Page 60 of Driven Daddy

“That’s it.” Larsen said with a fingersnap.

“She’s got that cute cat-like face. I’ve been drawing her all day.”

“Really?” Larsen left me in the dust to check out her sketches.

I shook my head as my best friendoohed andahhed over Ryan. He’d lost interest in my drawings long ago. Moksha had a few iterations from all the way back to my college days.

Larsen was actually the one who convinced me to change my major from screenwriting to a fine arts and visual arts degree. He’d been happy with engineering. We’d met in a mythology class in our freshman year, and that had been it.

We’d even finagled an apartment as soon as we could scrape the money together. It had been a hole in the wall in the city, but we’d lived for the freedom of it.

While we’d gone our separate ways for jobs, and after a few years, he’d gone home with his ‘fancy American education’ as his father called it. But New York was in his blood, and he’d come back to the city when he’d found a good job with a firm based in the city.

Somehow, I’d gotten lucky to bring him on, after he’d grown tired of the red tape and endless policy for the management and manufacturing companies. Strangely enough, he was perfect for his role with Duality Press. He technically worked for me, but I swore I wouldn’t have a company without him.

Dragging myself out of the past, I broke down my table and helped Colette put the store back together, all the while very aware that Rita Savage was a couple dozen feet away.

Even thought it might as well have been miles.

She didn’t even glance my way. Instead, she methodically organized her books and quietly spoke with Colette about the raffle tickets.

I had no idea how I’d ended up with a co-workshop with a romance author. I had no clue how that was going to work.

How we’d even manage to be civil enough to create something people would want to attend.

Moreover, I couldn’t believe how many people signed up. I knew there were plenty of fans who dreamed of doing what I did. That I inspired them to create their own stories and characters—which still blew my mind. But the real star of the show had been all the people who wanted to be authors.

And now we had to figure out a workshop in a little over a month.

Oh, and not snipe at each other because I couldn’t keep my asshole gene in check.

Easy.

Right.

I crossed to Rita, who was crouched behind her table, those toes still bare as she rearranged a shelf of books—her books. Well, the books with her co-writer.

How did that work?

I couldn’t imagine someone in my head all the time when I was creating. I had absolute control of theKnights of Chaosseries—for both the bad and the good.

“What was the final count for the raffle?”

Rita craned her neck to look at me before she stood and dusted her fingers on her dress. On that cashmere dress, no less. The memory of the softness of that material sliding over my shoulders had me shifting my feet.

“Over seven hundred.”

My jaw dropped. “Truly?”

“Free workshop with us was a big draw. I figured we’d be lucky to have twenty people want to take it when I called it out.”

“I am pretty famous.”

Her eyebrow arched. “Is that so?”

I huffed out a half laugh. “You know that I am. We’re both at the top of our particular genres.”

“How would you know?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I thought I was just a romance author.”

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