1
Kenzie
If this conference didn’t change my life, I might regret maxing out my credit card to come. I’d always lived by a firm “shoot first and ask questions later” philosophy. Did it sometimes lead to crippling embarrassment? Debt? Bodily harm? Yes, to all the above.
But I never wondered “what if.” Because if life had the balls to put an opportunity in front of me, I grabbed it by the horns even if it meant getting rag dolled into the crowd.
It meant I never had to wonder what would’ve happened if I tried a skateboarding trick in front of a bunch of hot guys when I didn’t know how to skateboard. I may not particularly like the answer I got—three chipped teeth and a big dental bill—but I got my darn answer, didn’t I?
Shoot first, ask questions later. And that’s exactly what I’d done when I heard I could get tickets for me and my best friends to hear Sebastian St. James speak at a writer’s conference. I could also get some signed books from some of my other favorite authors, but the truth was I came here for Sebastian. The mysterious, brilliant enigma that he was.
Winter had just crept into the air. The thin jacket and sandals I’d chosen were turning out to be tactical mistakes, especially considering I’d insisted on getting here several hours early. By the time we finished waiting in line, I worried I might be the first recorded case of frostbite in fifty-degree temperatures.
The warmth inside the huge conference center felt good until it woke up my numb limbs with little pinpricks of torment. The building was cavernous with tacky carpet, tall windows along the outer walls, and that certain smell I found was unique to big conferences. It was like stale coffee, sweat, and just a touch of desperation.
Signs everywhere directed traffic to book signing tables, speaking events, and showing the day’s schedule. I didn’t need any of that because I’d studied the agenda and a map of the conference center for the past few days. I could’ve walked this baby blindfolded by now.
Most attendees fit the same mold. I guess it took one to know one, but I could tell almost every man and woman here was a writer. Despite the stereotypes, writers came in all sizes and shapes, too. My favorite were the little old ladies you’d never suspect. They were shuffling along with determined, mischievous little smiles on their lips. They often wore high powered glasses strong enough to magnify an ant to the size of a basketball. Of course, those glasses had to be secured to their neck with some kind of decorative string, just in case the force of flipping a page on their latest romance novel jettisoned their spectacles from their eyes.
But my favorite thing about those little old ladies? Half of them wrote the dirtiest, sexiest, steamiest smut I’d ever laid eyes on once you put a keyboard in front of them. They’d smile, give you a hug, and maybe even bake you a cookie by day. By night? They’d melt your panties off like absolute badasses.
“Why are you grinning like a weirdo?” Trinity asked.
“Come on, Trin,” Lance said. Lance was her big brother, and he towered over both me and Trinity with his athletic build as we made our way through the building. “This is Kenzie’s wet dream. Of course she’s grinning like a lunatic.”
I was moving as fast as my unfortunately small legs could take me without breaking into a full run. I kept it to a fast walk, partly because I wasn’t sure I would make it at a jog all the way to the conference room and partly because I had some shame. “Or,” I said. “You could say Kenzie is grinning like a hopeful, gorgeous, young aspiring author.”
Lance chuckled and Trinity made a gagging sound.
Trinity was two years younger than Lance. She was short like me and had strawberry blonde hair she liked to keep in two shoulder-length braids. She had a cute, innocent look that always seemed to attract exactly the wrong sort of guy.
“If Lance calls you gorgeous,” Trinity said. “I’m going to barf on both of you as a deterrent.”
“Kenzie’s like a sister,” Lance said dismissively. “Besides, Travis already made it weird enough between us when he tried to get in Trinity’s pants. I think two brothers trying to hook up with their little sister’s best friend would just be redundant.”
My older brother, Travis, was probably the worst case of “wrong guy” she’d ever attracted. Thankfully, I’d squashed that one. For now. Being related to a player slash billionaire who could charm the teeth off a horse had always made it hard to have girlfriends. The sick bastard took it as a challenge to see if he could sleep with anybody I ever got friendly with.
Trinity and Lance started bantering about something, but I was a kid in a candy store. I barely heard them.
I did a little hopping dance of excitement as I walked. Lance and Trinity shared a roll of the eyes and a grin on my behalf.
Lance was a former baseball player who had a serious chance of playing his way up from the minor leagues until he blew out his shoulder. He still looked the part, even down to the blue eyed, all-American look he had.
Trinity, like me, was allergic to exercise and probably couldn’t throw a baseball through an open barn door. Her biggest dream was to get an internship in a French kitchen to jumpstart her goal of opening her own pastry shop. Neither of them really cared at all about an author’s conference, but they were good enough friends to tag along without complaint for my sake.
“I still can’t believe you bought us tickets to this thing without telling us,” Lance said.
“Well,” I said. “I wasn’t going to come alone.”
“At least tell me these tickets weren’t too expensive,” Trinity said.
“We’re here, aren’t we?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. They both knew my financial situation. Grim would’ve been an understatement. I was basically the starving artist type, except minus the artist part, because I still hadn’t even finished writing a proper book. It was all made worse because my big brother made a monthly plea to “just give me a few mil to take the edge off.” The guy seriously thought handing someone a couple million dollars was as casual as offering an aspirin from his medicine cabinet.
Stubbornly, I always refused his help. I had a dream, damn it. Someday, I wanted to look back from my castle mansion and say I’d built it all with nothing but words. I didn’t want to have to mutter under my breath about how my brother kinda sorta financed the shit out of me and gave me a leg up on all the competition.
We were fast-walking—mostly because I was too excited to walk at normal speed—toward the room where Sebastian St. James was going to be speaking. I sort of managed not to shove my way past any poor old ladies trying to shuffle to the same room.
“You know,” Trinity said. “The only way to keep my sanity and be your friend is learning when I shouldn’t ask more questions. But I have a feeling you really went overboard this time. You were just telling me last week how you had to bat your eyelashes at some guy to bum his subway card. You can’t afford to take the subway, but you can afford three tickets to this?”
“What?” I asked, already growing breathless. “I got a really good deal.” Liar, liar.
Lance was keeping pace with my small, churning legs easily, but Trinity was huffing and puffing to maintain my speed. I didn’t care if I got there sweaty and panting; I was going to get a seat in the front row.