Hannah's Hero - Ruby Dixon Page 0,39
can’t stop staring at him.
I should just lean over and kiss him. Get all this tension out of my system. Just cross those few inches between us and put my mouth on his pretty, far-too-pouty-for-a-guy mouth and taste him. Slip my tongue against his and show him how to really, really kiss me. I should do all those things.
Instead, I whisper, “I’m not trying to be a jerk, you know.”
His eyes narrow. “A jerk?”
“An idiot. A mean person. I’m not trying to be mean to you, fighting this.” I gesture between us. “Resonance. It’s just that…I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be back on Earth, celebrating the massive launch of my career. I can’t give up and stay here on an alien planet and have alien babies. I just can’t.”
He says nothing, and I immediately feel guilty. I’m a jerk, all right, a jerk for babbling about all the things I should be keeping stuffed deep inside. I shouldn’t have said anything at all. I should have just closed my eyes and gone to sleep. I always seem to say the wrong thing to everyone, and I bite back a sigh of frustration.
To my surprise, J’shel rolls onto his side and faces me. He props his head up under one bent arm and studies my face. “Tell me about your home.”
My mouth is suddenly dry in the face of his attention. I gaze at him, trying not to stare at his too-fascinating lips. “My home?”
“Yes. I would understand you. I want to know what you left behind.”
Oh. It’s surprisingly thoughtful of him to ask, and I find myself smiling. “Well, back home I was an author of books. Or I was going to be. You guys don’t have books, right? Okay, they’re stories. But instead of a story that takes like, a short time to tell, it takes several evenings. It’s so complex that there are many people in the story and many adventures. And it’s all written down on paper so the words can be shared with thousands of people.”
“This complex story…it is hard to do?”
“Very hard,” I admit. “I wrote three books before I wrote In Search of a Hero. They were terrible stories and they didn’t make sense, but it was all part of the learning process, you know? But Hero was different. From the moment I got the idea it was exciting and I wanted to play it out and see where it went. I wrote on it a little bit every day after work, and it took forever to finish it. I rewrote it twice before I was satisfied with it, and when it was done it was nearly five hundred pages long. I know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but I thought it was great. My agent—that’s the one who was going to sell it for me—said she’d never read anything like it. It was like a small-town romance but on an epic scale. And she said that it would be huge. So she took it to all the big-name editors on her list and there was an auction for the rights. Seven figures,” I say dreamily. “It’s the kind of launch an author can only dream of. I was the lead title for my publisher. Massive advertising campaign. Ten city book tour. And Hollywood was calling. Basically everything I could have ever thought of in my wildest dreams was happening for this book. It was going to change everything in my life.”
“And instead you are here.”
Hot, stupid tears prick my eyes. “Yeah. I know it doesn’t mean anything to you. That you can’t understand it.”
“Why do you say that? You have told me yourself—it is something that you put much time and effort into for others to enjoy. It was to be successful beyond your every hope, and it has been taken from you.” He shrugs. “I understand that. It is a very hard thing to get past…and now you feel as if you have nothing here.”
“I know it was just a story,” I whisper. “But it’s been such a big part of my life for so long that it’s hard to get past it.”
“I understand,” he says patiently. “When I was young, there was a female in my tribe that was my age. She was lovely and good with a spear. Her name was V’shari. I thought someday that she would be my mate. We were friends, you see. We played at being mates sometimes. And she was