everything. But the words wouldn’t come.
It was entirely possible that I was just done for the day. I’d used up my creative well and tomorrow I’d be right back at it. After all, Gavin Bailey’s presence couldn’t possibly contain that kind of magic—that kind of power. This had to be my overactive imagination making connections that didn’t really exist.
But I had to know for sure. So I’d texted him and asked him to come over.
A knock at the door roused me from my tangled musings and I raced downstairs.
Gavin’s dimpled grin when I answered the door almost rendered me speechless. “Hey, Sky.”
“Hi,” I managed to get out. Pull yourself together, Skylar, he’s not that good-looking.
Okay, yes he was.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I need your help with an experiment.”
His eyes swept up and down, and he caught his lower lip between his teeth. Suddenly I was thinking about a very different kind of experiment. Heat rushed to my core and my inner thigh muscles twitched.
Focus, Skylar.
“What do you need me to do?” he asked.
Other than give me a much-needed orgasm? “Come in. Upstairs. Wait, can you do stairs?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
I let him in and closed the door behind him, then led him up to my room.
He hesitated just inside the doorway, leaning on his crutches as he glanced around.
Gavin Bailey was in my bedroom.
It made me wonder how different things would have been if I’d grown up here. If my parents hadn’t divorced and I’d spent my childhood around the Bailey brothers, instead of hearing about them second hand. Would Gavin and I have been friends? Would a teenage me have invited a teenage him up to my bedroom?
Probably not. He would have looked right past me at that age.
“You can sit on the bed if you want,” I said. “This is probably going to sound weird.”
“Not gonna lie, I’m curious as hell right now.” He laid his crutches on the floor and hoisted himself onto the bed.
“When we were at the coffee shop earlier today, I wrote an entire chapter.”
“That’s awesome, Sky. Good for you.”
“Thanks. Specifically, I wrote it all when you were there. Before you came in, I’d barely written anything. And after you left, it was like… I don’t know, it was just gone.”
He picked up the pillow next to him and put it behind his upper back, then settled against it. “So you’re saying you could write when I was there and couldn’t after I left.”
“Yes. Apparently. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but now I really need to know. I haven’t written that much in one sitting in months.”
“You want me to sit here while you write to see if it happens again?”
“Yes.”
He clasped his hands over his middle. “Okay.”
“That’s it? You don’t mind?”
The corner of his mouth turned up in a grin. “Nope.”
How was he so adorable?
But I hadn’t invited him over so I could contemplate his attractiveness.
“Do you want something to do while I work, or will you be fine just like that?”
“I’m pretty comfortable. I got that massage and I feel awesome.” He shifted against the pillows and glanced around the room again. “Are those your books?”
I had a small stack of them on a shelf next to the closet. “Yeah.”
“Can I read one?”
Normally I would have cringed in horror at the idea of someone reading one of my books in the same room as me. But for some reason, Gavin reading my work didn’t send me into a tailspin of anxiety.
“Sure. Any preference as to which one?”
“Surprise me.”
I grabbed one about an FBI profiler working to solve a series of murders that turn out to be the same killer who got away from him a decade earlier. It had a lot of twists and turns, and some rather graphic crime scene descriptions. But all my books were at least a little morbid, so there was no sense in trying to hide that from him.
Cullen had disapproved. Encouraged me to tone it down. Especially in this book.
Shaking off that unpleasant thought, I handed the book to Gavin.
“This is fucking awesome.” He ran his hands across the title, down to my name printed in large letters at the bottom.
“Thanks. I hope you like it.”
“I’m sure I will.” He opened it and flipped to the first chapter. “Okay writer monkey, get to work.”
Leaving him to it, I sat down at my desk. Flipped open my laptop, took a deep breath, and laid my fingers on the keyboard.
At first, nothing happened. I was hyper aware of Gavin on