I felt myself blushing even before I registered how picturesque he looked. It was his eyes, I think. When he looked at me, the world around us blurred. All I saw was him, and all he saw was me. And he saw me. It felt like one of those moments I wrote about in romances, one of those destiny-calling feelings, where like called to like. And I knew—I knew—I was the exception to the rule.
He noticed my shoes abandoned by the chair. “Bold of you to take your shoes off in a stranger’s house.”
“These aren’t shoes, they’re torture devices,” I argued, feeling myself go rigid in defense. “And I don’t see it bothering you.”
He studied my shoes. “They do seem to be rather pointy.”
“Great for stabbing men alone in a library.”
“The pretty girl with the blond hair and the Louboutins in the private library?” He grinned. “No one’ll see that coming.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Are we flirting or is this a game of Clue?”
He did that thing—the thing people did sometimes when they ran their tongue over their teeth, just under their lips, to hide a smile. “Which do you want it to—”
“Marlow!” A tall woman with strawberry hair strode into the library, two drinks in her hands, immediately breaking the spell with her soft honey voice. I quickly looked away, down at my bare feet, as he greeted her. “There you are. I thought I left you by the head editor from Elderwood.”
“You try holding a conversation with that guy,” the man in the red Vans replied, and accepted one of the drinks the woman handed to him.
“I’ve had to talk to worse.” She then took him by his coat sleeve and tugged. “C’mon, there’s still a lot more people to meet.”
I wondered who she was. His girlfriend, perhaps? Fiancée? She was beautiful, with blunt-cut bangs and a loud yellow jacket, paired with high-waisted tartan-print trousers. I later came to find out that she was his assistant editor before he left Faux, where he had steadily climbed the ladder for years.
If the man in the red Vans had gone with her, things would have been so, so different. But he glanced back at me, a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth, and said, “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Ugh, fine,” she said as someone caught her eye in the crowd in the living room. “Oh! Ohmygod, that’s him. That’s the author. Mr. Brown!” she called, hurrying back into the fray of people.
And then we were alone again.
He watched her go, setting his drink on the mahogany bookshelf—that should’ve been my first warning sign, a blatant disregard for someone else’s books—and came over to me. I felt my chest constrict; I wasn’t sure if I’d rather be left alone with my painful feet or if I wanted him to stay.
“So,” he asked, “do you have anywhere to be tonight?”
“Here.”
He snorted a laugh. “Anywhere else?”
I inclined my head. “Are you asking?”
“Are you saying yes?” He arched a very pointed eyebrow. It was the kind of arch a feature writer would call belletristic when they sat down to pen his profile in GQ.
I should’ve told him to leave. I should’ve said I needed to stay and keep an eye on Rose. But I didn’t know, and he looked at me with this genuine sort of curiosity—who could this girl be, in Louboutins and a discount black dress? And he was a mystery, too, in his red Vans and his loose brown suit and his wild blond hair.
He outstretched his hand to me, as if wanting me to take it. “I’m Marlow—Lee Marlow. C’mon, let’s go somewhere shoes aren’t required.”
I smiled at him, and I knew then—I just knew—that this was something special. I felt like a star that had come unhinged from the night sky and started to fall, and I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t want to.