve got
a big day ahead of you.”
I grudgingly walked to the door of his office and yanked
hard a few times, made a frustrated noise, then turned to face
him. “Why is this locked?”
 Damian was smirking. “Did you try pushing?”
I indignantly turned back and realized that, sure enough,
the door opened easily when I pushed. Of course, it did.
In an instant, it felt like everything that happened since
meeting Harry crashed down on me at once. I was so far in
over my head that I’d popped out on the other side. I needed a
long bath and some mindless TV show time, and I needed it
bad.
One thing was for sure. I needed to be extremely careful
around Damian Cross. I only wished I knew if he wanted to
exploit me for money, fame, or something far worse.
 10

HARRY

I practically jumped out of my car when I saw Nell leaving

Damian’s building. She was wide-eyed and walking like
she was in a daze. I jogged across an intersection and got
honked at a few times before I caught up with her on the
sidewalk.
“Nell.”
“Harry? What are you—wait, did you follow me?”
“No. No, of course not. I just knew where you’d be and
waited… Damn. That actually doesn’t sound a whole lot better
when I hear it out loud.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to be pissed, but
she let out a sigh and a smile. “Do I want to know why you’re
stalking me now?”
“Aside from the obvious reasons? To apologize, for
starters.” I desperately wanted to tell her everything I knew
about Damian Cross right then and there—that he had a
reputation in the business for hiring young, attractive women
just to sleep with them. Moreover, I wanted to explain that
Damian had about a thousand reasons to want something to
use against me as leverage. Granted, he hadn’t exactly hired
Nell, but I seriously doubted he cared if the pretty young
woman was a client or an employee. Damian was a dog, and
Nell deserved better. Maybe if I’d managed to keep my cool at
the party, I could’ve told her as much. Now I’d just look like a
jealous lunatic if I pushed the issue any more, so I made a
promise to myself to shut my mouth about it, despite what
William seemed to think I should do.
“Wait,” I said quickly. I thought I could sense that she was
about to make an excuse and leave me standing there. New
plan. “Just come grab a coffee with me. You can still be
irritated with me, but you’ll get a free drink and food out of
it.”
Nell tilted her head. “I do like free things, but I’m not a fan
of coffee.”
“Okay. What do you like?”
“Don’t judge me, but I’m kind of obsessed with
doughnuts.”
Ten minutes later, we were sitting across from each other
in a family owned doughnut shop. It was an awkward time of
day to go for doughnuts—a little too far past morning but not
quite lunchtime yet—which meant we mostly had the place to
ourselves. Some sixties music played softly over the radio.
“So, how’d things with Damian go?”
Nell gave me a sharp look.
I chuckled and held up my hands in innocence. “I’m not
asking because I’m jealous. I know it’s a big opportunity for
you, and I was curious. That’s all.” I felt guilty for lying. I was
absolutely asking because I was jealous. Yeah, I wanted what
was best for Nell. I just also happened to believe being as far
away from that douchebag was best for her. It was just some
more of William’s raw chicken that I was burying for later.
She relaxed, took a bite of her doughnut, and shrugged. “It
went weird, I guess? I’m actually supposed to get back to my
place in a couple hours to meet with a stylist. He says I should
dye my hair again and work on my image. After that, he
wanted to meet for lunch to talk over some more stuff about
the gala.”
Weird? What the hell did that mean? I clenched my fists
under the table. The idea that Damian had the nerve to tell Nell
to change her hair or anything else about herself pissed me off.
I had to remember that it wasn’t entirely outside the norm for
an agent. I didn’t worry about that sort of thing for my authors,
but I could imagine how it would matter to an artist. I could
see the logic if I really thought about it. Just calm down,
Harry. Stop being jealous of a woman you only met two days
ago, and don’t ruin this opportunity for her.
I even had to admit that Damian meeting her for lunch
later wouldn’t have made me raise an eyebrow if I didn’t think
he wanted to sleep with her. For all I knew, Damian was
playing it straight this time. I just needed to force myself to
stop jumping to the worst possible conclusions. More than
that, I needed to trust that I liked Nell because she was strong,
and she wasn’t like the woman Damian had tried to sink his
claws into before.
Strong or not, my growing feelings for Nell were going to
be a massive complication. Damian was the beloved son of
one of the biggest names in publishing. If he even suspected I
was trying to sabotage what he was doing with Nell, one call
to his father could get me blacklisted by more than half of the
publishers in the country. That also meant screwing my
brother over. I needed to seriously consider what I was willing
to do for a woman I’d just met, no matter how much I already
liked her. Liking her wasn’t dangerous on its own, but I’d have
to be extremely careful about how I handled the Damian
situation going forward.
“I guess that gives me a couple hours with you, then.” I
hoped the smile I wore wasn’t too obviously forced.
“I know this is direct, but what’s going on between us? I
mean, I never really got a solid sense of what the invitation to
the party was. Then the next minute, you were practically
ready to punch Damian in the face for offering to represent
me.” Nell said.
I found myself studying her. She was wearing a sleeveless,
silky blouse and tight, khaki slacks. It was a simple outfit, but
her olive skin and bright orange hair made it all seem more
eye-catching than it should’ve been. “You’re right. That is
direct, but I happen to like direct. It beats watered down small
talk, at least.”
 “Then you won’t mind me pointing out that you’re not
answering my direct question.”
I couldn’t help smiling. She was right, of course. “Force of
habit, I think. I guess the only way to answer is to be equally
direct. I’ve had bad luck with women, and I tried to convince
myself staying away would be simpler at first. But I came
back and invited you to the party because I decided you were
worth a few complications.”
She looked thoughtful as she sipped at her soda. She
swallowed, then a slow smile spread across her full lips.
“While we’re telling the truth. Why don’t you tell me this…
Would you like me if it wasn’t for my bush?”
I laughed. “I’m not going to pretend that I have no interest
in your… bush.” I paused because I couldn’t stop from
picturing what it’d look like to unzip her pants—to pull down
the elastic of her underwear and… I pushed the thought from
my mind. “But I was hoping to get to know more about the
rest of you.”
She raised a playful eyebrow. “What, like whether I prefer
fluffy beds or hard beds?”
Excitement pulsed through me. I was starting to feel that
same easiness in her that had attracted me in the gardens.
“Well,” I said carefully. I knew flirting was a risk, but I also
couldn’t help myself. “That depends. Do you want me to learn
from what you say, or what you imply?”
Nell furrowed her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“People say the most interesting things between the lines.
For instance, you asked me if I was interested in more than
your bush. Your next question was about your preference of
bed types. Somebody could be forgiven if they assumed your
thoughts were coming from a dark and dirty place.”
Nell’s cheeks reddened. “Or it could be a coincidence.”
“Just like the coincidence where you accidentally turned
my bush into a giant penis right after having a conversation
with me?”
“What are you implying?”
 “That you had something other than work on your mind.”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t want this to come out
wrong, but I can’t do this.”
I inwardly cringed but made sure to keep my face neutral.
“Do what?”
She waved her finger between the two of us. “This thing.
Whatever it is. Maybe if I’d met you a year ago or two years
ago, it would be different. But I’m out of time for screwing up.
I can’t just keep plowing forward and saying ‘oh, well’ when
things don’t work out. So I just…” She stood, shouldered her
purse, and shook her head. “I’m sorry. But I really should go.”
Part of me almost let it happen. She was halfway across
the little doughnut shop, and she’d be outside in a few
seconds. All I had to do to secure my career was to stay right
the hell where I was. It was that simple. A couple days ago, I
didn’t even know if I’d ever bother dating again. I only needed
to wait a few minutes, and everything could go back to how it
was.
I gripped the handle of my coffee cup and watched as she
tried to hail a cab.
All I needed to do was wait. Let her go. Just let her walk
away. It would probably be better for both of us.

I put my hand on Nell’s shoulder.

She swung around and blasted me with a right hook that
would’ve made Mike Tyson jealous. I blinked through
watering eyes and worked the blazing pain out of my jaw with
a few careful movements as I took a step backward. Jesus
Christ.
“Oh my God,” she said, clapping her hands to her cheeks.
“Self-defense classes? And steroids?” I asked.
Nell looked like she was torn between horror and
amusement. She bit her lip as she reached to touch the spot
where she’d hit me.
 I clearly had misunderstood what the phrase “hitting like a
girl” meant for my entire life. Apparently, it meant you hit so
hard that you could knock the paint off a firetruck.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” Nell said.
She was holding back laughter now.
“Yeah, especially not when that somebody is secretly a
professional boxer.”
She flashed that crooked smile of hers. “Did it occur to
you that you might just not be able to take a punch?” Nell’s
eyes widened slightly, and she delicately touched the
throbbing spot on my cheek. “Actually, that’s already swelling
and turning blue. Maybe I really did hit you that hard.”
I laughed. “Yeah, well, I was coming out here to try to
change your mind. Now I can play the pity card to make you
let me give you a ride home.”
“You sure you’re not scared to be alone with me after
that?” She made a fist and mockingly put her hands up like she
might take another shot at me.
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take. What do you say?”

Nell’s place was half an hour outside the city, which gave us
plenty of time to awkwardly not talk about much of anything.
Nell occasionally pointed towards an exit or a street for me to
turn off on.
The uncomfortable silence gave me plenty of time to think.
Mostly, I thought about what was holding Nell back. Most
women made no secret that they wanted to date me. I wasn’t
bad looking, I had a successful career, and I was loaded. For
everybody I’d ever met since making my fortune, that had
been enough. It never mattered if I misspoke or if I made a
mistake. They were always willing to forgive me because they
thought I was a catch. It was a big reason I’d become so bitter
about dating.
Part of what intrigued me with Nell was how hard she was
trying to keep me at arm’s length. I knew from the looks in her
eyes that it wasn’t an easy battle. Part of her wanted to like
me. So why was she fighting so hard to hold her feelings
back? I didn’t want her to care about my money, but I also
wanted to know why she seemed to be the only woman I’d
met who didn’t.
My own thoughts were a mess. Half of me was ready to
pull over and order her to jump out of the car. I was risking my
career, and everyone’s I cared about by going up against
Damian and his father—and I had no doubt about that
anymore, continuing to pursue Nell, let alone talk to her, was
going to piss off Damian.
The other half of me relished the idea of the fight. Fuck
Damian Cross and his powerful daddy. I was one of the best
literary agents in the country, and even if I were blacklisted by
all the top publishers, I’d find a way.
“You okay?” Nell asked.
Her question startled me. “Do I look like I’m not?”
“You look like you’re trying to choke the life out of your
steering wheel.”
I forced myself to relax my grip a little. “I’m fine. I just get
nervous around pretty women.” I inwardly cringed. I just get
nervous around pretty women? Was that really what I was
going with?
Nell looked away.
I wanted to kick myself in the balls. I wasn’t used to
playing from behind, and apparently, my lack of practice was
showing. “So,” I said. “Are you planning to keep working for
the Gardening Gnome?”
She nodded. “I got my boss to give me a week off. I didn’t
want to officially quit until I knew if somebody was actually
going to buy the bush like Maya thinks.”
“Maya North is a big name in the art world. Based on her
reaction, I’d say it’s a safe bet. Not that I’m voting for you to
quit the gardening gig, that is. It sounds like you’re pretty
passionate about it.”
 Nell looked over at me, and I couldn’t say for sure, but I
thought she was holding something back. She chewed her lip,
then looked down at her lap. “Yeah,” she said. “I actually used
to think I wanted to be a sculptor when I was a kid, but my
high school art teacher practically begged me to give that up,
so…”
“Wait, really?” I asked. “What kind of art teacher tells kids
to give up?”
“A realistic one? I think her exact words were ‘you
couldn’t properly sculpt the broad side of a barn if I gave you
a mold for it.’”
I squinted. “What?”
“Like… Never mind,” Nell shook her head and studied her
lap. “What about you? When you’re not throwing fancy
parties, what do you do for fun?”
“Hunting, sports, pretty much anything outdoors.”
She tilted her head like she was trying to imagine that side
of me. I couldn’t blame her. She had seen me buttoned up and
proper. In a lot of ways, she didn’t even know the real me.
“My uncle used to take me fishing,” she said. “It was
always kind of nice, but I felt bad when we actually caught
fish. So I just dangled a line with no hook in the water.”
I laughed. “You might like hunting, too. We could just use
paintball guns or something if you didn’t want to kill the
animals.”
“Is that a thing?” she asked. “Paintball gun hunting?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
She looked suddenly uncomfortable.
“Sor—” I cut myself off and gritted my teeth. Why did it
always feel like I was apologizing to her? “Hey, look,” I said.
“I get that I got off on the wrong foot with you at the party.
The whole thing with Damian… I was an ass. I knew the guy
from way back, and I was competitive. It was stupid, and it
won’t happen again.”
 Nell studied me. I’d given her less than a half-truth, but I
hoped it was at least a step in the right direction. In my head, I
was telling her as much as I possibly could, and I had to cross
my fingers that she could tell I was trying to be open with her.
“Okay,” she said. “I believe you. And I get it. I’m sorry I
stormed off, too. I had a bad experience with a jealous
boyfriend, and it’s still pretty recent. So I’m extra sensitive in
that department.”
Great. Not only had I made an ass of myself, but I’d gone
and accidentally triggered what sounded like her biggest red
flag. I knew I was taking a dangerous step by trying to mend
the damage with a lie, but I was reasonably sure I’d only do
more damage with the truth. How would it sound if I tried to
throw Damian under the bus, especially if I explained how
much was personally at stake for me? She’d just think I was
trying to talk her into breaking things off with him to protect
myself.
I may not like it, but lying—no, withholding the truth—
was my best option for now.
“Is this it?” I asked, pointing to a sign for an apartment
complex off a busy commercial road.
“Yep. This is my crib.”
I pulled into the parking lot out front. I hadn’t been
wealthy for my whole life, so looking at Nell’s apartment
complex didn’t feel precisely like culture shock. Instead, I
only felt a deep, pulsing desire to get her out of here. The
building was crusted with mold, and the cars in the parking lot
were battered, sun-bleached, and old. Two guys in white tank
tops were huddled by the side of the building with their heads
close together.
“I’ll walk you up,” I said suddenly.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No. I insist.”
Nell didn’t protest again as she led me up the three flights
of stairs to her floor. We traveled down a short hallway, and
then I waited while she had to jiggle and force her key into the
lock.
“It gets stuck sometimes. Just takes—” she grunted with
effort and finally got the key to slam into the hole. “Some
convincing.”
She opened the door just barely a crack and then turned to
smile awkwardly at me. “Well.”
“Well…”
“I’d better get going. Damian did say he was going to have
a stylist coming by.”
“Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t move.
Nell laughed, then smiled. “This is usually the part where
you kind of just walk off, I think.”
“That’s one version of how it goes. The other is you
inviting me in.”
Nell’s face went white. I immediately regretted what I’d
said. As much as I thought I’d felt the chemistry between us
rekindling, her reaction told me I’d completely misread her.
“Right.” I shook my head and laughed softly at myself.
“When it comes to you, I apparently have a serious case of
foot in mouth. I’ll just—”
“Uh, wait.” Nell sucked in a deep breath and blew it out as
she looked toward her door. “Wait here a second.” She
slammed the door in my face.
I stood there, feeling confused until I heard the rattle and
thump of somebody hastily cleaning up. Plates clattered in the
sink, from the sound of it, and then something heavy thudded
down on the floor. I heard a muffled “shitttt,” followed by
several long, hissing intakes of breath. After nearly a minute,
Nell opened the door again. She was rubbing her knee and
wincing. “Well, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t at
least offer you a bag of frozen peas after punching you in the
face?”
 11

NELL

H arry didn’t look like he fit in my apartment—

figuratively or literally. He must’ve been pushing six
feet and four inches, maybe taller, which made the already low
ceilings look practically cave-like. Then there was the casual
way everything about him seemed to scream money: his
clothes, his hair, even his skin. It was like you could’ve
covered him in mud, thrown him in a cardboard box, and it
still would’ve been obvious that he was somebody who had
done great things and was still destined to do more.
And he was standing on a pair of my panties that were
waiting to go to the laundromat a few blocks over.
I cleared my throat and motioned for him to move toward
the couch. I hoped he wouldn’t look down or behind him to
see the pile of clothes Davey and I had built up for our weekly
laundry trip. Once Harry took a step toward the couch, I
kicked the panties into the pile and moved one of Davey’s
shirts to cover them.
“I know it’s really depressing in here,” I said. I bent down
and shoved a pile of newspaper pages that Davey had left
scattered on the couch. He loved reading the paper, but he also
never understood how to put it back together when he was
done.
“Woah,” Harry asked. He moved to the closet where I’d
stuffed all my sculptures in and tried to jam the door closed
before he came in. He picked a clay sculpture up and turned it
slowly with a confused look on his face. “Is this a woman, or
is it a…”
I took it from his hand, shoved it back in the closet, and
rammed my shoulder into the door until it closed. “Sorry it’s
such a mess in here,” I said, hoping to distract him and avoid
explaining my closet full of crappy art.
“Don’t apologize,” Harry said. “I didn’t always live in a
stuffy mansion with butlers.”
“Wait, you have butlers?”
“Would this be a bad time to announce that I’m in the
room?” Davey asked.
He pulled back the thin curtain that covered the corner
where his bed was stashed.
I had been about to sit down, but the sound of Davey’s
voice made me half-jump. My foot caught on the coffee table
and caused me to nearly topple to the ground.
Davey, who had an unfortunate habit of being overly
dramatic, charged from where he had been sitting on his bed
and tried to jump over the back of the couch. I wasn’t sure
what his plan was—rescue, maybe—but it ended when his
stubby legs couldn’t clear the sofa, and he ended up flipping
over to crash on Harry, who had just sat down.
I put my hands to my head, not sure if I should laugh or
cry. “By the way,” I said softly. “I have a roommate.”
Harry had to do a kind of shoulder press move to get
Davey off of him. I didn’t fail to notice the way Harry’s
muscles flexed and strained against his black shirt as he did,
either. Davey flopped to the couch where Harry dropped him
and struck a kind of laying down pose with one hand under his
cheek and the other on his hip. He looked at me and wiggled
his eyebrows. “He’s strong. Oh, damn. What happened to his
face?”
“Davey,” I said warningly. Unfortunately, there was a
decent sized lump on Harry’s cheek that was already turning a
shade of blue. I was absolutely not going to admit that one of
my hobbies during college had been playing the Wii boxing
game. Apparently, all those hours of cardio throwing punches
at my TV screen had given me some unexpected power.
Harry got up with his hair in disarray. Of course, the messy
hair just made me think about how good he’d look after a little
rough and tumble time in the sheets. “And you’re heavier than
you look.”
Davey shrugged nonchalantly. “You know what they say.
Muscle weighs more than fat.”
Harry grinned. “Right.”
“Davey, could you please… just…”
“Drinks?” he asked, popping up. “We’ve got ice water, hot
water, room temperature water…” he rummaged through the
cabinets and held up a salt shaker. “Saltwater?”
“Ice water would be good,” Harry said.
Davey pulled open the freezer. “Scratch that. The ice
machine is broken again. I could just blow on it for a few
minutes. What was that trick you taught me, Nell? When you
breathe, hoo, it’s cold, and haa is hot? Or was it the other way
around?”
I was blushing so hard I thought my cheeks might just melt
right off my face at any second. I was going to kill Davey
when this was over. Slowly. Maybe I’d even buy some of
those metal paddle things off the internet so I could bring him
back a few times and kill him again.
Davey walked over to Harry while blowing on a glass of
tap water. Harry took the glass, gave it a distrustful look, and
set it beside the couch.
“How do you two know each other, exactly?” Harry asked.
“Friends since Kindergarten,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Davey said. He walked over and put his
arm around me like we were drinking buddies. “The fact that
we’ve been friends a long time is just the tip of the iceberg.
I’ve been there for Nell through thick and thin. Crazy ex-
boyfriends. Stomach troubles,” he added with a meaningful
look.
 I stomped on his toes and gave him my best glare. I tried to
talk quietly without moving my lips. “You can leave through
the door or the window. You pick.”
Davey sized me up, decided I was at least annoyed enough
to make him regret pissing me off, and tipped an imaginary hat
toward Harry. “It was nice to meet you, but I think I hear my
friends calling me.”
Once the door closed, I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d
been holding. “I’m sorry about him. In his head, I think he
thinks he’s being protective. Only a guy who really likes me
would stay after he’s done. Or something like that,” I
muttered.
Harry gestured to himself on the couch. “Looks like I’m
still here.”
I blushed again. “Maybe you’re just waiting for those
frozen peas.”
“Actually, I was hoping I could talk to you about this
whole gala with Maya North thing.”
I stiffened but tried to look normal as I sat down on the
opposite end of the couch. “What about it?” I asked slowly.
“Damian Cross is… I’m sure he’s great at what he does.
But I also think there are some ways I could help you. My help
would be free, of course. I guess I just feel a sense of
obligation to help since it all started in my gardens.”
I nodded. I’d considered the potential for trouble if Harry
decided my art was ultimately made out of his bush. I couldn’t
be sure, but it felt like he was subtly trying to hint that he’d
make trouble if I didn’t agree. “Are you threatening me?” I
asked.
Harry reeled back. “What? No. Hell no.” He laughed.
“Jesus, what did Damian tell you?”
“Nothing. I’m just—I don’t know. This is all really new to
me, and it feels like I don’t know who I can trust anymore.”
“See? You really could use my help. I happen to have
professional and personal experience with that. All I’m asking
is that you have a few conversations with me. Let me give you
some general pointers and tips. That’s it.”
I chewed the idea over. I might feel conflicted about Harry
and how to handle him, but I wasn’t going to even try to deny
the attraction I had toward him. I needed to be careful that I
didn’t let myself throw away an opportunity for a romantic
flame. Ashley needed me to make this work, and I wouldn’t be
able to look her in the eye if I knew I’d risked her future for
my own selfish desires.
“You promise it will be strictly business?” I asked.
Harry drew an “x” over his heart. “Cross my heart.”
I grinned. “Okay. Fine. We can work something out.”
“Perfect. What about tonight?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. Remember? Damian has some
sort of party he wanted me to go to. And I’ve got lunch with
him.”
Harry swallowed and paused just long enough that I could
see he wasn’t thrilled about any of that. “Okay. Tomorrow,
then?”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed.
“You said your uncle used to take you fishing, right? Why
don’t we go out on my boat? No hooks,” he added quickly.
“Just fishing rods and empty lines. It’ll be less cliché than
meeting in a coffee shop.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That sounds a little bit like
blurring the lines between business and pleasure to me.”
“I’ll do my best to make sure it’s not pleasurable at all. No
fun.”
I bit back a smile. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good.” Harry stood up and reached to shake my hand. I
took it and shook, feeling more than a little awkward. He
looked like he wanted to say something but decided to keep it
to himself. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow.”
 I practically melted into the couch once he left. I didn’t
know what to think about our little fishing excursion
tomorrow. But I thought I’d seen a glint of something
dangerous in Harry—something that made me wonder if I was
really going to have to wait until tomorrow to see him again.
 12

HARRY

“D o I need to remind you this is a bad idea?” William

asked.
I straightened my tie and shook my head. We were
standing outside the Apex Hotel downtown. The entire lobby
had been rented out to host a huge party for all the big names
in art, from collectors to artists. William had enough of a
reputation that he’d been invited to the party. Once I found
out, I may have planted the idea for him to invite me.
“It’s only kind of a bad idea,” I said. “A really bad idea
would be trusting Damian Cross to be a decent human being.
For all I know, she’ll need me here to save her.”
“No. A really bad idea would be stalking the girl who
clearly has a pet peeve when it comes to jealous, possessive
guys. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I
happen to love watching chaos unfold, and you just gave me
front row tickets. I only thought it was my responsibility as
your friend to point out the obvious.”
I sighed. “Consider it pointed out. Let’s go. And you need
to stay close to me in case Nell catches me. Your job is to back
me up on the fact that you invited me and wanted me here as
an advisor.”
William made a tsk tsk sound. “I’d say I hope all these
little bits of raw chicken don’t catch up with you, but I
honestly can’t wait to watch the raw chicken hit the fan, either.
So please, keep it coming.”
 I glared. “Sometimes, the only way to do the right thing is
getting your hands dirty.”
William showed his ID to a man at the door who checked
it against a list, then nodded for us to proceed inside. “Getting
your hands dirty. Like two in the pink and one in the stink? Or
are you talking figuratively?”
“Figuratively,” I said through a tight jaw.
“Oh, look. There they are,” William said cheerily.
The lobby of the hotel was filled with art and wide, open
space. Nell and Damian were standing in a circle of people
who were talking excitedly. Nell’s hair was now a deep shade
of purple with a single streak of white. She still looked
beautiful, but I felt myself clenching my hands to think that
Damian had chosen it for her. It was as if he’d marked her, and
the idea made me want to go up to him and punch him, even if
it would’ve meant flushing my career down the toilet.
“Easy, Rambo,” William said. “If you want him to bleed
his own blood, you’ve got to be a little sneakier than that.”
I realized I’d taken a few steps toward them, and if
William hadn’t put a steadying hand on my arm, I might’ve
charged right into the group without a plan. “Come with me,” I
said.
William followed along as happily as a child on his way to
a playground. I found a big display of a woman’s breasts made
out of what looked like chrome. The nipples were glass
windows, and I discovered we could stand inside the breasts,
using the windows to keep an eye on Nell.
William whistled appreciatively. A woman nearby turned
her head, mistaking the noise for a catcall.
“Oh, no, no,” William said quickly. He held up his finger
and showed his wedding band. “Only one of us is single. But
this guy is trying to fix the whole single thing by spying on his
crush through that nipple window there.”
The woman—a young redhead wearing an attention-
grabbing green dress—frowned, then hurried off.
 “It sounds really bizarre when you announce it like that.”
“Maybe that’s because it is really bizarre? You really think
Nell is going to be less pissed that you’re spying on her
because she spots you inside giant metal boobs than if you
were just lurking in a corner?”
I inched closer to the window and peered through. “No,” I
said quietly. “The idea is that she doesn’t see me. The breasts
are for cover.”
“Breasts,” William scoffed. “You sound like a grandma.
Speaking of… She should’ve been here by now.”
“Who should’ve been here?” I asked, still whispering.
“Grammy. I told her it was going to be hilarious.”
I turned to glare at William. “You invited your grandma?”
“What? No. She’s Hailey’s grandma.”
Nell and Damian seemed to finish their conversation with
the group. Damian turned to say something to Nell once they
were alone again and put his hand on her arm as he laughed.
Nell was smiling. Was that a forced smile, or was she enjoying
it? Shit. I wasn’t close enough to tell.
“We need to get closer.”
William grinned. “Yeah. I totally agree. Maybe there are
some balls we can crawl inside? A rectum? You had
experience crawling into rectums, right? Or… Did I make up
the trapped in an anus story?”
I did my best to ignore him as I casually walked out from
behind the breasts and skirted the wall of the gallery.
Thankfully, the showroom was lined with sculptures and
strange art displays. I was able to move closer without ever
risking being seen. I pressed my back against a giant head
made out of suspended pieces of garbage on thin, clear strings.
William scooted in right beside me with a huge grin on his
face. “This is perfect. No way she’ll see you between all these
thousands of small gaps in the trash face.”
 An elderly woman wearing a huge pearl necklace and a
white dress casually walked up and squeezed herself in
between the two of us. She smelled like cotton candy, oddly
enough.
“Grammy,” William said happily. “You almost missed it. I
think he’s going to get caught soon.”
“No shit. He might as well be hiding behind a pane of
glass. Is your friend…” she made a vague gesture toward her
temple and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, definitely,” William said.
“At least he’s cute.” Grammy turned and made a kissing
gesture toward me.
I took a deep, calming breath and looked back toward
Damian and Nell. Except… shit. Where were they?
I hurried out from behind the trash head and nearly
bumped into Damian Cross’s chest.
“Harry?” Damian asked. “I didn’t expect to see you here.
And why are you walking like that?”
I cleared my throat and straightened my back. I hadn’t
realized I was crouch walking. “Tweaked my back the other
day,” I said. “Deadlifts.”
Damian nodded, but his furrowed eyebrows said he was
already suspicious of me.
I caught Nell coming back toward him from the other side
of the room. She must’ve gone to the restroom. She hadn’t
seen me yet, either. That was the precise moment it dawned on
me that I was being an idiot. I needed to get out of here before
she caught me and realized she’d been right not to trust me.
“Well,” I said, reaching out and patting his shoulder.
“Gotta go.”
I was turning to leave when Grammy joined us. “Hold on,”
she said. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend,
Harry? He’s kind of serial killer cute.”
 I caught a glimpse of William, who was wide-eyed and
smiling from a few feet away. Bastard.
“Harry?” Nell asked. “What are you doing here?”
Just tell the truth. No more lies. “I was…”
As if I needed help screwing things up more, William slid
himself into our quickly growing group. “Sorry. I dragged him
along. I was thinking of buying something vaginal. I hear
that’s really in right now. Vaginas. Breasts. You know, that
window nipple thing was pretty nice. It, uh, what was it you
said, Harry? It lets you really get inside the mind of a woman
and see through her nipples.”
“That’s not what I said.” My voice sounded weak and
unconvincing. I could’ve strangled him.
“I didn’t realize you’d tried to get into the art world,
Harry,” Damian said.
The look on Nell’s face was riddled with suspicion. I could
practically see how close she was to writing me out of her life
for good. Damn it. I knew I was only digging myself deeper in
the hole, but I also knew I could fix this. I just needed some
more time to figure out the right way to come clean about
everything.
“A little,” I said.
William and Grammy shared a gleeful look. The assholes
were obviously demented, and they knew exactly what was
happening and were relishing in it.
“Were you going to ignore me all night?” Nell asked.
“I didn’t want to get in your way. I know this is a big night
for you. I was actually kind of hoping you wouldn’t notice
me.”
“Oh,” she said. From the look on her face, I saw that she
had completely bought my story, and I almost wished she
hadn’t.
“Well, William and I were just going to go check out those
testicles,” I said. “He was really hoping to get a pair. It’d be a
new experience for him.”
 William waggled his finger at me. “I see what you did
there. Well played.”
“Okay,” Nell said. “Are we still on for tomorrow?”
I cringed a little, especially when I watched Damian’s
expression go from distrustful to outright hostile.
“What’s tomorrow?” Damian asked before I could answer.
“Harry was just offering to help me. Not officially, or
anything,” she added. She was clearly misunderstanding
Damian’s anger. Maybe she thought he was just worried about
me taking a cut of the profits. “But I mentioned how it was all
really overwhelming, and Harry said he could help talk me
through some of it.”
Damian subtly repositioned himself until it was like he’d
cut the rest of us out of the conversation by putting his
shoulder between Nell and us. He lowered his voice until I
could barely hear him. “Nell. I’m your agent, okay? You don’t
need to look for help outside our business relationship. My job
is to support you in any way you need.”
“Yeah,” I said loudly. “Except I already made
arrangements for tomorrow. So it’d be a little bit of a problem
if she canceled.”
Nell shot me a look that told me I was skirting the jealous
and obnoxious line again.
Damian said nothing, but I could see his jaw flexing as he
clenched his teeth.
“We’re still good for tomorrow,” Nell said.
I nodded. She hadn’t said as much, but there was a hint of
something in her tone. We’re good for tomorrow, but after
that, all bets are off.
I could’ve punched a lot of people right then. Damian.
William. Maybe even Grammy, if punching old ladies wasn’t
frowned upon, at least. Unfortunately, I knew the only person I
could really blame was myself. I was the idiot who kept
avoiding the full truth and managing to make things worse at
every turn. I needed to make sure I didn’t blow it tomorrow,
because I was fairly sure I’d run out of second chances when it
came to Nell.
“So,” Grammy said. “Are we all going to pretend there’s
not a giant bush penis and balls over there? Because I’m dying
to touch it. It’d be the second biggest penis I’ve ever had my
hands on, and God knows I want to strip Fred Billington of
that title.”
 13

NELL

I listened to the sound of the water lapping against Harry’s

boat. It was a pleasant sound, and it instantly brought me
back to all those years ago when my uncle would bring me out
to fish. Sometimes, Ashley would even come along. I had a
little moment of shock when my dark, purple hair blew across
my face. I was just barely getting used to the orange, as it was.
I watched Harry at the wheel on the boat and thought how
at home he looked there. He wasn’t dressed in the classic, rich
guy yacht casual gear. His outfit was just some jeans, boots,
and one of those weird fishing shirts that had an extra flap of
fabric on the back. He was also wearing a beat-up hat and
sunglasses. If it wasn’t for his proud, angular nose and the
clear genetic lottery he’d won with his facial structure, you
could almost mistake him for a normal, average guy out for a
fishing trip.
But I knew the truth about him. Harry was a big shot
agent, and Damian had taken the liberty of telling me that he’d
also been a notorious playboy a few years back. I tried to stop
myself from holding that against him, but I couldn’t help
wondering if he’d put the past behind him.
Harry caught me watching him. I did my patented move
when I got caught staring. I blinked, shifted my gaze before
my eyes opened, and then hoped he believed he’d just
imagined me staring.
“I’d ask if you want to take a picture, but it looks more like
you wanted to take a bite,” Harry said casually.
 My cheeks burned.
He smirked. “I’m just screwing with you. So stop looking
like you’re going to knife me as soon as I turn my back.”
Don’t mention the playboy thing, Nell. Don’t even think
about it. “So, is that a common problem for guys like you?”
I wanted to hang my head in shame. Really? I couldn’t
even hold it back for at least a few minutes?
“Guys like me?” he asked.
“It’s just that I heard you have a little bit of a reputation
when it comes to dating.”
Harry stiffened. “And who told you that, exactly?”
“Damian, but it wasn’t like he brought it up just to bring it
up. It kind of came up in conversation. I forget how.”
“Right,” Harry said. He stared ahead as he took us farther
offshore, clearly choosing his words carefully. “Well, Damian
didn’t give you the whole story. I wanted to find somebody to
share my life with. I know everybody probably thought I just
wanted a few nights of fun, but that was never my goal. So
every time a girl turned out to be shallow or a gold digger or
just not a match, I got more and more impatient. One day, I
decided I was done wasting my time. Women were just
complications and the right one wasn’t out there. So I swore it
all off.”
“I see,” I said. “So our strictly business fishing trip doesn’t
violate your oath, I guess?”
“No. But me asking you to come to my party did. And I’m
not sorry about it, either.”
I was sitting on a soft bench on the side of the small boat
and felt suddenly exposed. There was nowhere to hide out
here. How many times had I run from Harry now? How many
times had I decided it was easier to walk away than to face
reality? Out here, I was stuck. “I thought you promised I
wouldn’t enjoy this?”
“I could splash you with some water if you’re having too
much fun.”
 I laughed. “It’s hot enough that getting splashed might
only make me enjoy myself more. I have to be honest. Being
out here like this… It’s nice. The last few days have been
absolute insanity. All this art stuff has me feeling pretty
conflicted. And then there’s the image issue,” I said, holding
up a lock of my hair as if Harry hadn’t already noticed.
“Conflicted, how?” he asked.
It was a simple question, but somehow, he managed to
inject so much genuine compassion into it that I felt oddly
touched. Maybe I was deluding myself because he looked like
he’d been ripped straight out of some renaissance master’s
painting—if renaissance masters had known what sunglasses
and baseball caps were, at least.
“Uh,” I said, searching for the right words. “Conflicted
because I feel like a fraud, I guess? You and I both know I was
trying to turn that bush into something else. All this attention
is only because I made a mistake. If I do end up getting some
huge payout because of it, how can I justify that?”
Harry nodded thoughtfully. “You’re not a fraud. If you
were, you wouldn’t be having those doubts. And you can
justify it because people make their own value. It’s the same in
the literary world. A bad book can ride a hot trend to become a
bestseller. People are paying to be part of that trend. They
want to be able to talk about the ‘in’ book, even if it’s to say
how bad it was. That’s what they’re paying for. As the creator,
your job isn’t to feel guilty because somebody paid for your
work, it’s to do everything in your power to make your work
have value.”
“Even if it means lying?”
“You’re selling a story. I don’t really see how that’s
different than writing a book.”
I pursed my lips and sighed. “Because I’m selling a story
about myself. One that isn’t necessarily true.”
Harry frowned. “I think you’re worrying too much about
the rich bastards who might buy this thing, Nell. The kind of
people who go to Maya North’s gala are the kind of people
who could spend millions on a painting and forget to move it
from storage to their house for a few years.”
“That works for you? When you’re doing whatever it takes
to make a deal, I mean? It doesn’t eat away at you?”
Harry pulled the throttle back and killed the engine on the
boat. He stood there for a few moments, just gripping the
throttle and looking down. “It does,” he said. “So maybe you
shouldn’t take my advice, because I clearly haven’t really
figured out how to do this and still stay happy.”
“Hey,” I said, standing and putting my hand on his
shoulder. “I wasn’t trying to imply—”
Harry looked at my hand. His attention made me realize
how smooth and warm the muscle of his shoulder felt under
my hand. I’d meant it as a platonic gesture—just a natural
reaction to seeing somebody who looked upset—but it felt like
much more than that.
I shakily pulled my hand away.
Harry licked his lips. “Look. Nell. There’s something I
need to tell you.”
“You were at the party last night to keep an eye on me, and
that story you guys told was bullshit?” I asked.
Harry flinched back. “Uh… Yeah. That’s right. And I’m
sorry I lied to you. I was an idiot. Again.”
“Honestly, I didn’t mind that you were keeping an eye on
me. The part that bothers me is I believed you. It was only
after you left when Damian told me your friend hadn’t been to
an art show in years that it clicked. I’m afraid to get close to
you because I don’t know if I’ve ever really talked to the real
you.” I tried not to visibly pant for breath when I was finished.
I hadn’t planned to bear my soul, but the words had come
pouring out before my mind even had time to catch up. Once I
heard it all out loud, I knew it was true.
On paper, there was no reason for me to even be a little
reluctant about Harry. I should’ve wanted his attention so
desperately it hurt. Yet I’d been resistant at every step of the
way. I’d made him feel like he had to chase me, even though
I’d never been that type of woman. Now I saw that I just
didn’t want to be the fool again. I didn’t want to look back and
realize I’d been played all along—that everybody was
watching my downward spiral and shaking their heads,
wondering how I could possibly be so blind.
Harry sank down into the seat behind him. He slid off his
hat and sunglasses, letting them fall into his lap. When his
eyes rose up to meet mine, I saw raw determination in them.
“I’m going to air it all out,” he said. “No more lies and half-
truths. Because you’re right. I’ve given you no reason to trust
me.”
I mentally braced myself. I ran through a list of worst-case
confessions in my head at light speed. I decided the worst
possible thing he could say was that he was a serial killer who
liked to take people out to the middle of the ocean before
murdering them. Maybe he’d say he had no interest in a
relationship and had only been trying to sleep with me. Or—
“There was a reason I got so protective when Damian
offered to let you work with him. And it wasn’t jealousy.”
Harry started to say more, then stopped himself. “Okay. It was
jealousy, too. But I didn’t want you to work with Damian
Cross because he’s the one with the reputation. He sleeps with
every woman he works with. And last year, I had to peel him
off his girlfriend at the time when he was plastered drunk, and
she was asking him to stop. I kind of punched him in the face,
and he got his father, Nathaniel Cross, involved.”
I felt my eyebrows drawing together. Part of me was angry
that Harry hadn’t just lied about being at the party. He’d been
holding something this big back. But the information also
made everything else click more firmly into place. He wasn’t
just like Chuck. Trying to butt his way between Damian and
me had genuinely been because he was trying to protect me.
Except I stormed off before he had a chance to explain. After
that, he probably assumed I’d accuse him of making
everything up if he came clean.
“Nathaniel Cross?” I asked. I shelved my thoughts on
Harry and his secrecy for the moment. I could deal with that
later.
 “He’s sort of like a loan shark who masquerades as a
businessman. A lot of the major publishers in the country got
funding from him. Most didn’t know what he really was, but
by the time it became public knowledge, almost everybody
was tied up with Cross and his dirty contracts. He has the
industry by the balls, and he made sure to let me know that
when I punched out his son.”
“Wait. So were you hiding all of this from me because you
were afraid of losing your job, or because you were afraid of
how I’d react?”
“Both. But if my job were the most important thing to me,
I’d stay as far away from you as humanly possible. At least
until Damian had a chance to…”
I shivered, suddenly feeling sick. I stared out at the water
and tried to fight back tears. I wasn’t an easy crier. I cried
when sad things happened to animals and at those YouTube
videos of soldiers being reunited with their families.
Sometimes I cried when I cut onions, but only if I forgot the
trick about leaving the root intact.
Harry sat beside me and leaned in, concern plain on his
face. “I’m so sorry, Nell. I didn’t want to have this
conversation when you were stuck on a boat with me. I can
start taking us back to shore if you want.”
“No. I’m not crying because—” I wiped at my eyes and
cleared my throat. “I’m not crying at all, because I’m not that
emotional. But if I was crying a little, it would only be because
I thought I was doing the smart thing by keeping you at arm’s
length. I didn’t want to look back and realize I’d been getting
played the whole time. And now it turns out that I’m just as
stupid as I always was. I’ve been playing right into what
Damian would want this whole time, and in the process, I’ve
been pushing away the one person who actually cares about
me in this.”
Harry gave a slight shrug and brushed my cheek with his
thumb. “You might have been pushing a little, but I’m no saint
here. Yes, I care about you—more than it makes sense for me
to care about you when we only just met. But I’ve also been
dishonest. Maybe you’d be right to keep pushing me away.”
“Is that what you want?” I asked. “Because if I push you
away, you won’t risk pissing off Damian and his dad?”
Harry chuckled. “The thought crossed my mind. But it
didn’t last long. I’ve already found success. I’ve made money
and seen what that does for me. I’m still not happy, though.
When I’m with you, it feels like I get a glimpse of something
better. And I want to chase that, no matter what the cost is.”
I bit my lip and noticed that he was suddenly very close to
me, close enough that I could’ve counted each of his thick,
dark eyelashes. “I want to chase it too,” I said. It had sounded
like the romantic, proper thing to say in the moment, but once
I heard it out loud, I worried it was a little too vague. “That
thing you were talking about, I mean. The happiness.”
“Yeah,” Harry said. “I knew what you meant.”
I saw him leaning in to kiss me like it was slow motion. I
ran through all the ways this could go wrong, how it could be
a significant complication with Damian and his willingness to
help me sell the bush. I thought about how I might be getting
in way over my head with a guy like Harry. Most of all, I
thought about how selfish I was being for risking my sister’s
future because I had the hots for a guy.
I closed my eyes and felt my lips parting. I made a silent
promise to myself that I’d figure out a way to get through this
and still help Ashley. If I was honest with myself, I knew my
little sister would care more about my happiness than her
college fund, but that didn’t erase the guilt.
Harry’s lips met mine. For a fraction of a second, it was a
soft, polite kiss—almost as if he was trying to give me as
much time as he could bear to back out if I was having second
thoughts. As soon as I took his lower lip between mine and
kissed him back, he slid his big, strong hand up my neck and
gripped me by the hair.
My skin exploded in waves of prickling, scorching heat. In
the span of a few seconds, I knew I’d never kissed a guy like
this. Never.
Harry’s kisses kept crashing into me like a bombardment
of waves, each one stronger and more devastating than the
last. I imagined a sand castle on the beach with “self-control”
carved into the front wall. From up close, it had seemed like a
massive, nearly impenetrable fortress. But I saw now that
kissing Harry had brought in the tide—it had brought massive,
powerful waves that were going to wash away every last hint
of my resistance. The scariest part was that I welcomed it.
And then it felt like the world shook beneath me. My head
hit something hard and unyielding. I’d fallen to the deck,
sprawled out with Harry beside me.
He wasn’t kissing me anymore. That was the first thought.
“Why am I on the ground?” I asked. My voice sounded
groggy.
Harry got to his feet and looked over the edge of the boat.
“Because a whale headbutted us. Look.”
I stood up, touched my head again, and winced.
Harry frowned and took me by the shoulders, helping me
to sit. “Shit. You’re bleeding.”
“Blood?” I asked. “That’s not good. I faint when I see too
much blood.”
Harry licked his lips. “Uh. Maybe close your eyes.”
“But I wanted to see the whale.”
He laughed. “Real fast. Then we’re going back to shore
and getting that looked at.”
I turned my head, which felt like it was swimming a little.
When I leaned over the edge of the boat, I didn’t see anything
except a vague, dark shape under the water. If Harry hadn’t
told me it was a whale, I probably would’ve had a panic attack
and thought Jaws himself had come to bite our small boat in
two.
A single drop of bright red blood dripped from my
forehead and splashed in the water. I watched it swirl and
disintegrate. “Oh,” I said. “That’s my blood.”
 I felt Harry’s steadying hands on my shoulders just before
I slumped forward and passed out.
 14

HARRY

I felt good. I mean, aside from the part where kissing Nell
had turned into racing back to shore to get her to the
emergency room. Thankfully, the cut on her head had been
pretty shallow, but since it was on her forehead, it was
bleeding like crazy. I was more worried that she had a
concussion based on how woozy she’d looked standing up.
But I felt good because I came clean. Telling the truth had
felt like shrugging a giant boulder off my shoulders. So, while
I sat beside her as she slept in the hospital bed, I made a quiet
vow to myself that I’d always be honest with her from here on
out, especially when it wasn’t easy. Nell deserved that. I knew
most women would’ve pushed me over the boat after I
confessed what I did to her. It was just too bad that some
asshole of a whale had decided to interrupt us. God only knew
how far things would’ve gone if it hadn’t been for him.
Maybe it was for the best, though. If I’d slept with Nell on
the boat, I might’ve wondered if she was really in a state of
mind to make a decision like that. She was in the middle of a
crazy phase of her life, and I’d just upended it by telling her
the truth about Damian. I could forgive myself the kiss, but
anything more would’ve been questionable, to put it lightly.
Her friend, Davey, came into the doctor’s office with a
young, teenage girl at his side. I squinted in confusion for a
few seconds as I tried to figure out if she was his girlfriend. I
hoped not, because she didn’t quite look old enough to vote,
let alone date a guy in his twenties. Then I saw the
resemblance. She didn’t have crazy, dyed hair, but she had the
same upturned nose as Nell and the same bright, expressive
eyes. It must’ve been her sister.
“Hey,” I said as the two of them moved to her bedside.
“Is she going to make it?” the girl asked.
I laughed. “Yes. S just bumped her head. The doctor said
she’ll be fine, but she might have a concussion. She’ll just
need to take it easy for a couple of days to be safe.”
Davey nodded. “This is Ashley, by the way. Nell’s little
sister.”
Ashley gave a nervous smile and waved. “Are you her
boyfriend?”
Davey looked suddenly very interested and amused.
“Yeah, are you?”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
Ashley gave Davey a knowing smile. “Do you think
they’ve made it to first base?”
“Sorry,” Davey said. “I haven’t been in elementary school
in years. What happens at first base again?”
She glared, and I almost laughed at how similar to Nell she
looked right then. “I’m in high school. And just because
you’re a geezer, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what first
base is. Or maybe it’s because you’ve never made it that far.”
I put my hand to my mouth and covered my smile.
Apparently, Nell had rubbed off on her little sister.
Davey made a choking sound in his throat and crossed his
arms. “As we were saying. I think they’ve definitely hit first
base. But let me enlighten you from the perspective of
somebody older and much wiser than you, Ashley. Harry says
it’s complicated because they’ve committed a crime of
passion. They got lost in the moment, took things farther than
they were ready to, and now they aren’t sure where that leaves
them.”
“That’s pretty insightful for a virgin,” Ashley said.
I laughed. “I like her.”
 Davey rolled his eyes. “Yeah, just wait until she turns
those evil little kid eyes on you. Then maybe you won’t think
it’s so funny.”
Ashley looked to me and gave a little shrug. “Don’t worry.
You seem way cooler than Davey. I totally vote for you and
my sister getting married.”
“Is this a bad time to say I’m awake?” Nell asked.
Ashley leaned in and hugged her. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a whale knocked me down and gave me a
concussion.”
“Wait, he wasn’t kidding about the whale thing?” Davey
asked.
“It’s more common than you’d imagine on the open
water,” I said. “They don’t mean any harm by it. It’s more like
a playful thing.”
“Yeah,” Nell said. “Remind me not to play with whales
again.” She met my eyes, and I thought she must’ve been
remembering what we’d been doing right before she hit her
head. She looked down at her lap and tugged the blankets up
in the bed a little. “Hey, guys, do you mind giving Harry and I
a second alone?”
Ashley nudged Nell and wiggled her eyebrows. “He’s
really cute. Don’t screw this up for us.”
“Ashley. Please, go.” Nell said through tight lips.
Davey snorted. “Nell knows he’s cute, Ashley. She has
hardly stopped talking about what a ‘snack’ Harry is.”
I grinned to see how red Nell’s cheeks were getting.
Once Davey and Ashley were outside the room, Nell
sighed. “He’s exaggerating, by the way. I only said a few brief,
tasteful words of description when I met you that first time.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“Yeah,” Nell said. “She still lives with my parents, and my
parents are kind of done with me. So visitations are kind of
tricky. We mostly just Facetime each other.”
 “What happened with your parents?”
“Uh, well… It’s kind of a long story.”
I gestured to the quiet room around us. “Last I heard, you
aren’t supposed to go anywhere for a few hours.”
“My last boyfriend kind of sucked, to put it lightly. His
name was Chuck. I met him at a really low point in my life.
He was nice, and he made me feel better. I guess I started
latching onto him instead of fixing the real problems I had.
He’d compliment me and make me feel like I was important,
and I’d put up with all the issues he had. I knew where I’d go
back to if I broke up with him, and I think that fear kept me
shackled to him. Little by little, he got more possessive and
more jealous. At first, he just always wanted to know where I
was. I’d have to text him every time I hung out with friends.
Then he wanted me to text when I got there and when I was
leaving. Then he wanted me to get an app so he could track
my location.”
“Jesus,” I said. “No wonder you were ready to run when I
butted in between you and Damian.”
She laughed. “It gets worse, actually. He started saying I
shouldn’t need friends—that having friends was a form of
emotional cheating. He thought he should be the only person I
needed, and the only person I wanted to spend time with.”
Nell’s smile faded as she looked down and worked her fingers
together in her lap. “I probably sound so stupid for going
along with all of this, but it happened so gradually and so
subtly at first that I barely noticed.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not exactly the same, but I’ve seen
countless authors get manipulated in the same sort of way by
agents and publishers. Some people are really good at taking
advantage of people, and when those people are already going
through something, it’s even easier.”
“Thank you. It still feels embarrassing to talk about. And
maybe part of why I got so mad about the thing with Damian
was just because it reminded me of how blind I’d been. I was
just starting to get my self-respect back, and when I thought I
saw the faintest hint of Chuck in you, instinct took over.”
 “Don’t be embarrassed. The best people I know are only
who they are because they made mistakes, lived through them,
and learned from it. You hauling ass away from the party was
just proof that you’re not the same person he took advantage
of. You’re stronger now.”
She grinned. “I didn’t exactly ‘haul ass.’ It was more like a
fast walk.”
“Then you should compete in fast walking competitions
because you would’ve smoked the field.”
Nell laughed. “Yeah, well, the end of the Chuck story is
just that his final move was driving a wedge between my
parents and me. He convinced me it was their agenda to keep
me from getting into beauty school. I accused them of all sorts
of horrible things and went to beauty school, failed out, and
blamed them for it.”
“So, what happened to this Chuck guy?”
“I found out he was cheating on me, too.” She laughed. “I
guess he was so jealous because he’d been assuming I wanted
to do all the things he’d actually been doing.”
I found myself gripping the armrest of my chair tight
enough to make my fingers ache. “Where is he now?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why? Are you going to go punch
him for me?”
“Unless you tell me not to, that was kind of the plan.”
Nell smiled. “I don’t want anything to do with him, even if
it’s sending my terminator boyfriend to punch him in the
face.”
“Boyfriend?” I asked.
 15

NELL

I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do about Damian

Cross when I met him at his offices. I ran through my
battle plan while I rode the elevator up to his floor. I decided I
had a few options. One was to unleash my apparently
devastating punching power on him. The bruise Harry still
wore on his cheek was a testament to how much I could make
him regret thinking he would pull a fast one on me. Then
again, I hadn’t entirely confirmed he had bad intentions. Yes,
Harry had enlightened me about his scummy reputation. Yes,
all signs pointed to “beware of the dog,” but it probably
would’ve been premature to give him a taste of the old right
hook. For now.
My slightly more reasonable option was to thank him for
his help and excuse myself from his life. I could worry about
salvaging any bridges I might burn in the process later, but I’d
know there was no risk of Damian taking advantage of me in a
personal or business sense. Harry had voted for that option,
but I also couldn’t rule out the fact that as my newly minted
“boyfriend.” he was a little biased against keeping me within
spitting distance of Damian.
Mental note. Spitting on Damian didn’t sound like a half-
bad idea. Save that for later.
I finally decided on the boring option. Wait and see. The
truth was that simply knowing Damian was probably out for
blood meant I could have my guard up. If my guard was up,
what could he really manage to do? It would mean I still got to
take advantage of the personal relationship he had with Maya
North and most of the big art buyers. I’d still get the money
Ashley needed, and I wouldn’t risk tipping Damian off about
who was secretly in my corner.
That much was important. Damian couldn’t know about
Harry. If he found out I was dating—was I officially dating
Harry now just because I’d called him my boyfriend in a
concussion-fueled haze? Before I could decide on that little
matter of syntax, the doors of the elevator swished open.
Here goes. Kick some ass, Nell. Not literally, either.
I found Damian in his office with a stack of prints. He was
looking through artwork and making notes on a pad of legal
paper. He looked up and smiled when he saw me. “Nell. I’m
glad you came. We’re running out of time before the gala, but
I managed to find another place we can show the bush tonight.
It’ll help drum up some more hype before the big day.”
“Tonight?” I asked.
“What? Did you have a hot date to go to instead?” Damian
asked with a smile that said he clearly meant that as an
improbable joke.
“Uh, no,” I said slowly. Except I did have a hot date
planned. Harry was going to take me deer hunting with a
paintball gun. The doctor had even given me clearance for it,
despite his worries that I might’ve suffered a minor
concussion. Harry said we’d mostly be doing slow speed
creeping through bushes in the dark, which the doctor
admitted wasn’t going to really put me at risk of worsening the
condition.
“Okay. So, what’s the problem?”
“There’s no problem. I’ll be there.”
“Great. Oh, and, listen. I know how this is going to sound.
But please, hear me out. One of the people who will be there
tonight is an ex-girlfriend of mine. She also happens to be
dating a man named Kyle Van Buren. If Van Buren bids on a
piece, he absolutely kills interest. The man has horrible taste in
art, and he’s notorious for it.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
 “That we’d be wise to do anything we could to make sure
he doesn’t bid on your bush.”
I frowned. “I’m not okay with having him…” I lowered
my voice and leaned closer. “whacked. If that’s what you’re
getting at. So my answer is no.”
“Whacked? What does that even mean?”
“Like making him sleep with the fishes? Scrambling his
brains from the back seat of his car with an ice pick?”
“Jesus. What kind of movies do you watch? No. I’m not
talking about anything like that.”
“Oh. Then what?”
“If my ex so much as thought we were dating, even if it
was a mild suspicion. I know she’d force Van Buren to
promise not to bid on your piece. It’d be mortifying to her if
her new boyfriend bought work from someone I was
representing.”
A wave of cold ran up my back. “You want me to pretend
we’re dating?”
“No, no.” Damian laughed easily. “I’m just saying if we
even give the slightest suggestion that we’re not not dating, it
would be a huge move for your career. Because trust me, if
Van Buren bids on your bush, you’re screwed.”
I took in a long, deep breath. “How likely is this guy to
even bid on it in the first place? I mean, won’t there be like
hundreds of people there? And what if somebody else bids
higher first, or any number of ways that would make this idea
of yours a waste of effort?”
“I’m your agent, and my job is to do whatever it takes to
get you the most for your work. I know Van Buren’s taste, and
your piece is right up his alley.”
“Wait, I thought you said he has notoriously horrible
taste?”
Damian grinned. “He does. Which is why he won’t see
what makes yours so special. He just likes shock and awe art.
Gore. Sex. Mutilation. Anything that grabs attention. Yours is
more than that, but it won’t matter to him.”
I chewed my lip and sat down.
“So, what do you say?” Damian asked. “Is it a date?”
 16

HARRY

I pinched my temples and looked up at Nell, who was

standing in my living room with a worried, but somehow
determined look on her face.
“You really think this is a good idea?” I asked. She’d just
finished explaining Damian’s plan to me, and once I got past
the simultaneous urges to throw up and choke the man to
death, I had to remember what Nell just got out of. Her ex-
boyfriend was apparently the king of all control freaks. She
didn’t need me to be her guard dog. She needed me to be her
support, and no matter how much it felt like chewing on glass,
I had to let myself relax and give her the power to decide.
“Business-wise? Yes. And I know you have nothing to
worry about. I hope you know that too. It’s not like I’m going
to make out with him in the middle of the gallery. I think he
just means like we’ll walk in together and maybe stand a little
closer together than normal. Trust me, if he makes it weird, I’ll
give him a bruise a lot worse than yours.”
I laughed. “I’m not going to tell you what to do. This is
your life and your decision. But you can bet your ass I’m
going to sneak my way into that venue and watch him like a
hawk.”
“Harry,” Nell said warningly. “If he sees you creeping
around again, he’s going to suspect something. Don’t you
think?”
“Yeah, he’ll suspect that if he tries anything stupid, I’m
going to jam your sculpture up his ass.”
 “Ignoring the fact that it’s a bush and it would just crumple
up and bend, that’s not going to help, and you know it. Not
unless you want to throw your career away.”
I was annoyed that she was right. The truth was that it
wasn’t so much my own career I was worried about. I was
managing William’s wife, Hailey, my brother, the Fredericks’
twins, and dozens of other authors I’d come to think of like
family. Even if I tried to quietly step away and hand them off
to a new agent, I doubted Nathaniel Cross would stop at
sabotaging me. He’d go after the agents they moved to,
making sure none of them even came close to having
successful careers. It would all be my fault, and I wasn’t about
to make that decision and screw over the people I cared about.
“Okay. Fine. I won’t go. I promise.”
Nell came to sit beside me on the couch and leaned in. She
was so close that I could smell her shampoo, and that set off a
chain reaction of mental images—chief of which was her
naked body covered in warm water and trails of suds. There
was a stirring between my legs, but I needed to remind myself
of what I’d promised. I wasn’t going to take advantage of her
and trying anything before we’d figured out what to do with
her sculpture and what to do about Damian would’ve felt like
taking advantage. I wanted her to choose to be with me, not to
fall into it.
But kissing her was okay. I’d decided as much for my own
sanity. So, I took her by the cheek and pulled her a little closer
until I could feel her warm, soft lips against mine. She tasted
as good as she smelled, and I savored each gentle, passionate
kiss. Nell’s leg snaked over my own, and she started to slide
herself into a straddle position on top of me.
If I had let my cock run the ship, that would’ve been the
last decision she made under her own power for the day. I
would’ve carried her to my bed, stripped off her clothes, and
pinned her wrists above her head while I savored every last
inch of her body. I would have—
I forced myself to stop thinking about any of it. I pulled
back from her mouth and gave her a long kiss on the forehead.
“You should get ready for tonight,” I said. “If I’m going to
have a chastity belt custom made for you in less than eight
hours, I need to go make some calls.”
She smiled, but her eyes kept roaming my face and falling
back to my lips. God. I knew she wanted it as badly as I did,
but I just needed to remember how much was on her plate
right now. “A chastity belt?”
“In case things go south with Damian.”
“If Damian tries to go south on me, he’s going to get an
uppercut.”
I grinned. “That’s what I like to hear.”
“Now promise me one more time you won’t be there.”
“I promise. I will not be there.” This time, it wasn’t a lie. I
absolutely was not going to step inside the venue, but I knew
somebody who could on my behalf.
 17

WILLIAM

E spionage would’ve been my middle name if I knew how

to spell it. Infiltration. Subterfuge. Harry had given me a
mission, and I was going to be damned if I screwed it up. Well,
technically, I was actually just going to be amused if I screwed
it up. That was probably why I invited the whole crew.
Hailey was to my left as we entered the party. It was the
typical affair—music, cocktails, an open bar, and a huge venue
downtown. It was also so packed I couldn’t spot Nell right
away.
“Where is she?!” I shouted suddenly. A few people nearby
turned and gave me curious looks.
Hailey rolled her eyes. “Can you please stop talking in that
horrible impersonation of a Batman voice?”
I frowned down at her. “Batman wishes he was me. Don’t
insult me by comparing me to that rodent.”
“Somehow, I doubt that would be true, even if we forget
the fact that he’s not real.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly why he wishes he was me. I’m
walking around with real, functional equipment while he’s
stuck in fantasyland. Pussy.”
Hailey laughed. “You’re sure Harry actually asked you to
come here?”
“What? You don’t think he’d trust me? Harry Barnidge and
I have become very close friends.”
 “Right. Or maybe you’re just being protective of me and
can’t stand the idea of being too far removed from this book
project.”
“Let me tell you something about me, wife.”
Hailey shot me a mischievous grin. She knew I only called
her “wife” like that when I was planning on finding a place to
plunder her at some point in the night. “Go on,” she said,
eyebrows raised.
“I happen to like Harry. I also think he’s a competent
bastard, so if I do manage to make a mess of this little mission
he assigned me, he’ll figure it out. That’s why I invited
Grammy, Bruce, and Natasha.”
“You did what?”
“It’s like a family reunion!” I said cheerily.
I saw Hailey scanning the room. We both spotted Grammy
at the same time. She was talking to a young man who looked
highly uncomfortable. Grammy was leaning in and laughing
about something while the guy was arching his back like he
was preparing to try to break a limbo world record.
“We should go save him.”
I sighed. “Go on, then. I’ve got important work to do.”
That was when I spotted my mark. Nell Snell. I grinned.
Stupid name. She was standing next to Damian, and if I didn’t
know better, I’d say he was dangling his arm so close behind
her back that if she so much as coughed, he’d graze her ass.
Oh, Hell no. This is exactly what Harry wanted me here to
prevent.
I needed to find Grammy and get a plan in the works. And
I needed to do it fast.
 18

NELL

I fought the urge to yawn. Apparently, once you’d been to

one fancy art enthusiast party, you’d been to all of them.
Getting shopped around like a prize cow to potential buyers
had gotten old quickly. Having to fend off Damian’s constant
attempt to look like my boyfriend was only making the whole
ordeal more unbearable.
Part of me actually wished Harry had done the stupid thing
and come, just so I could watch him throw Damian off of me.
It was almost funny. Once I learned the truth about everything
that happened, I’d gone from being pissed at thinking Harry
was jealous to almost wishing he was more jealous. I guess it
made sense in a way. It wasn’t the jealousy that put me off,
exactly. It was that I didn’t trust him to be different than
Chuck. Seeing how much Harry had to put up with to try to
keep a secret from me—and only to protect me, at that—made
me think I could trust him.
I knew it was selfish to want Harry here. It was like he
said. Damian and his father could ruin Harry if he had the
inclination, and if I had to put up with this act for a few more
days, it was a small price to pay to avoid that.
“Malorie,” Damian said loudly. He put his hand around my
waist and led me toward a man and woman who were standing
in front of a four-sided painting that was so big it nearly
reached the ceiling. As far as I could tell, the painting was
nothing but four slightly different color tones. “That’s her,” he
muttered under his breath.
 “The ex?”
“Yes,” he said.
The woman and the guy at her side were both attractive.
The woman had more traditional beauty with full lips, big
breasts, and heavy hips. The man, on the other hand, was
handsome in that kind of weird way that makes you almost
feel creepy for even thinking so. He was thin, had a strangely
intricate beard and mustache thing going on, and he wore thick
glasses.
The man reached out to shake my hand. “Kyle Van
Buren,” he said.
“Hi. I’m Nell.”
Damian pulled me a little tighter into his side, which made
my skin want to crawl right off my bones and jump in a vat of
acid.
Malorie didn’t miss the gesture, and I saw her eyes tighten
momentarily before she flashed a huge, artificial smile. “It’s so
good to see you again, Damian. Is this your latest project?”
I realized a second late that “this” was me. I wondered if
she’d look so cocky with a few knuckle prints on those
makeup-crusted cheeks. Calm down, Nell. I could’ve laughed
at myself. I wasn’t usually violent, but apparently, learning the
power of my punch with Harry had made me start fantasizing
about punching people who got on my bad side.
“Nell is an up-and-coming artist. We’re trying to get bids
on her latest piece. It’s absolutely new. Groundbreaking stuff.
Really.”
Van Buren touched his mustache and leaned a little closer.
“Is it here?”
“Right over there,” Damian said.
Van Buren left, not even waiting for Malorie to follow
after him. She looked like she was thinking about throwing her
drink in Damian’s face. “Why are you really bringing her right
in my face?”
 “I’m trying to do my job, Malorie. Selling art for my
clients.”
“Client. Right. Because you’re not fooling me. I can see
her cringing away from you. Are you really so pathetic that
you wanted me to think she was your girlfriend? Did she
actually agree to that? Or did you just threaten to ruin her if
she refused?”
Damian scoffed, and before I knew what was happening,
he was leaning toward me like he was expecting a kiss. I only
had time to think about whether I’d rather punch him or jump
back as quickly as I could before a blur of motion flashed by
my face. In an instant, Damian wasn’t there anymore.
Malorie just barely had enough time to step out of the way.
“Harry?” I asked. All I could see was a big man wrestling
with Damian on the ground.
“Oh, Jesus,” Hailey Chamberson said. She was jogging
over to the men. She knelt down and tried to peel the man on
top off, who still had his back to me. She whacked him with
her handbag a few times, to which he finally turned and
looked up at her. It was William, not Harry.
But why…
Damian landed a solid punch on William from the ground
and sent William flopping to the floor.
That was when Hailey swung her handbag at Damian so
hard in the face, I thought she might’ve knocked a tooth loose.
His head whipped back, and he clutched his jaw. “You fucking
—” He looked around, eyes suddenly seeming less blue and
more black as he took in every single person who had gathered
around to watch. I thought he was about to give some sort of
evil villain speech, but all he did was walk up until he was
only inches away from me and lower his voice. “I know
exactly who asked him to be here. You’re finished. He’s
finished. Oh, and that purple hair looks ridiculous on you.”
Damian pushed past me and left the rest of us standing
there in stunned silence.
“Wait,” I said.
 Damian turned around and looked at me expectantly.
I grabbed a glass of red wine from the woman beside me
and splashed it in his face. “Okay. You can go now.”
To my surprise, Damian walked away without another
word.
William sat up and shook his head like a wet dog. “Did
anyone see the part where I kneed him in the balls? He didn’t
even flinch. So, yeah, you’re welcome ladies. I just confirmed
for everyone here that Damian Cross is nutless.”
A man who looked so much like William it could only be
his brother, Bruce, pushed his way through the crowd. A
woman I took to be his wife was close behind him. They
helped William to his feet. Bruce brushed some dirt off
William’s suit. “You okay?”
“Yeah, he just slapped me with those wet noodles he calls
arms a few times. I’ll be fine. Wife,” William said to Hailey.
“Really? Right now?” she asked.
“My blood is pumping. Your warrior needs to sate his—”
She pushed her fingertips to his lips and smiled
uncomfortably. “I think he might’ve bumped his head a little.
I’m going to go take him somewhere to get him checked out.”
“Yeah. The broom closet. It’ll be just like—”
Hailey used her whole hand this time before rushing
William away.
I didn’t need to be a genius to piece together what had
happened. Harry had asked William to come and keep an eye
on me. I took about two seconds to decide if it pissed me off
and realized it didn’t. He’d known Damian was likely to try
something stupid, and having William come instead of himself
showed that he could at least be level headed enough to avoid
taking an unnecessary risk. William by himself wouldn’t have
raised any eyebrows, but it also meant Harry had some
confirmation that Damian would be kept in check.
It was a good plan, but—
 A collective gasp drew my attention to the other side of the
room. I looked just in time to see the top half of my bush penis
fall to the ground. Damian was standing there with some kind
of sword he must’ve swiped from one of the art pieces and a
triumphant look on his face. He let the sword clatter to the
ground as he spread his arms wide and walked backward
toward the exit. “Whoops!” he shouted.
 19

HARRY

N ell was sipping chocolate milk on the couch in her

apartment while I paced back and forth in her small
kitchen—which basically meant taking one step forward,
turning around, and taking another step. Between the call
William had made to me and Nell’s quick explanation, I had a
relatively clear picture of what had happened. When William
told me what Damian was trying to pull, I had to remind
myself that I could get him back later. Nell needed me right
now. Murdering Damian with my bare hands could wait, at
least for a few hours.
“I can’t believe he cut my penis in half,” Nell said. I could
hardly believe it, but she was smirking.
“I’m glad you’re taking this well.”
She sighed. “I’m really sorry, Harry. But maybe Damian is
bluffing? Who says his dad is even going to be willing to
follow through on his son’s threats? Maybe we could even
reach out to him before Damian has a chance to tell him some
bogus version of what happened.”
“No. I’ve known Nathaniel Cross long enough to know he
doesn’t care. Nathaniel cares about his reputation and making
sure everybody knows he’s the most powerful man in the
industry. Letting us get away with this would undermine that
perception. People would see Damian got disrespected, and
they’d start to wonder if Nathaniel was as god-like as he wants
everyone to think.”
 “I feel like this is my fault. If I hadn’t let Damian convince
me we needed to worry about this Van Buren guy—”
“No. If you’d put your foot down, he would’ve kept
thinking up new ways to get at you. The bottom line is Damian
was going to try something sketchy sooner or later. We were
kidding ourselves thinking we could just wait him out. I only
wish he had waited until after Maya’s gala. God knows what
kind of damage he can do to your chances of selling the
piece.”
“I mean, he cut the thing in half. I don’t know if anyone is
going to buy it now.”
I planted my hands on the counter and tried to think of
something. Anything. I hated the idea of watching Nell get
chased out of this opportunity she had, especially when I knew
I’d played a part in messing it up for her. “Wait. Didn’t you
say you were kind of into art when you were a kid?”
“I also said my art teacher told me to quit.”
“Yeah, but if you could make something like the bush
penis once. You’ve got it in you to do it again. What if I get a
team of guys trying to repair the penis and make sure the bush
doesn’t die. If that doesn’t work, you and I will be working on
a backup plan for the next couple days.”
“A backup plan?”

Nell studied the large bushes in my gardens while she held a

pair of hedge clippers in her hand. “I don’t know. The first
time, I was seriously trying to make that damn penguin and his
snowman. It wasn’t like I had a deep, artistic vision, and it
turned out like I planned.”
“Yeah, well, I happen to think you’re capable of more than
you give yourself credit for. I’ve watched you rise up to the
moment again and again since we met. You may think you’re
blundering through it, but to me, you’re killing it.”
She did a sarcastic little leg kick and twirled her hair.
“You’re just trying to make me blush.”
 “I know exactly how I plan to make you blush when this is
all over. Right now, I’m just being honest.”
Nell looked down and swallowed. “How are you planning
on making me blush after all this is over, exactly?”
I knew it wasn’t the time or the place, but I couldn’t stop
myself from walking closer to her. She was wearing a casual
exercise kind of outfit that didn’t have any right to be as sexy
as it was on her. I put my hand on the side of her face and she
leaned into it. I enjoyed the way she always seemed to want to
melt into me when I touched her. If I hugged her, she sank into
the hug. If I put my arm around her waist, she slid her body
against mine.
“I’d start by doing what I’ve been dying to do since we
met. I’d help you out of those clothes, and I wouldn’t take my
time about it.” I kissed her neck, savoring the faintly sweet
taste of her skin, and the smell of her soap. She always
smelled so clean and impossibly fresh, like she’d just come
from the shower even when it was midday, and I knew it had
to have been hours since she last washed. “Then, I’d see if you
taste as sweet all over.”
“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m blushing already.”
“Ah.” I pushed back from her. “Then I guess I don’t need
to tell you the rest.”
“No. Actually, false alarm. It was just the sun on my
cheek. You can continue.”
I shrugged. “We should really get to work on this whole
backup plan thing. It’s fine.”
I could feel her glaring as I turned and studied the bush.
“Come on. Let’s think of something that would fit right in at
Maya North’s gala.”
“A giant bush vagina?” Nell suggested.
I laughed. “Probably. But I feel like you need to push the
envelope a little more than that.”
Nell walked a slow circle around the bush, then sat on a
bench to study it while she rested her chin in her hands.
“Hmm…”
“Have something?”
“No. I was just thinking about how I mostly charge my
phone in my car, so does that mean my phone is gas
powered?”
“I actually meant an artistic idea.”
“Come back in an hour,” Nell said suddenly. She stood and
picked up the shears.
“I can’t watch you work?”
“I want it to be a surprise.”
“What am I supposed to do for an hour?”
“I don’t know? Go pull some fish out of the water. But
throw them back in when you’ve had your fun. I won’t kiss a
murderer.”
I grinned. “You’ve never eaten fish?”
“Fair point. But it seems different when you choke the life
out of it with your bare hands.”
“For some reason, I think you don’t fully grasp how
fishing works.”
“You know what I mean.”
“One hour,” I said. “And I don’t want to stress you out, but
I do want to remind you that Maya’s gala is in two days. I
don’t know if you did the mental math yet, but that works out
to us not having much time to get this done right.”
“Please. Don’t you even start to doubt me. One hundred
percent of the bushes I’ve sculpted have gained the attention
of the biggest names in the art world.”
“Percentages don’t really tell the full story when we’re
talking about a sample size of one.”
“Just go,” Nell huffed with a devious flicker of her eyes.
“You’re sabotaging my artistic vision.”
I left her to work, but I had to admit I was nervous about
whatever it was she thought she could create in an hour.
Somehow, Nell had managed to sculpt a rough approximation
of a foot out of the bush. A big, giant, green foot. I was
impressed at the level of detail, even if there were still some
rough edges. She was standing proudly with her hands on her
hips and a sheen of sweat on her forehead.
“What do you think?” She flipped both her hands out to
gesture toward the bush and lost control of her shears, which
flipped through the air and embedded themselves in the top of
the foot. “Whoops…”
“I think it’s really foot-like. Definitely recognizable as a
foot from far away.”
“But…”
“But I’m not exactly sure it’s edgy enough for Maya and
her people.”
“I thought you’d say that. Allow me to introduce you to
this big fella.” She pointed to the next bush in the row, which
was still untouched by her shears.
“Okay. Consider me introduced?”
“This one is going to be a big ball sack. The foot is going
to kind of hover over it?”
“Oh…”
She winced. “It’s not good?”
I laughed. “You know what? I’m not going to pretend I
really understand what passes for art. I hid inside a giant set of
breasts and spied on you through glass window nipples at one
of her galleries. Why shouldn’t a big ass foot about to stomp
down on some balls qualify as highbrow art?”
“Hell yeah!” Nell shouted. She gave me an unexpected
hug.
Something about her sweaty body pressed against mine
made me react on an instinctual level. I caught her by the
small of her back and took two steps forward until her back
bumped against the bush that would become the ball sack.
 “Itchy,” she whispered.
“I wanted to wait until this was all over. I thought it
wouldn’t be fair to you if I…”
“Defiled my bush?” she asked.
It should’ve been funny, but her red cheeks and hushed
voice made it feel like the sexiest question she could’ve asked.
“Something like that.”
“At this point, the only thing that wouldn’t be fair is if you
teased me like that and then didn’t follow through.”
“You’re sure? Because I can’t promise I’m going to be
able to stop once I uncork everything I’ve been holding back.”
“Who says I’d want you to stop?”
I wondered if she knew what she was unleashing, but I
couldn’t quite bring myself to care. I may not know if Nell
was the cure for everything wrong with my world. Maybe
when the drama of Damian and his bullshit had passed, we’d
realize that circumstance was tricking us into thinking more
had formed between us than our few short days together
should’ve made possible. Logic told me that all must have
been true, but my gut said otherwise. It said I didn’t need
weeks and weeks of games—date after date and endless
conversations about why our parents weren’t perfect or what
our dream car was when we were kids. “Being with you feels
right,” I said. “Am I going to scare you off if I tell you that I’m
falling pretty hard?”
“Why would that scare me? I literally fell for you the
second time I saw you.”
“You did?”
“Don’t you remember pulling me ass-first out of the
bush?”
I smirked. “That’s not the kind of falling I was talking
about.”
“Yeah. Me either. But I’m also not sure I can trust
something this fast. I’ve got some baggage, I guess, and it’s
going to take me a little while to believe even what my own
heart is telling me.”
“Mine is telling me to do whatever the hell it takes to keep
you around. So, if time is what you need, you got it.”
“Time would be nice. But there was one other thing you’d
mentioned…”
“Oh, right,” I said, straightening up and backing away
from her. “The fishing trip?”
Nell’s eyes went heavy, and she reached out for me,
tugging me back into her by one of the belt loops on my jeans.
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Too embarrassed to ask me to tend to your bush?”
She swatted at me. “Stop it.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to back away again.
Nell caught me with both hands this time and tugged me
back. “Be a gentleman.”
“I don’t think a gentleman would do what’s on my mind,
so I’m in a little bit of a bind here.”
“Harry Barnidge. If you make me spell it out for you, I
swear I’m going to—”
“What?” I whispered, leaning close to her ear. I watched as
goosebumps rippled across her arms. “What are you going to
do to me?”
“Well, I was kind of planning on going limp and letting
you have your way with me.”
I took her hands in pressed them above her head.
Unfortunately, the weight of me leaning into her against the
bush made us both sink into it. I barely caught her and pulled
her back. I lifted her up and started walking toward the house.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Deciding I’m too selfish to risk some random person
catching a glimpse of what I’m about to do to you. And
realizing that I’m not going to be able to pin you against a
bush while I go down on you without you falling into the
thing.”
“Go down on… Oh.” Nell wrapped her arms around my
neck and let me carry her the relatively long walk from the
garden to the back patio doors and up the spiraling stairs to my
bedroom on the second floor. I kicked the door closed behind
me and tossed her down on the bed once we were inside.
I stood over her and peeled my shirt off. There was so
much adrenaline thumping through my veins that it would’ve
been a blatant lie to say I had a plan. All I had was lust. It felt
like months and months of buildup and repressed desire to
have her in every way imaginable. When I realized it had only
been a handful of days, I could hardly believe how quickly I’d
let myself get to this point.
Taking a break from relationships hadn’t helped steel my
heart against Nell. Instead, it seemed like all it had done was
prop the doors wide open. I didn’t care about any of that,
especially not right now.
She was watching me while she lay there on the bed,
propped up on her elbows while her chest rose and fell in a
heavy rhythm. I wondered if she was trying to imagine what I
was going to do.
I dropped my shirt to the ground and moved to my belt.
“Maybe I should take a shower first,” she said.
“No,” I growled.
Nell’s eyebrow twitched up. “I want to be clean for you, if
—”
“Clean. Dirty. Filthy. I want to take you as you are.”
Nell’s eyes glazed over for a second like she had to process
what I’d just said. When she looked back up at me, she took in
a deep breath, let it out, and gave a subtle nod. “You really
know how to turn it on when the time comes, don’t you?” Her
voice was a little high pitched and shaky.
Usually, I would’ve seen her nerves as adorable. Right
now, they only registered to me like the smell of blood to a
shark. I was so, so hungry for her, and she was only making it
harder to bear. “And you don’t know when to stop talking, do
you?” I yanked my belt free of my pants, dropped it, and
started on my zipper.
Nell’s eyes went up and down my torso, to my face, to
what my hands were doing, and back over it all again. “No.
Sometimes, when I get nervous. I just kind of talk in a sort of
stream of consciousness kind of thing. It’s like I can’t shut it
off.”
“Mhm,” I said, stepping out of my pants and then pulling
down my briefs. I was already hard as a rock, and Nell
definitely noticed. I almost laughed when she stared at my
cock unblinkingly and then actually licked her lips. It was a
completely unconscious reaction, and it was one of the hottest
things I’d ever seen.
I stepped between her legs and put my fingertips on her
chest before giving her a slight shove backwards. She plopped
down on her back and stared up at me with knitted eyebrows.
I was torn between the urge to literally rip her clothes off
and the desire to make this as slow and deliberate as I could—
to savor every kiss and caress.
I took her leg and lifted it to pull her shoe and sock off one
foot, then I followed with the other. I grinned when I saw
goosebumps prickling up her legs. “Do you like having your
feet touched?” I asked.
“Um,” Nell said. She nearly made me laugh again because
she wasn’t using anything close to a bedroom voice. If
anything, she was talking a little louder and more casually than
usual. “I think right now you could probably fondle my elbow
and I’d be at risk of exploding. So… Take that as you will.
And wow, I said that out loud.”
I reached over her to take her arm and propped myself up
on the bed with my free arm as I planted a soft kiss on her
elbow. Nell’s whole body shivered.
“Whoo,” she said loudly. “See. Just an elbow kiss, but it’s
got me all wibble wobbly.”
 “Hey,” I said softly. I leaned in so I could kiss her
forehead. I meant for the gesture to be calming, but I hadn’t
really considered how practically laying on top of her while I
was naked and erect was far from calming for her. “You don’t
need to be nervous with me. There’s nothing you could do
wrong here, okay? I just want you. As you are. Whatever that
is. So loosen up and enjoy this.”
Nell blew out a slow, shaky breath. “Okay. I just really like
you. I don’t want to mess this up.”
“And I really like you too, which is why you can stop
worrying.”
I slowly set to work taking off Nell’s clothes. It didn’t feel
like a means to an end with her. I was enjoying every second,
from watching her shirt come up to reveal her freckled,
smooth belly to pulling down her athletic shorts and drinking
in the sight of her mound beneath her pink panties.
I reached under her and unhooked the clasp on her bra,
peeling it off her. I instinctively bent to kiss her nipple as soon
as her bra was out of the way. It hardened when my lips made
contact, and Nell let out a soft, squirming moan.
“Oh, jeez,” she said, still in that loud, conversational tone.
“Already making noises and you’re barely started. This is
going to be bad.”
“Noises are good,” I said, kissing her again.
I let her keep her panties on for now. I stood back up and
took a step away, enjoying the way she squirmed under my
gaze. She was incredible, and I knew exactly how I wanted to
start enjoying her.
 20

NELL
WOW.

T here were two kinds of people in the world. One type

made up ninety-nine point nine percent of the population.
I liked to think I belonged to that overwhelming majority who
had no right to strut around butt ass naked and look as
confident as somebody who just scored the game-winning
touchdown in the Super Bowl. Strip me naked, and I’d do all
the usual moves. Knees buckling inward to press my thighs
together. One hand over my… area. The other arm would be
the nipple blocker. It was an undignified affair that would
leave everybody feeling awkward and uncomfortable.
Then there was the other type of person. The kind I didn’t
think existed outside scripted movie cinematography and
creative camera angles. Those were the people who could take
off every last scrap of clothing and still look perfect. Even
with a giant, erect penis that arguably was an odd move on
nature’s part—I mean, why did they have to be so big to get
the job done? And why did the balls have to just hang there,
like the only organs in the body that weren’t cool enough to
chill with the rest of the crew, so they got banished to a sack?
Except it all looked so, so deliciously right on Harry.
Trying to peel my eyes away from his round, muscular pecs
and that tantalizing ridge of muscle that led down to his pubic
hair like a big arrow from God might as well have been
impossible. Don’t worry, God. I think I can figure out where
my attention is supposed to go without the help.
I was only distantly aware that I should probably be
worrying about any of the fifty things I was usually self-
conscious about, even when I was rocking a two-piece
swimsuit in a public pool. I mean, what kind of woman had a
freckle inside her belly button? And what would he think if he
realized my thighs didn’t have a perfect gap between them like
the girls in magazines? It all normally would’ve been driving
me crazy, but there was nothing in Harry’s hungry gaze that
said he cared.
It was like he said. He wanted me. As I was. A little
sweaty and a little dirty from working on the bush. A lot less
than perfect. It didn’t matter to him, and the realization washed
over me like warm, pure water. I could’ve sunk down into the
sheets and basked in his attention for hours. Then again, I was
also embarrassingly turned on and so horny I might’ve
humped a pillow, so I was anxious to see what he was going to
do next.
“Touch yourself,” he demanded.
I searched his face for clues. Touch myself? I pressed my
index finger to my stomach and gave him a questioning look.
“Like that?”
“Lower.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean like you want me to… Uh, jingle
the doorbell?”
Harry’s stern, heavy eyes flashed amusement. I thought he
was going to laugh, but he managed to keep that serious look
on his face. “Yes. Whatever you want to call it.”
I licked my lips, then slid my hand inside my panties. I
was reminded that with all the bush trimming I’d done in
Harry’s garden; I had neglected my own. Oh Lawd.
I started to rub my fingers in a circle. I couldn’t quite bring
myself to look at Harry’s eyes, but every time I peeled my
gaze from his face, it fell to his rigid cock, which felt even
more naughty. I finally decided to just close my eyes.
“That’s good,” Harry said breathily.
I found myself getting uncontrollably turned on—so much
so that I was distantly afraid I’d embarrass myself and end up
leaping from the bed to jump his bones if he made me keep
this up for long.
“Are you wanting me to have one from this, or…” I asked.
Why couldn’t I seem to stop talking so loud?
“Have one?” Harry chuckled. “Does it offend your
sensibilities to say ‘cum’? Or orgasm?”
“No.”
“Then I want to hear you say it. What’s going to happen if
I don’t make you stop soon.”
“I’m going to… cum,” I said. Even though I’d denied it,
the truth was I had always been slightly averse to using proper
sexual terminology. I guess I didn’t want guys to think I was
slutty or something like that. But hearing the word slide past
my lips sent a dirty thrill through me that ratcheted my
enjoyment up another level. I was squirming now, and soft
gasps were escaping from me, whether I liked it or not.
“Good. And tell me what you want me to do to you.”
“Anything you want.” Oh, my. I felt like I needed to add an
amendment to that before he decided to do something truly
crazy, but I also wasn’t sure I could think of something I’d
stop him from doing at this point. If sexual tension was butter,
it was so thick in the room that we would’ve needed to pop it
in the microwave for at least ten seconds before we could
spread it on toast.
Harry pulled my panties down and took me under the
arms, lifting me effortlessly and moving me so my head and
shoulders were on his pillows. He climbed on top of me and
paused so that I could feel the heat of his erection resting
against the inside of my thigh. He only stopped long enough to
grab a condom from his nightstand and slid it on himself.
I pressed my head into the pillow and closed my eyes. It
wasn’t my first time sleeping with a man, but Harry felt like he
was on a completely different level—so much so that I felt
more nervous than I’d been even before my first time.
He slid his hand under my head and took a fistful of my
hair before planting a rough kiss on my lips. It wasn’t like the
kiss we’d had before. It wasn’t tender, soft, or controlled. The
safety bars were off, and Harry was done holding back. I
gasped against his mouth, shuddering in expectation when I
felt him shift his weight so he could guide himself into me.
I took a shameless handful of his ass, just like I’ve wanted
to since the first time I watched him walk away from me in the
gardens. “Oh, God,” I gasped.
He slid himself into me, stretching me in a way that made
me feel wonderfully full. I let myself get lost in the hypnotic
pattern of his thrusts—the way his smooth, hard chest slid
against my breasts, teasing my nipples as his warm cock drove
into me. I tightened my fingers around his ass and on his back,
feeling the way his muscles tensed and relaxed with each of
his movements like some kind of precise, intricate machinery.
In some distant corner of my brain, I knew Damian Cross
was still a problem. I knew he had possibly cut my chances of
helping Ashley pay for school in half with that stupid sword. I
even knew he was very likely going to make Harry’s world
hell in his attempt to punish us for wanting to be together. But
none of that seemed to matter. I could drift away on the
rhythm of those powerful thrusts, and the glittering waves of
ecstasy that pumped through me in their wake. It was bliss.
Serenity. Like somebody bottling up heaven and letting me
take a long, warm drink of it—letting me fill up until I could
feel it settling into my stomach and spreading tendrils of calm
through my body.
Everything seemed to blend together into a cocktail of
explosive pleasure, as if I was so full to the brim that it would
burst out of me at any moment. I dug my fingers into Harry
and realized I’d been moaning embarrassingly loud.
My body tightened around him, and I felt the rush of an
orgasm tearing through me. But the most startling part of the
experience was the thought that seemed to rise up between all
the gasps and movements of my writhing body.
I wasn’t crazy enough to say I loved him. We’d known
each other for less than a week. I’d be a lunatic to think I knew
him well enough to love him. But crazy or not, the idea
seemed to plant itself in me as I laid back down, panting and
sweating. Could I love a man I’d only met days ago? Or was
that just the chemicals flooding through my system talking?
“Damn,” Harry said with a satisfied groan. He rolled off
me and flopped to the pillow beside me. “I’ve spent a few
sleepless nights imagining how much I’d enjoy that.
Apparently, I have a shitty imagination, because I wasn’t even
close. That was incredible. You were incredible.”
“I just laid there and made awkward noises.”
“You also squeezed my ass. And you enjoyed the hell out
of it,” he added.
I laughed. “I might’ve had a good time.”
“A good time? I thought you were about to start speaking
in tongues for a minute there.”
I swatted at his shoulder and curled over to rest my head
on him. “Don’t tease me about that. You’re going to make me
self-conscious.”
“Joking aside… I’ve never had sex like that. Never.”
“You’re only saying that because I tried to stick my toe in
your butthole.”
Harry laughed in surprise. “Wait, what? You didn’t
actually try that, did you?”
I grinned. “I’m just messing with you. Maybe.”
Harry studied me with those mesmerizing eyes of his. The
mid-afternoon sun was streaming in the window behind him
and catching little motes of dust that floated lazily through the
air. I felt about as carefree as they must right now, like nothing
in the world could touch us. And then I realized I was thinking
about Harry and me as “us” already. Somehow, that felt like a
big step.
Harry opened his mouth, frowned, and then closed it.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. I’m just wondering how this is all going to work
out.”
 From the look in his eyes, I thought he wasn’t being
entirely honest. I couldn’t help wondering if the same “L”
word was floating around in his head, but that would be
wishful thinking. I shouldn’t have even been thinking about
that word, let alone hoping he was, too.
“It’s going to work out,” I said. “And we’re going to figure
it out together.”
Harry took my hand in his and kissed my fingers.
 21

HARRY

E very author I represented sat in the conference room in

my house. William had also decided to come, and Nell
was sitting beside me. I was slightly self-conscious about the
fact that we both had wet hair from the shower we’d taken
after our little diversion in my bedroom. Anyone with a few
hints about my feelings for her could probably work out what
had happened, and the look on Peter’s face said he had already
put two and two together.
“Most of you already know why I asked you to be here,” I
said. “I haven’t heard specifics yet, but I know Damian Cross
is likely going to get me blacklisted with his father’s influence.
Unfortunately, that falls back on all of you. I can’t say for sure,
but my best guess is that Nathaniel will come after some of
you personally once he’s done with me.”
“Why is he so intent on coming after you?” asked Ross,
one of my nonfiction authors.
Blake Renshaw stood up and pointed across the table at
me. “Because our ‘agent’ couldn’t keep his dick out of her.”
I calmly stood up and started walking toward Blake, who,
to his credit, seemed to consider running. I took him by his
shirt and walked him backwards to the wall, pressing him
there just hard enough to let him know that he wasn’t getting
down until I’d finished talking.
William started a slow clap, but Hailey put one hand over
her eyes and the other on his wrist.
“Really?” Hailey muttered.
 “What? This is so much more entertaining than I thought it
was going to be,” William whispered loudly.
I looked Blake in the eye. I’d been representing him since
his debut novel seven years ago, but we’d never really crossed
the business line to become friends. “I do have feelings for
Nell. Strong ones, actually, but—”
William started slow clapping again. “What?” he asked
when everyone turned to glare at him. “I can’t slow clap for
the action scene or the romantic scene? What does that leave
me with?”
“How about no clapping. Period,” Hailey suggested.
“Uh, then how is Harry going to know when I’m enjoying
myself?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll just assume if things are going
to shit in some capacity, you’re having the time of your life.
Sound good?”
“Fair enough,” William muttered. “I still don’t get what’s
so bad about a little applause.”
“Damian decided he was either going to sleep with Nell or
he was going to try to ruin her life. And yes, I’m dating Nell,
but I wasn’t going to let some piece of slime sexually harass
her because I was scared of retaliation. I knew the risks, but I
also didn’t have a choice. All I can say is that I’m truly sorry it
came to this. Damian and his father put all of us in a shitty
situation, and now we don’t have any choice but to deal with
as best we can. Considering this was my mess that turned into
yours—”
“You don’t sound as pissed anymore,” Blake said. His
voice was a little strained, which made me realize one of my
hands had slipped slightly and was pushing into his neck. “Do
you think you could put me down for the rest of the speech?”
“That depends. Can you stop yourself from making me
want to punch you in the face for the rest of my speech?”
Blake held up his palms and shrugged.
 I grudgingly let him go, even though punching him
would’ve felt good. I knew he had a right to be pissed,
anyway. I might not have felt like I had a choice, but this was
still somebody else’s fight spilling into the laps of all my
clients.
“So,” I continued. “If any of you want to cut ties and leave,
I’ll have my team tear up our contracts, even on existing
projects. You won’t owe me a dime going forward, and maybe
that’ll help convince Nathaniel that he already punished me
enough by chasing you off. If you’re leaving,” I said, gesturing
to the door. “Thanks for letting me represent you, and I’m
sorry it came to this.”
There was a great shuffling of chairs and feet as almost
everyone in the room got up and walked out. Some took a
moment to come over and pat me on the shoulder, shake my
hand, or give me a quick hug and a rushed “goodbye,” but
when the dust settled, only Nell, William, and Hailey were still
in the room.
William rocked back in his chair and brought his hands
together in a few loud, piercing slow claps.

Nell and I waited on a loading dock behind the building where

Maya North’s gala was behind held in downtown New York.
I put my hand to a strand of Nell’s hair and held it up with
a smile. “I like the new color.”
“This was actually the color I originally went for when I
screwed up and got that neon orange. I took a few minutes to
read the instructions on the bottle this time.”
“Blonde suits you. But, then again, so did orange and
purple with a white stripe.”
“You’re only saying that because you like me.”
“Guilty,” I said, leaning in to kiss her. “About liking you,
at least. It’s not my fault you can pull off any hair color.”
“Well, it is going to be my fault if this art show is a major
bust.”
 “It won’t. But you’re sure you don’t want to use the stand-
in bush penis my guys made?”
“I’m sure. I appreciate that you had them do that, but I
actually made something on purpose this time. It might not
even fully make sense to me or seem like it should be worth
any money, but I made it. That’s my foot and my ball sack.
The penis and balls were just a mistake.”
I grinned. “This would be the perfect conversation for
somebody to walk in on with no context.”
Nell laughed. “At least I didn’t reference what color all of
it is.”
“Did you tell your sister?”
“No. She knows I met some hot rich guy and managed to
get a minor concussion while making out with him on a boat.
Beyond that, she has no idea any of this is going on, and that’s
how I want it. She’s still just a kid, and I don’t need her
stressing or feeling guilty about everything I’m doing.”
“I can respect that.” For about the hundredth time since I’d
learned about Nell’s desire to pay Ashley’s way through music
school, I had to fight the urge to offer her the money myself.
Even if all but two of my clients just walked out on me
yesterday and the remaining two were probably going to be
crippled by Nathaniel’s bullshit, I could afford to help her. I
wanted to help her. But I also knew Nell wasn’t asking me for
a reason. It was important to her to do this in a way she could
be proud of. It meant something to her—enough that she
wasn’t even willing to show up with the art Maya North was
almost guaranteed to sell for an amount of money that
could’ve changed Nell’s life.
I didn’t offer her the money because I knew she wouldn’t
take it, and I also knew if she did take it, she wouldn’t have
been the woman I was rapidly falling for.
The original cock bush hadn’t survived Damian’s sword
attack. I had an arborist try to reattach the severed top of the
penis, but the leaves wilted and browned. My backup plan had
been to pay an artist to recreate the original, but Nell had
insisted on going with her foot and balls.
The gala started a few hours later.
The art shows we’d been to earlier seemed small by
comparison. This wasn’t just a gathering of a few dozen rich
art enthusiasts and their dealers; it was an event. There was
press, celebrities, and of course, the buyers.
Nell and I watched as groups of people passed by her
piece, scratching their chins and squinting. In most cases, it
was impossible to tell what anyone thought. The norm at the
gala seemed to be for people to look like they were
contemplating everything on the deepest level so nobody
would think they were too dull to grasp a piece. I even saw a
group of people spend close to five minutes discussing the fire
extinguisher hanging on the wall, which was definitely not an
art piece.
Maya found us a few minutes into the showing.
“I was sorry to hear about everything that happened with
Damian,” Maya said. “He has spent the past few days trying to
convince everybody that you’re just a hack. He said you’d
show up with some glued together version of your piece and it
would prove you weren’t a true artist.” Maya gave me a little
shrug and a wink. “But I guess he underestimated you, didn’t
he?”
“Do you like the new piece?” Nell asked.
“Personally? No. I think it’s derivative and shows you’ve
got some work to do, that maybe we were reading more into
your original than you intended.”
“Oh,” she said quietly.
Maya flashed a tight smile, then left.
“Hey,” I said, pulling Nell into a tight hug. “You okay? I
know that wasn’t exactly what you wanted to hear.”
“No. It’s fine. I don’t think I quite realized how much I had
wanted to impress Maya with my art until she told me I’d
failed. She was like the final boss version of my douchebag of
an art teacher back in high school, and this bush foot and balls
were supposed to be my triumphant moment where the
universe had to admit I was actually good at something.”
“Wait,” I said suddenly, pulling back. “Where are the keys
to your apartment?”
“Here?” she said uncertainly, plucking them from her bag
and holding them up.
I snatched them from me and ran toward the nearest exit.
“Harry?” she said. “What the hell!?”
“I’ll be back. One hour!”

It ended up taking me more like an hour and a half to get back

to the gala. Nell lived outside the city, and I had to wait for a
rental car to show up that had enough room to carry all the
sculptures she had squirreled away in her apartment. My heart
had been aching for her after what Maya said, but then it had
occurred to me. I’d seen a closet full of sculptures on my first
visit to Nell’s apartment. I hadn’t expected them to also be
stuffed under her bed, in cabinets, and even under the
bathroom sink.
Apparently, Nell had been keeping her real passion for art
a closely guarded secret. I couldn’t be sure if anyone at Maya’s
gala would be interested in Nell’s other stuff, but I knew I had
to try something. If I had stood there watching Nell try to hold
it together for another minute, I would’ve lost my mind. She
was too sweet and pure to have her hopes smashed like that,
especially after everything she’d already been through in the
past few days.
I came rushing back to where her bush sculpture was set
up in the gala with a giant box stuffed full of her art.
Nell was watching me come, fists planted on her hips. “I
knew that’s what you were doing as soon as you left. What if I
don’t want people to see my crappy art I made in the kitchen?”
“Then, you could close your eyes?” I suggested as I hastily
found a table and dragged it closer to where she was set up.
“This stuff is as good as anything here. I mean, it’s not really
about precision and technicality with modern art, anyway. It’s
just having something that speaks to people, right? You
obviously cared a hell of a lot when you made all this, and you
owe it to yourself to give it a shot.”
Nell put her hands on mine when I tried to take one of her
pieces out of the box and tried to stop me. “Harry. I’ve never
shown people these. Just Davey, and he’s way too nice to tell
me how bad it all is.”
“What if that high school teacher of yours was just
jealous? Maybe they hated having a student who was better
than them.”
She laughed. “Any other theories?”
“One. I lifted the bowl I’d been holding for her to get a
better look. “Have you ever noticed that almost every single
thing you’ve sculpted here is vaguely… sexual?”
“Uh, what? I think I’d realize if I was some kind of
closeted…” Nell trailed off as she tilted her head and looked at
the bowl. “I mean, okay. I can see with that one how you could
make an argument that it’s a little vagina-like, but it’s not as if
—”
I lifted a sculpture of a woman from the box. “And this
one?”
“Slightly phallic, maybe?”
“And this?” I lifted another.
Nell crossed her arms and made an annoyed sound. “Okay,
so maybe I have some repressed sexual tension or something. I
don’t see how this means anything?”
“It means the penis bush wasn’t completely a mistake.
That’s just your style.”
Nell grinned. “My style is accidentally turning everything I
touch into a vague representation of genitalia?”
“Yes! It’s almost like a superpower.”
“That has to be the worst superpower I’ve ever heard of.”
 “Please, Nell. Just try this. If not for yourself, then do it for
me.”
She worked her lips to the side and stared at the box.
“Okay. But if anybody comes by and makes fun of them,
we’re packing it all up and lighting the whole box on fire.”
“If anybody makes fun of them, I’ll personally remove
them from the building.”
With a sigh, Nell helped me unpack the box and set up all
her sculptures on the table. Once we were finished, I took a
step back and tried to take in the entire display. “You know,” I
said. “Seeing all this other work by you kind of makes the foot
and balls work better, I think.”
We only had to wait a few seconds before interested
groups of people started circulating around the display. I noted
many furrowed brows and excited whispers from dealers to
their clients.
A man wearing a purple ascot with a pencil-thin beard was
the first to approach me. “What’s your current offer on the
figurine of the woman?”
“Ah,” I said. I hid my elation and slid right into the role of
being Nell’s agent. “We actually fielded a few offers on that
one, but our leading two bidders are interested in buying the
figurine along with several other pieces as a package. We
would need a considerable offer to think about passing them
up.” I gave an apologetic shrug. “They were talking in the six
figures, and—”
“Four hundred thousand,” the man said.
I made a sound in my throat. Four hundred thousand. I’d
earned a fortune representing authors throughout my career,
but the number throttled even me. My brother was one of the
most prominent authors in the world, and he was lucky to get
an advance anywhere close to that for a new book.
“Did he say four thousand freaking dollars?” Nell
whispered so loud I was reasonably sure the man could hear
her.
 I cleared my throat. “No, no. Of course not. He knows not
to insult your work with an offer that low. He said four
hundred thousand.”
Nell stepped back and her face went white. “How many
zeroes is that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I could temporarily wrap Nell
in a blanket and set her aside. “We don’t get her out of the
studio much.”
The man gave a patient smile. “Quite alright. Will you
accept our offer?”
“I wish we could. But the lowest we could afford to take
considering our current bids would be half a million. Anything
less than that, and we’d prefer to keep bidding open on the
piece.”
“Very well.” The man handed me his card and left, as if
he’d just put in an order for a hotdog at a street vendor instead
of promising to pay half a million dollars of his client’s
money.
“Did that just happen?” Nell asked. She was clutching my
shoulder so hard it actually hurt.
“Yes,” I said. “And as much as I enjoy getting your
perspective—it’s adorable, really—you might want to just
stand in the background and look confident from now on.”
Nell took a step back and assumed a posture and facial
expression that looked more like she was fighting food
poisoning than feeling confident.
Over the next half hour, I fielded bid after bid on Nell’s
work. I bluffed my way through the first few encounters and
blindly inflated the prices of her work against imaginary bids,
but eventually I was working with real bids. I didn’t even need
to lie, because there were so many people interested in buying
up everything on the table—even the foot and balls.
Maya came back with a confused look on her face. She
swept her eyes across the table, eyebrows slamming together
as she picked up a piece and examined it. “This is utterly
brilliant. It’s so cohesive and bold. The subtext… My God, the
subtext is phenomenal. It’s—” she seemed to realize she was
rambling on to herself and then found Nell. “Where were you
hiding all of this? Wait, no,” she stopped, putting her finger to
her chin. “I understand.” She laughed suddenly, seeming more
than a little insane. “You revealed the one piece,
underwhelming and almost disappointing by itself. Borne from
the unexpected demise of your previous work. The foot of
society always crushes sexuality. But like this piece, the rest of
your work rose up in spite of that. And I see now, yes, yes. I
see why you couldn’t have everything on display from the
beginning.”
Maya continued rambling about the symbolic significance
of everything Nell had done, including dying her hair back to a
more natural blonde color, for close to four minutes. Nell
listened with wide eyes, and an expression on her face that
clearly said she had no idea what Maya was talking about.
Suddenly there was a pause, and Nell and I both seemed to
realize Maya was waiting for some kind of reaction.
“Oh,” Nell said. “Absolutely. Everything you just said.”
Maya shook her head in awe. “I don’t do this for many
artists, but I want to invite you to my next gala as well. It’s in
six months, and you can bring anything you see fit.” She
looked to the ceiling wistfully and wandered off with her
hands clasped together.
Nell looked at me in astonishment. “What the hell is going
on?”
“For starters, you’ve got people ready to spend…” I
checked the notepad I’d been keeping tabs in. “Six point three
million dollars on your artwork. Even with the massive tax hit
you’ll take on that, it’s still over three million dollars that will
go in your pocket. Oh, and Maya North basically just declared
you to be the next big thing in the art world.”
“Would it be too cliché and girly if I fainted right now?”
I grinned. “I’m pretty sure you can’t faint on command.”
Nell rolled her eyes up and held up a finger toward me, as
if telling me to hang on for just a second while she prepared to
faint. Instead, she just let out a small, mouse-like sneeze. “Oh,
it was just a sneeze.”
“He’s not going to be happy about this,” I said, nodding
past Nell.
She turned and looked to where Damian Cross and his
father were moving through the room. They were speaking
loudly to somebody, who then pointed in our direction. The
two men started toward us with determined looks on their
faces.
“I just have one question,” Nell said.
“What?”
“Do you think he has another sword hidden in that suit
somewhere?”
 22

NELL

I watched Damian coming toward me with mingling fear

and excitement. I was afraid that he and his father
somehow had the power to mess even this up. But I was
excited because my success here tonight was about so much
more than the money. It was about more than proving my art
teacher or Maya North wrong or even Damian. Somewhere
along the way, I started to believe that I really wasn’t meant
for anything greater. As much as I wanted to pay my sister’s
way through music school because I loved her, I think I also
saw her as my only chance to contribute something
worthwhile to the world.
Because what had I done? I’d failed at everything I ever
seriously tried.
Tonight, was a new chapter in my life, though. It was the
beginning of something different, and no matter what Damian
or his father did, they couldn’t take that away.
Despite his failings, Damian had always seemed like an
intimidating man to me. He was the master of his own ship, if
nothing else. But now that I saw him trailing behind his father
with a meek expression on his face, I saw him for what he
really was. Damian was an overgrown child who still let his
father fight his battles for him.
Nathaniel Cross was in his sixties with a prominent belly, a
beard, and wild eyebrows. “Barnidge,” he said. “I considered
letting you slide on all of this if you had just kept yourself out
of the way. But it seems like you couldn’t leave well enough
alone, could you?”
“How do you figure?” Harry asked. He stood casually, but
there was a hint of electricity in the air between the men. I felt
like I wouldn’t be surprised if this conversation ended in a
brawl, even though I hoped it wouldn’t. “Your son made an ass
of himself trying to force himself on yet another woman who
wasn’t interested. She and I are dating. I’m really not seeing
how anything that happened needs to be a problem.”
“She disrespected my son. That means she disrespected
me, and you should know better than most how I can’t let that
stand.”
“Yeah,” Damian said. He took a half step forward, but his
father held him back and rolled his eyes.
“Son. You’ve done enough already.”
Damian balked, deciding instead to stand there stupidly
clenching his fists and glaring.
“Sure,” Harry said. “So, do what you’ve got to do and try
to ruin my career. But leave my authors and Nell out of it.
Most of them left as soon as they found out I got on your shit
list, anyway. Punishing them isn’t going to send any kind of
message that hasn’t already been sent.”
Nathaniel sniffed. “I can respect a man who is willing to
fall on the sword for the people he cares about. But I didn’t get
where I am by letting who I respect get in the way of doing
what’s best for me and my family.”
“I guess it’s a good thing you don’t have any sway in the
art world, then. Because you’re looking at one of the biggest
up and coming artists on the scene right now.” Harry gestured
to me.
I didn’t know what to do, so I twinkled my fingers and
smiled awkwardly. Damn it. That wasn’t cool. I should’ve
pounded my fist into my palm, or something. Maybe I
could’ve just snarled and bared my teeth.
“Why would I care about that?” Nathaniel asked.
 “Because your son’s business is art. I wonder what would
happen if the newest, loudest voice in art came forward and
told the truth about him. What was it you said, you can’t let
anyone disrespect your family? So, I guess you’ll have to
choose the lesser of two evils. Which disrespect can you
tolerate least? Your son getting embarrassed because a woman
didn’t want him, or your son getting publicly outed as a creep
who preys on the women he works with?”
I raised my eyebrows. He was making a really good point,
and I couldn’t help wanting to start a slow clap like William
had during Harry’s little emergency meeting at his mansion.
Fortunately, I had more self-control than William Chamberson,
even if that wasn’t saying a whole lot.
Nathaniel thought that over, then nodded. “Fair enough.
Damian, your smartest move is to walk away from this one,
and I won’t help you do otherwise.”
“That’s it?” I asked. I’d expected Damian’s father to be
some kind of maniacal supervillain who would twist his
mustache at us. But he was just going to drop it because Harry
made a good point?
“It’s like I told Harry,” Nathaniel said. “I am where I am
because I don’t let emotion cloud my judgment. Harry is right.
It’s that simple.”
“Father,” Damian said tightly. “Nobody is going to give a
shit what she says.”
“I’ll confirm what Harry said, but if he’s telling the truth,
he’s right. Face it. You lost, and you looked like an ass doing
it.”
Nathaniel left Damian as he headed off toward Maya, who
was chatting excitedly with a group of women in front of my
artwork.
“Last chance,” Damian said. “You can sign back on with
me, or I’m going to make sure nobody ever buys a single piece
of your art.”
“You’re a little late on that one,” Harry said. “She already
has bids on nearly half of her work.”
 Damian clenched his jaw. “I’ll talk to your buyers and tell
them what you really are.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What am I? The most recent
woman who wasn’t dumb enough to sleep with you?”
“Be careful,” Damian said.
“You should consider listening to your father,” Harry said.
“What, and just walk away?” Damian asked.
“What else are you going to do?” I asked. “Stand here and
continue making yourself look like a petulant child? Trust me,
we’ll both be happy to forget about you.”
I saw William Chamberson wandering around near my
exhibit. He turned his head, saw us, and started heading over. I
wanted to wave him off, but I also didn’t want to draw
Damian’s attention to him. If there was one thing I’d learned
about William, it was that he introduced chaos into every
imaginable situation.
Damian scoffed. “And what makes you think I’ll be
willing to forget you?”
William was getting closer, and I could’ve sworn the look
on his face was like a dog who caught a whiff of bacon. He
started walking more slowly, almost creeping toward Damian
from behind.
“Common sense?” Harry asked.
“Trust me,” Damian said. “When I’m done, everybody
who matters in this industry is going to know what you really
are.”
“You keep talking about what I really am,” I said. “What is
my big secret, exactly?”
William was standing right behind Damian now. He looked
to Harry and me, gave a thumbs up with a questioning look on
his face. Harry nodded subtly toward William.
In an admittedly impressive show of dexterity, William slid
his hand inside Damian’s jacket from the bottom and from
behind, fished around with a look of concentration on his face
while he was half-kneeling, still completely unnoticed, and
pulled out a pair of keys. He pocketed them and strolled off
like nothing ever happened.
I wanted to laugh, but I knew it would be more satisfying
if I kept my cool. I only hoped those weren’t just his car keys.
I hoped he got locked out of his house, too.
“Your big secret is that you’re a fraud. You didn’t even
understand why your sculpture caught Maya’s eye. If everyone
knows you’re just some simpleton who is slapping together art
for the heck of it, you won’t get—”
“Come on,” Harry said casually. “He doesn’t look like he
plans on stopping anytime soon, and we’ve got more bids to
field.”
Damian shook his head slowly. From the look on his face,
I think he knew he’d lost, but he wasn’t a man who ever had to
learn how to lose. It was almost sad watching him stand there
so deeply in denial. I thought once the heat of the moment
passed, he’d likely realize his father was right. If we stood and
talked to him, he would’ve gone till he was blue in the face, so
Harry was right to pull us away.
“You okay?” Harry asked once we were clear of Damian.
“I feel great. Overwhelmed, but I’m kind of getting used to
that.”
“I know the perfect way to de-stress after a night like this.”
“Is this your way of trying to get me into your bed?”
“What? No. That will happen on its own. I was talking
about something else.”
“What exactly could be a better way to de-stress than
that?”
 23

HARRY

N ell was the loudest human being on the face of the Earth.
I had her decked out in camouflage and all the proper
gear. The only modification to my normal hunting equipment
was that we were both equipped with paintball guns instead of
real weapons. We were even using clear paint so we wouldn’t
risk marking the animals and making them more visible to
predators. That little dose of morality had cost us an extra
forty minutes of driving when Nell realized the paintballs I
brought were orange.
There were stories about how Native Americans could
move through the woods so quietly you wouldn’t hear them
until they were inches away from you. They supposedly could
spot which leaves were dry and would crack underfoot and
which were soft and supple enough to silence their steps. They
knew which branches could bear their weight and when to find
a new path when there was no quiet route available. I’d always
wondered what it would be like to hunt next to somebody with
that level of mastery.
Now, I thought I could just imagine the complete opposite
of Nell. Her feet sought out every dry ass, crusty leaf and
cracked it so loud you’d think somebody just suplexed a
dinosaur and broke its back. She punished any stick foolish
enough to get in her way. She absolutely didn’t know how to
whisper, and she kept accidentally firing her gun. It became
such a problem that I made her let me hold the gun in the
unlikely event that we happened to sneak up on a blind and
deaf deer.
 “This is really fun,” Nell practically shouted at the top of
her lungs.
The sudden, loud sound in the middle of a quiet forest
would’ve normally made me jump. Except it wasn’t the only
sudden, loud sound. There was also the loud snap of Velcro
and packaging when she pulled out the food she had smuggled
in.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. If you could try to step
a little quieter, we might find some animals.”
“Like this?” Nell asked. She did an exaggerated parody of
a sneaky walk with her hands up high and her knees rising up
with every slow step.
Instead of making it quieter, it had the same effect as
somebody trying to open a package slowly in a quiet room or
eating a chip at half the normal speed.
I sighed but couldn’t help myself from smiling. “You’re
lucky I like you. If I met anybody who was this naturally bad
at hunting, I’d probably have run for the hills.”
“What? How can I be bad at hunting? We haven’t even
seen any animals yet.”
“The part about hunting that takes skill is finding the
animals. And part of finding the animals is not broadcasting to
them that you’re bumbling through the forest.”
“Excuse me. I don’t bumble.”
I laughed. “I’m just saying you are… conspicuous.”
Nell pointed her finger at me. “I’m not sure if that’s an
insult or not, but given the context, I’m going to choose to be
insulted.”
I pulled her closer to me. “Maybe if I kiss you, you won’t
be able to make so much noise.”
She raised her eyebrows in a clear challenge.
I kissed her. I realized it was the first time I’d ever kissed a
woman in the forest. It was actually the first time I’d ever
taken a woman I was dating hunting, for that matter.
 Nell moaned loudly and squeezed my ass with both hands.
I pulled back, smiling. “Okay. Fair. I should’ve seen that
coming.”
“So,” Nell said. “How did everything end up with the bids
on my art? Last you told me, we needed to wait until
everything got finalized, right?”
“Usually, it’s best not to hold loud, casual conversations in
the middle of a hunt.”
She made a show of snoring. “Sorry. I’m kidding. I know
this hunting thing is your jam, and I’m going to get better.”
Nell pulled her features into a serious expression. “I’ll be
silent as the night. Quiet as a chicken’s foot on the beach.
Invisible as a splinter you’re super sure is there but it just
won’t show up.”
“Uh,” I said slowly. I was watching her with a smile as she
got into a semi-crouched position and then jumped. She started
army crawling through bushes and undergrowth like some
kind of lunatic before I could stop her. “Nell! Wait! Shit,” I
dropped my gear and hurried to try to stop her, but before I
could reach her, she army crawled straight into a patch of
poison ivy.
“What?” Nell asked, finally stopping now that her hands
and face were completely covered in the stuff. “Too loud?”
 24

NELL

T hanks to Harry, I didn’t get the worst of it. He’d helped

me clean most of the oil from the poison ivy almost
immediately, so my only real symptom was a few itchy
patches in areas we hadn’t been able to completely get, like
my right eyelid.
I was laying on the couch at his house while Harry fiddled
with the remote in his theater room to pull up a movie. He was
a member of some fancy, rich person club that let him get in-
home access to movies that were only available in theater
otherwise.
“I’m sorry I ruined the hunting thing this morning,” I said.
“I’m kind of cringing when I look back on it.”
“Don’t. Being kind of hilariously bad at things is part of
your charm. Except art. It turns out you’re pretty damn good at
that. And making me happy.” Harry came to sit with me. He
pulled my feet up to rest them on his legs. He was wearing
casual clothes, which was relatively rare for him, but I liked
seeing him dressed down in a t-shirt and pants.
“You mean that? The happy part, I mean.”
“I mean all of it. You’re one of the only women I’ve ever
met who didn’t seem to give a shit about who I was or what I
was worth. You are always just yourself. Unapologetically so.
And I happen to really, really enjoy that self of yours.”
I laughed. “That self of mine,” I said quietly. “Yours isn’t
so bad either. And it was kind of hot seeing you get all Rambo
in the woods earlier. Especially when you knew exactly what
to do to get the poison ivy off me. Very sexy.”
“Listening to you impersonate a blind baby elephant was
pretty hot, too.”
I laughed, then tried to kick his leg.
“By the way,” Harry said. “If Damian did try to sabotage
you in any way, he did a horrible job of it. All your top bids
came through earlier. Unless somebody’s check bounces in the
next few days, you’re officially a millionaire. How does it
feel?”
I thought about that. I’d obviously run my mind over the
idea several times since everything that happened at Maya’s
gala, but I hadn’t really let it sink in yet. “It feels good, but not
really because there’s some crazy expensive thing I want to
buy. It feels good because… I guess it’s finally concrete proof
that I did something well. And it’s permission to keep doing
something I care about doing well.” I felt a sudden welling up
in my throat and pushed it down. I wasn’t going to cry while I
was talking like I was giving some sort of acceptance speech.
“It feels good. Yeah. Wait,” I said suddenly. “Did you tell your
authors that Nathaniel isn’t going to come after them
anymore?”
“I sent the message out, yeah. I haven’t heard back from
everybody, but I think they’ll come back.”
We ended up spending the night talking instead of
watching anything. Harry would occasionally get up and grab
some salve to put on the spots where the poison ivy had given
me an itchy rash. He always lingered where he touched me,
pausing to plant a kiss just above or beside the spot, then
smiling at me. I would’ve called it a loving smile, if I didn’t
think I was getting ahead of myself with a label like that.
Warm. It was a warm, caring smile, and I thought it was the
kind of smile I could be happy looking at for a long, long time.
“Can I say something a little silly?” Harry asked.
We had gone out to walk the gardens and ended up in the
spot where we first met, except the stars were out and the air
was crisp and cool now.
“Only if I can say something silly first.”
He smirked. “Okay. Deal.”
“The syllables in ‘on your mark, get set, go,’ are a
countdown.”
Harry let out a long sigh. “I don’t know where you come
up with this stuff.”
“The internet. Now it’s your turn. What is your silly
thing?”
“I feel like I need to preface this by saying I know we
haven’t technically known each other a long time. But I nearly
screwed everything up in the beginning by not being
completely honest with you. When I thought I’d lost you, I
swore I would always tell you everything from that point
forward, even if it wasn’t easy or if it would make me look
like a fool.”
I braced myself. What had he done? Was he breaking up
with me? Sleeping with someone else? A fan of cinnamon
flavored gum—I mean really, what kind of person tries to
freshen their breath with literal fire?
“I think I already love you.”
“Oh,” I said.
Harry winced a little. “Right. Yeah. Like I said, brutal
honesty. Maybe not always the best policy because—”
“I do too. And I know it’s crazy. But who says it has to
take months, right?”
Harry pulled me into such a tight hug that I thought my
head might launch off the top of my body for a second. He
relaxed, just holding me tight and rocking slightly from side to
side with me in his arms. I closed my eyes and nuzzled my
head into his chest. I didn’t know if we were being as
hopelessly romantic as teenagers with their first crushes.
Maybe we were both riding high on the new relationship
chemicals. Maybe I’d learn in a week that Harry wasn’t the
man I thought he was.
 I could’ve built a lake out of “maybe”’s and swam in it, but
I had one “for sure” that outweighed it all. Being with Harry
felt right. It felt so right that it sank into my bones, and stayed
there long after I’d left and went back to sleep in my own bed
at home. I could feel him there, like music just quiet enough
that I could only feel the vibrations running through me. It
didn’t matter that I’d only known him a week. I was happy.
25
 EPILOGUE - NELL
Five Months Later

I followed Ashley around during her campus tour of the

Juilliard School. It had been her top choice, but even when
I was secretly planning to earn enough to help her pay her way
through school, I had no hopes of ever being able to help her
go here. My best-case scenario was putting her through some
rinky-dink college in the middle of the woods in Missouri.
Ashley looked like a kid in a candy shop as the tour guide
took us through the campus and showed us state of the art
recording rooms, auditoriums, classrooms, and the amenities.
We all took a break near the café.
“You don’t think it’s a little weird that you brought like
fifty people to this?” Ashley asked. “We have so many people
that we took up an entire tour group. Like, I’m the only
student.”
I guess she had a point. Harry had wanted to come for
obvious reasons. Over the months, my dream of helping
Ashley do this had basically become his dream, too. Peter had
come because Harry talked about it so much and he felt like he
wanted to see Ashley’s reaction, which meant Violet and her
daughter, Zoey, had come as well. Then William had somehow
found out about it and came, which meant Hailey was with us.
And of course, Davey had come, too. We were all gathered at
a cafeteria-style table near the edge of the room, except Zoey,
Violet, and Peter had gone off to search for cupcakes.
One thing was for certain—every woman on campus was
gawking at our little group that seemed to be full to the brink
with heart-stopping men.
“It’s definitely weird,” Davey said. “I feel kind of
uncomfortable being the most attractive man here, too. Like,
are we going to talk about how awkward that is?”
I grinned at him. “Oh, it’s unbearable.”
 Davey shrugged. “Yeah, well, I guess all you muscle heads
should’ve done a little research on the growing popularity of
the dad bod before you wasted all that time eating chicken and
lifting weights.” He popped a French fry in his mouth as if
emphasizing his point.
William leaned in closer. “I can pop an apple if I press it
between my bicep and my forearm. Can you do that?”
“Why would I want to do that?” Davey asked dryly.
William walked over to the buffet line, grabbed an apple,
and came back to sit at the table. He wedged it in the crook of
his elbow and bent his arm, squeezing until his face went red. I
noticed Hailey’s face was going red, too. Sure enough, the
apple exploded after a few seconds.
“I’m still failing to see the benefit of that power,” Davey
said.
“I mean, it was kind of cool,” Ashley admitted.
“I think they agree,” I pointed to a group of giggling
college girls at a nearby table who looked ready to pass out
with excitement.
Hailey shook her head. “I told you not to use that move in
public. It gets me all…”
William winked at us. “Well, ladies, gentlemen, and
Davey. Here’s a free bit of relationship advice. The key to a
healthy sex life is spotting the signs of desire in your woman.”
He reached out and brushed his thumb over Hailey’s bottom
lip. She sucked in an excited breath. “Yep. I’m going to need
to go take care of this.”
William stood, yanked Hailey up out of her seat and
carried her over his shoulder.
“Okay…” I said.
“That guy is an animal,” Davey said.
“Yeah…” Ashley agreed wistfully.
“Oh, stop it,” I said, laughing. “He’s married. Happily.
And you’re way too young for that.”
 “Okay, mom,” Ashley said. She was smiling though. “It’s
still weird that you’re friends with all these rich, famous guys
now. And Davey.”
Davey threw his hands up helplessly. “Could everyone
stop throwing me in at the end of the sentence like some kind
of afterthought? Did we all forget who got Nell the job that set
everything in motion to begin with?”
“I haven’t,” Harry said. He wrapped his arm around me
and kissed the top of my head. “So, thank you for bringing
Nell to my doorstep.”
“See,” Davey said. “I like him better than the twin.”
“That’s because you are a good judge of character,” Harry
said.
“I don’t know if I’ve officially said this yet,” Ashley said.
“But thank you.” She got up and hugged me tight, then sat
back down beside me. “I know how much this must cost, and
I’m going to pay it all back once I start making real money.”
“No,” I said. “I’m happy to do this for you, and if you try
to pay me back, I’m just going to take every dollar you give
me and stuff it in your couch when you’re not looking.”
Ashley hugged me again. “Why are you so nice to me?”
“Because you’re my little sister. And you’re an amazing
musician. You deserve to be here.”
She sat back and blew out a nervous breath. “I hope so. It’s
intimidating actually being here.”
“You’ve got this. And you’ve got all of us ready to back
you up if anything goes wrong, okay?”
She nodded. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but do
you mind if I kind of wander around on my own for a little?
Not that I don’t enjoy your company, but I think everybody is
afraid to talk to me when I’m surrounded by the super-star
squad.”
I laughed. “No. Go ahead. We’ll be fine and we can meet
back up later.”
 “Our little girl is growing up,” Davey said once she left.
“She’s a good kid,” Harry said.
I looked at Harry and had an overwhelming curiosity creep
up in me. We’d been together five months now. Our first week
had been an emotional rollercoaster, but everything beyond
that felt like a perpetual summer. I had my renewed passion
for art and the studio apartment I was renting downtown in
New York with a view of Central Park. I got to spend all day
sculpting and trying new things and then I got to spend my
evenings doing everything imaginable with Harry. We
traveled, we stayed in, we ate out, and sometimes we just sat
on street corners or on benches in the park and talked for
hours. But there was one thing I’d been too embarrassed to
bring up until now, and I desperately wanted Davey to find
somewhere else to be so I could ask Harry.
Harry saw the look on my face, which made him furrow
his brows. He was trying to figure out if something was
wrong.
Davey looked between the two of us, frowned, and then
threw up his hands with a sigh. “Oh, sure. Third wheel Davey
will just go wander around, too. Make sure you don’t forget to
come find me when you’re done doing whatever it is you two
are about to do.”
He got up, and almost as soon as he left the table, a college
girl with pretty red hair stopped him. “Um, excuse me. I know
this is really weird, but were you just sitting with William
Chamberson? Because I’m writing a paper on him and if you
had time to talk about him with me, it’d be a huge help.”
Harry and I raised our eyebrows at each other.
“Uhh,” Davey said. “I mean, I do know William pretty
well. Probably better than anyone, really.”
We watched him walk off with the girl, still bullshitting his
ass off.
I laughed. “I wonder how that’s going to work out.”
Harry shrugged. “Is something wrong? You were giving
me this really weird look.”
 “It was just something you said. ‘She’s a good kid.’ It got
me thinking about how we never really talked about it. I don’t
want to freak you out,” I said quickly. “I know it’s still early
and everything, but I don’t even know if you want to have
kids. Someday, I mean.”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“If it’s your belly I’m putting the kids in, then yes. I want
as many as you want.”
“I don’t know if it’s technically accurate to say you put the
kids in my belly. It’s more like you put them in my vagina and
the kids find their way to my belly.”
“I see. And I have a question for you.”
“Okay.”
“What are your thoughts on having kids outside
marriage?”
“I’d avoid it if I could.”
“Well, that’s a problem. Isn’t it? I’ll have to start thinking
about how we’re going to tackle that.”
“Wait. You mean like you don’t agree? Because I wasn’t
trying to pressure—”
Harry leaned in and kissed me, then pulled back with a
smile. “You’re adorably slow on the uptake, like usual. No. I
meant it was a problem that we weren’t married yet if you’re
ready to start trying for kids.”
“Oh. Oh,” I said. I didn’t realize I’d implied I was ready,
but when I thought about it, I guess I was. I’d told Harry I
loved him after just a week from the day we met. I spent the
next few weeks after that continually taking the idea of loving
Harry out and examining it in my mind. No matter how many
ways I tried to pick it apart, it never faltered. I really did love
him, as much as anybody can be sure of something so abstract.
I loved learning all of his little quirks and tendencies.
There was a comfort in the familiarity, like a well-worn trail
through the woods that I knew I’d never grow tired of
traveling. But he was still full of surprises and the sort of
kindness that could take my breath away at times, like when
he’d flown in a team of master sculptors for my birthday and
arranged for a full day of personal classes and instructions, or
when he found out I loved penguins so he surprised me with a
trip to go see wild penguins in Alaska. It wasn’t just about
spending his money extravagantly to “wow” me, it was that he
listened and cared about what I said. He was always trying to
find ways to surprise me to make me happy and make me feel
loved.
There wasn’t a world I could imagine where Harry
wouldn’t be an amazing father. So what else was I supposed to
wait for? Why not now? Why not him?
My questions were met with silence, because I knew there
was nothing left to stop us.
“Or are you not ready?” he asked. “You look a little pale.”
“I am. I’m ready, I mean. For all of it.”
“Me too,” Harry said.
“Yeah, me too,” I agreed.
He laughed. “I keep telling you. When somebody says,
‘me too,’ it’s because you already said the thing you don’t
have to say, ‘me too’ in response to a ‘me too.’ It’s just
confusing.”
“Sorry, I’m just excited.”
“Yeah, me too,” Harry said. He smiled and pointed a finger
at me just as I opened my mouth. “Don’t you dare.”
 PLEASE DON’T FORGET TO LEAVE A
REVIEW!

Thank you so much for reading! Whether you loved the book
or not, it would mean the world to me if you left an honest
review on Amazon. I read every single review and take them
all to heart, even on older books, so it’s not just a great way to
give me your feedback and help me improve, it’s also one of
the best ways to support me and help me find new readers.
I’m currently not planning on continuing the series past
this book, although I do still have one crazy idea for a book
that would tell Grammy’s story tucked away in my head. Who
knows when or if that will happen, but for now, I’m excited to
jump into something new and fresh. I hope you’ve had as
much fun reading the series as I have had writing it, and I can’t
wait to show you what’s up next!
Don’t know where to start? I hope this helps! You can also
check the next page for a more detailed guide on which of my
books might be best for you. Otherwise, click this image to go
straight to my catalog on Amazon and start browsing.
 ALSO BY PENELOPE BLOOM

My Most Recent Books

(Anyone But Rich) **Coming September 3rd**
The first book in a three-book series I’ll be working
with Montlake Romance on. You can pre-order it here.
His Secret (Top 20 Best Seller)
His Package (top 7 Best Seller)
His Treat (Top 6 Best Seller)
Her Cherry (Top 5 Best Seller)
His Banana (top 8 Best Seller)
Baby for the Beast (#60 Best Seller)
Baby for the Brute (We don’t have to talk about
rank on this one, do we?)
Savage (#20 Best Seller)
The Dom’s Bride (#40 Best Seller)

(Babies for the Doms)

Knocked Up and Punished (top 21 Best Seller)
Knocked Up by the Master (top 12 Best Seller)
Knocked Up by the Dom (USA Today Bestselling Novel
and #8 ranked Bestseller)
(The Citrione Crime Family)
His (Book 1)
Mine (Book 2)
Dark (Book 3)

Punished (top 40 Best Seller)

Single Dad Next Door (top 12 Best Seller)
The Dom’s Virgin (top 22 Best Seller)
Punished by the Prince (top 28 Best Seller)
Single Dad’s Virgin (top 10 Best Seller)
Single Dad’s Hostage (top 40 Best Seller)
The Bodyguard
Miss Matchmaker