Playing with Words (Boggy Creek Valley #2) - Kelly Elliott Page 0,5

most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on. And that smile…Christ, it lit up the entire bookstore. When she’d stumbled on her words, something inside of me had jolted to life.

I closed my eyes and pulled up an image of Greer. Her hair hung just below her shoulders in waves of brown with hints of copper that made my fingers itch to touch and see if it was as soft as it looked. And those hazel eyes of hers. I was going to be seeing those eyes in my dreams. She looked to be around my age, early thirties.

My phone buzzed in my bag, pulling me from my thoughts.

Reaching in, I pulled it out and groaned when I saw the name on the screen.

Melissa Faulkner.

“Hey there, Melissa.”

“I haven’t heard from you, Hudson. Are you there? Settled? Have you gotten any writing in?”

With a roll of my eyes, I started the car and waited for my phone to connect to Bluetooth—and for Melissa to stop asking me a million-and-one questions.

“Does the place you’re staying have good Internet?” she asked. “And for the love of God, where are you?”

“Are you finished?”

She sighed.

“I got here yesterday, and the bed and breakfast I’m staying at does have Internet if I need it. I have gotten a few words down, and, for the last time, I’m not telling you where I am. The whole reason I left New York, Melissa, was to get away from everything and everyone.”

“I suppose that’s a little bit of a dig at me.”

It was my turn to sigh. Melissa was amazing at her job, which was working as an assistant to Russ Wallace, my literary agent. She was also my ex. We had dated off and on for two years and then mutually decided that we worked better as friends. She’d only recently been promoted as Russ’s assistant and, honestly, I thought things would be weird at first. But Melissa was now happily engaged to a guy she had only been dating for three months. According to her, it was love at first sight, and Manny was her soulmate.

I wasn’t a believer in love at first sight. Sure, I believed two people could fall in love and live their lives together in unified bliss. I had witnessed that sort of love with my own folks. They were the fairytale book of happily ever after. It was rare, a love like that. At least in my opinion. Most of my friends had been married and divorced already. My sister Everly had thought she’d found love, and that had proven not to be the case.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in love. I just hadn’t ever felt it before. Melissa and I had dated for a while, and I liked her. Thought maybe I might love her, but when it came down to her flat-out asking if I was ever going to ask her to marry me, I realized I wasn’t in love with her like she needed me to be, and we broke up. We stayed on good terms, which I was thankful for.

“Your silence is my answer,” Melissa said, drawing me out of my thoughts.

Laughing, I replied, “No, it’s not a dig at you, although you are riding my ass with this book. I thought that was Russ’s job, not yours.”

“It’s because you have a deadline, Hudson. One that’s coming up and one that you cannot miss. The publisher is paying you a rather handsome advance when you deliver said book. Or have you forgotten?”

I sighed. When had my books become more about the money they brought in than the stories they told? No wonder I had zero desire to write this fucking book.

“Are you struggling with the love story aspect? I know how are you are with love, or your lack of believing in it.”

Now that was jab at me. I decided to let it go. “No, I’m not struggling with that.”

The fact that she’d even mentioned it pissed me off. I may write suspense novels, but they always had threads of romance. It wasn’t like I would be busting out a romance novel anytime soon, and I had no desire to do so. But I was very capable of writing romance into my books. The publisher had asked me to intertwine more of a love story into my latest novel, which I had no problem doing. It was simply the fact that I hadn’t wanted to write this book in the first place. It was a follow-up