Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 121460 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121460 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
I was a small-town boy who’d been trapped in a traveling man’s body for too long.
The door behind me opened, and I spun around to find Monroe stepping out of the cottage. Her gorgeous hair glinted copper in the low morning sunlight, the strands falling around her shoulders from beneath a green beanie that looked adorable on her. She locked her door and turned to me, her eyes filled with a light I hadn’t seen in a while.
My heart beat a bit faster.
Ever since the night I cooked dinner and she read my script, things had shifted between us. Roe was still wary, a bit guarded, but there was no more animosity. I hadn’t slept that night. I wanted to be thrilled by her assessment of my script. She’d loved it. She had a few notes on my female characters, which were great.
But it wasn’t my script that kept me awake. I tossed and turned, denying myself the urge to jump in a car and drive to Glasgow. Steven Shaw was very lucky I’d made a promise not to turn him into a dead man. Walker didn’t exactly help. In fact, I had to rein him in. My bodyguard had zero tolerance for violence against women. It was the one thing that transformed him from my cool, sensible head of security into a hot-tempered weapon.
We wanted to send Shaw a message and both agreed it would be better that neither of us did it because we’d probably maim the bastard. Therefore, we’d sent some guys Walker knew to calmly but forcefully explain that Monroe Sinclair was officially off-limits, and if he so much as breathed in her direction, he’d be breathing through a tube next.
The thought of him hurting this precious woman was a vise around the beating organ in my chest.
“Are you okay?” Roe’s smile of welcome dimmed a bit.
I grinned. “You’re just too fucking cute in that hat. Lost my ability to speak for a minute.”
She rolled her eyes with a snort of disbelief that made her even cuter and turned to take in the Christmas street fair that had made driving down Castle Street a no-go for the day. “I wish they’d had this when we were kids.” Roe stepped off the pavement toward the hubbub.
I followed and gently took her arm to thread it through mine, tucking her into my side. Our height made it a wee bit awkward, but I couldn’t care less. The heat of her, the scent of her perfume, were worth anything.
Roe gave me a look as if to say, I know what you’re doing, but she didn’t pull away. That was definitely an improvement. My optimism rose.
“Let’s check out Sloane’s stall first. It was so nice of Regan to get her a stall last minute.”
It was actually Lachlan. Regan had tried and failed to get the town committee to allow a last-minute seller to join the fair, especially an “outsider,” so she spoke to Lachlan, who was on the committee as a prominent business owner. He’d not only convinced them, he had a friend on the local council fast-track a permit for Sloane.
Following Roe through the crowd, I noted some people doing a double take when they looked at me. I gave them a nod but hoped the influx of tourists outside of Ardnoch would not be a problem. Spotting a young woman I didn’t recognize surreptitiously trying and failing to take a photo of me on her phone, I tried not to tense. Who knew where that photo would end up on the abyss of the internet. We’d become a society repulsively comfortable with taking images or videos of strangers in private moments and posting them online for entertainment, a culture that had surely developed from our treatment of celebrities.
Glancing down at Monroe, I noted she was too preoccupied with perusing the wares at the stalls to have noticed. Thankfully.
“There’s Sloane and Callie. Her stall is so busy already.” Roe sounded thrilled for her friend, and affection flooded me.
I let Roe lead me to the stall, chuckling as she shoved our way to the front. Sloane and Callie both looked at us with beaming smiles. “You made it!”
“We did,” Roe said, eyeing all the baked goods. “How did you guys pull this off? Look at all this!”
“I’ll have two gingerbread men, four cupcakes, and four mini Santa cheesecakes!” the woman next to Roe shouted at Sloane.
Sloane gave us an apologetic look, but Roe waved her off and then slapped my chest dramatically as she cried, “Brodan, look at the Santa cheesecakes. Those are adorable!”
Her easiness with me reminded me so much of what it used to be like. I grinned like a madman. “They are adorable.” It was true. Sloane had piped cream cheese and added sugar-dusted strawberries to the top of each cake and then piped a dot of cream cheese on top of that, so the strawberries looked like Santa hats.