Page 117 of Seduced By You

A swarm of butterflies took flight in my stomach.He’s gorgeous. I hadn’t a clue why, but I’d expected to come face-to-face with a middle-aged man and have to come up with a polite way of signaling that I wasn’t in the mood for chitchat. Instead, sitting across the aisle from me was a guy in his late twenties or early thirties. Medium-brown hair curled over his white shirt, and his eyes were the color of the finest jade. He had a perfect aquiline nose, model-worthy cheekbones, and a jawline that I’d give up this seat to run my teeth along just once.

“Sorry?”

He pointed his chin at my book.

“Ah. No. It’s terrible.” I wasn’t lying. If my editor saw this, she’d drop me faster than I could type “Goodbye, career.”

“Then why read it? Life’s too short to force ourselves to do things we don’t enjoy.”

I attempted a wry smile. “If only it were that simple.”

He flashed a set of perfect white teeth and removed a brushed-gold laptop embedded with a logo I couldn’t make out from his bag. Seconds later, he began typing, long, slim fingers moving effortlessly over the keyboard, his eyebrows dipped in concentration.

All righty, then.

Maybe he thought I’d given him the brush-off with my answer. Or perhaps he found me boring.

Ouch.Stop with the self-flagellation, Rowe. My confidence was already teetering on the precipice. It didn’t need a helpful shove over the edge of the cliff.

I returned to reading. Every word burned my eyes. The sentences were staccato and unvaried, there was far too much telling instead of showing, my descriptions were cloggy and lacking any kind of color, and my characters were two-dimensional arseholes.

What had happened to me? I used to find writing a joy, yet the more readership I gained, the worse I felt. Once upon a time, I could knock out ten thousand words in a day, and those words needed hardly any editing. The best I could do with this book would be to set fire to it and start over. But what if I couldn’t? What if this offense to literature was the last thing I ever wrote?

“Isn’t this you?”

I let the book fall into my lap and once more turned my attention to the handsome stranger. He’d spun his laptop so the screen faced in my direction. Staring out at me was… me.

I groaned. Stupid author bio. I hated that picture, too. I looked like such a prat. The photographer had insisted on that silly pose. Said I looked “author-y” in it—whatever that meant. My publisher had gushed over it, and the next thing I knew, it was everywhere.

Worse, though, was that my beautiful stranger had caught me reading my own book. From his point of view, I must look like an egotistical jerk.

“Um, yeah.”

“Wow, an author. That’s impressive.”

“It really isn’t.”

“Don’t talk yourself down. Millions of people would love the talent and discipline it takes to write a book, and you’ve written fifteen.”

He’d… counted.

Also… sixteen, if we included the… the…thingI held in my hands.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

The plane slowly reversed onto the taxiway. I hated the takeoff part. Once we were airborne, I’d be fine, but this first bit—

“Sometimes it helps to talk about it.”

I frowned, refocusing on the man to my left once more. “What? My dislike of taking off?”

His lips twitched. “No. Although, we can talk about that if you like. I was referring to your exasperation with your latest book.”

“Exasperation? Who says I’m exasperated?”

“I do. You’ve sighed thirteen times in less than two minutes. I could be wrong, but that sounds like exasperation to me.”

Ugh. Handsomeandastute. What were the chances?

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