Page 12 of Bad Boys After Dark - Brett
When it was their turn, Kurt looked up and his eyes widened. “Brett. I didn’t expect to see you here.” Kurt’s smile was open and friendly as he came around the table and embraced him.
He turned that disarming smile to Sophie, and when she opened her mouth to greet him, her fangirl slipped out. “Wow. Kurt Remington. Ohmygod. I can’t…Your books…”
He and Brett both laughed.
“I think what Sophie is trying to say is that she adores your books.” Brett put his hand on the small of Sophie’s back as if he knew she needed grounding. His touch helped bring her down from the clouds, and she managed what she hoped was a normal, not a fangirl, smile.
“Yeah, I got that.” Kurt smiled. “Don’t worry. It happens a lot. But what readers don’t realize is that I’m just as nervous as you are. Even after years of meeting fans, I still get a thrill when someone tells me, or can’t tell me,” he said with an appreciative glimmer in his eyes, “how much they love my books. Thank you for reading them. It means the world to me.”
“I really love your books. The way you build suspense is incredible. I have to keep all the lights on in my apartment while I read.”
Kurt laughed and glanced at Brett. “At least you can take it. This guy can’t handle thrillers.”
“Maybe all his bravado is just for show,” Sophie teased.
Brett scoffed. “She loves my bravado.”
They talked for a few minutes, and when Kurt signed a copy of his most recent release, Brett took a picture with his phone. “Let me get a picture of the two of you.” Brett motioned to Kurt and Sophie. After he took the picture, he asked a salesperson to take a picture of the three of them. He put his arm around Sophie. “A Sophie sandwich,” he whispered in her ear. “Mm. I sure am hungry.”
Quintessential Brett. She had a huge smile in that picture, and she knew she’d treasure it even more than the signed book and photograph with Kurt.
As they left the bookstore, Sophie was on cloud nine again. The fact that Brett had brought her to see not just her favorite author, but the man Grace had told him she dreamed about, underscored just how confident Brett really was, which made him even more appealing.
“Thank you,” she said. “That was incredible.”
He put an arm around her and said, “You can thank me properly later.”
And just like that, the Brett she knew so well returned.
Chapter Three
SOPHIE AND BRETT walked in the direction of her apartment. The city was so alive at every hour, it never failed to excite her. It had been a big adjustment when she’d first come to the city to attend college, going from a small town where almost everyone knew her name and where being stuck in traffic meant she passed ten cars instead of three on the way to the grocery store to a place where cabs weaved through the streets, stopping abruptly and honking their horns at all hours. But she’d craved the change for so long, she saw it as an adventure.
“Is this what we’ve become?” She patted his hand on her shoulder.
He shrugged. “It feels good. Go with it.”
“That sounds like a sexy line to me. Does it work often?” She said it jokingly, but her stomach knotted up with the distressed look in Brett’s eyes.
“You tell me. It’s the first time I’ve used it.”
That surprised her, but she believed him, and it did feel good to have his arm around her, especially after the way he’d held her at the bookstore. She reached up and held his hand, which was draped over her shoulder. “Yeah, I think it does.”
She expected a sexy retort, and when he didn’t give her one, she chalked it up to another surprise for the night.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” Brett said. “Something maybe no one else knows.”
She wasn’t sure if he was fishing for a naughty response, or really curious about her, so she erred on the safe side. “When I was a little girl, I’d dream about coming here. It felt bigger than life and unattainable.”
“Why unattainable?”
“I was a small-town girl. My parents met when they were young, and they’ve been together forever, living in their own hometown, Oak Falls, where I grew up. My grandfather has a farm he inherited from his parents. It just seemed unreal to think that one day I could live a whole different type of life far away from everything I knew.”
