What he looked like was a god, and every woman—and even some of the men, probably—in that terminal knew it.
That was the thing about Will Price, though: those good looks of his were deceptive. They’d managed to fool many, many people into thinking he was a sweet guy—a guy like the heroes he wrote about in his books, who lived only to adore and worship women … until he killed them off in some tragic freak accident, leaving the heroine brokenhearted but “stronger for having known what real love was.”
Barf.
And now Will’s good looks were fooling Lauren and her friends. I could see the girls clustered around the single baggage carousel with all the other passengers, waiting for their luggage to arrive.
But the second Will walked by, Lauren’s head popped up from her phone’s screen as if she had some kind of hot-male-celebrity-author radar. I saw her eyes widen, then her thin shoulder blades raise as she sucked in her breath.
“Will!”
The next thing I knew, all three girls were swarming him, Cassidy—the one who wanted her chest signed—shrieking the loudest of all.
“Will, Will,” she cried. “Oh, Will, I’m your biggest fan! Can I get a selfie with you?”
“Uh.” Will looked up from his phone screen. Now he stood—those dark eyes shaded by lashes that were wasted on a man—looking confused and startled, as the teens jumped around him. “Um—”
“We’re here for the book festival,” Lauren declared. “We’re going to go to every single one of your events!”
Will seemed about as thrilled as if she’d just informed him that she was an oral surgeon about to give him a dental bone graft.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s … brilliant.”
And of course he said brilliant instead of great. Because, as if Will weren’t hot enough looks-wise, he was also from some small, picturesque village in England somewhere, and had an accent I’d heard more than a few women (and men) swoon over as “the sexiest author voice ever.”
“Such a shame,” someone in publishing had once lamented to me, “that Will Price doesn’t narrate his own audiobooks! We’ve asked and asked him, but he won’t do it. He says he hates the sound of his own voice. Can you imagine? He’s so modest!”
No one had ever asked me to narrate my own audiobooks. I had offered many times, feeling pretty confident that I could do a good job, seeing as how kids seemed to love it at school visits when I read Kitty Katz out loud. I even did different little voices for all the characters: a high-pitched one for Kitty and a low-pitched one for her boyfriend, Rex Canine, as well as the popular “Kitty Katz claw” hand salute that symbolized pawsitivity. I was good!
I had, however, been gently but firmly told by my publisher that it was better to “leave such things to professionals.”
Unless you were Will Price, apparently, with a deep, manly voice and a British accent that pronounced butter like “buttah,” as in “buttah wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”
Barf again.
“Can we get a selfie?” The girls crowded in around Will, their cell phones raised like battle-axes. “This is so cool!”
Will was wincing those dark, expressive eyes of his as if he were in pain. He was evidently not usually met in airport terminals by throngs of adoring teenaged fans … or at least, not his hometown airport terminal.
And poor Will! There was no publicist nearby to stop the assault. Certainly this hadn’t occurred to the girls’ mothers—who I assumed were the attractive, well-dressed women standing nearby, their own phones raised in amusement to film their daughters leaping around their favorite author. They weren’t doing a thing.
I supposed that if Molly the librarian had been there, she’d have stepped in to intervene. But she was still occupied in the restroom.
Honestly, though, how was what was happening to Will so terrible? No one was telling him that they used to love his books. No one was saying that he used to be their favorite author. He should have been happy that he even had fans, given how deeply unsatisfying his books were.
But of course he didn’t realize this, because he was Will Price.
“I really think we ought to save the selfies for the festival, don’t you, girls?” he said in the condescending tone of voice people usually reserved for toddlers or golden retrievers.
“Noooo.” The girls kept snapping away with their phones. “Just one more?”
He looked so uncomfortable and dismayed that I couldn’t help laughing out loud. This was almost as good as if I’d wiped his name off the whiteboard.
Unfortunately, laughing was a mistake. Because somehow he’d heard me—don’t ask me how, considering the din in the terminal, with the clanking of the baggage carousel and the excited buzz of the rest of the passengers snagging the keys to their rental cars—and looked my way.
That’s how I was able to witness the exact moment that Will Price recognized me—despite my hair color, which I’d changed so dramatically since the last time we’d met.
And that’s how I saw those dark eyes go wide as his gaze went from my face to the whiteboard and then back again.
That’s when his skin, beneath the days’ old beard, went pale, and the heavy backpack he’d been carrying slid off his shoulder like he’d lost all muscle control. It landed with a solid thunk on the terminal floor.
Wow.
Well, I’d expected him to feel something upon seeing me again. A little embarrassment, maybe (if he actually had any feelings, which, after what he’d done to me, I’d always doubted).
But this? He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“Er,” I heard him say, his gaze still riveted to my face. “Listen, girls. I don’t have time to chat right now. I have to—”
Go? Do you have to go now, Will? Oh, why is that? Because the woman whose work you maligned to the New York Times is standing in front of you holding a sign with your name on it and you’re too much of a coward to go up to her and say you’re sorry? Is that why? How purr-fectly claw-ful for you.
But to my surprise, he didn’t head for the exit. Instead, he took a step toward me—
“Will? Oh, Will, there you are!”
I raised my eyebrows as a lithe blonde tore through the crowd, then launched herself at Will. Dressed in a barely there white bikini over which she’d thrown a pair of cutoffs and a gauzy red beach cover-up, she hit Will like a rocket.
“Will!” she gushed as she wrapped her sun-bronzed arms around his neck and her endlessly long legs around his waist. “I’m so sorry I’m late!” Surprisingly, she had a British accent, too. “I’ve got the car parked right outside. Are you ready? You didn’t check any bags, did you?”
“Uh, no. No, Chloe, I didn’t.” He attempted to peel the girl off him, looking, oddly enough, kind of irritated to see her. Which was weird, since most men I know don’t mind when beautiful blond girls wearing very little show up at airports to throw their arms around them.
“Great!” Chloe, her sandaled feet back on the ground, reached for the gigantic backpack he’d let fall to the terminal floor. It so figured that Will Price would let a tiny slip of a girl like that carry his bag. What was she, anyway, his assistant? Girlfriend? I guess Cassidy was wrong, and while hetero, Will wasn’t single after all.