Kane

by Foster, Delaney

  “Well… it’s not really what she said… see, Rie only reviews four books a month. And out of the thousands of books out there, she chose yours. It’s just exciting is all.”

  Rie? Short for Korie, maybe? Now she’d graduated to nickname status? Who was this girl?

  “Jess. What. Did. It. Say?” I said my words nice and slow just to make sure she heard me.

  “Oh shoot. I’m late for class. I’ll call you later. Love you. Bye.”

  Then she hung up. And I was more determined than ever to know what the amazing Korie Lawson had to say about my book.

  * * *

  About that date…

  Bennett Kane

  to me

  12:25 PM view details

  * * *

  Ms. Lawson,

  While I thank you for your review and am honored you read my book (I hear you’re kind of a big deal), I feel like I need to address a couple of things. Your dislike for the main character: you aren’t supposed to like her. She’s a hideous human. So your distaste for her only means I’ve done my job as an author. Ditto for her family. Did you even read the twist?

  Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, about that date… Maybe we could discuss your love of my voice over dinner.

  Until next time,

  Bennett

  I sat in my coffee shop reading corner and stared at my screen, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, until my mouth went dry. Dinner? He couldn’t be serious. Who does that? And of course, I’d read the twist. It was my favorite part—completely unpredictable, and that was hard to do with me.

  I’d received tons of emails from authors requesting reviews. So many that I had to add a form to my website and resort to random selection. I’d even gotten emails from authors thanking me for a mention. Sometimes they’d let me know they’d gained a few new fans because of it. Those emails made my heart swell with joy. It’s why I kept my blogger email public. But this—this was a first.

  I didn’t have the words to describe what was going through my mind at that moment. Shocked? Maybe. Offended? Perhaps. Intrigued? Absolutely. This guy had some serious testosterone. Or an ego the size of Atlanta. It was my curiosity about the testosterone that made me immediately email him back. I threw my legs up over the arm of the linen chair and made myself comfortable. Stella would be here in a few minutes, and I planned on keeping myself entertained until then.

  * * *

  Korie Lawson

  to Bennett Kane

  1:35 PM view details

  * * *

  Mr. Kane,

  Isn’t one of the Ten Commandments of Publishing “Thou shall not respond to reviews. Ever.”?

  Pretty sure it’s there. Right under “Thou shall not plagiarize.”

  Keeping it professional,

  Korie

  I didn’t go anywhere near the dinner comment. He didn’t even know me. For all he knew, I could be some whack-a-doo with a cabin in the snow and a sledgehammer. And he could be a balding mid-twenties sociopath with body parts in his freezer. He probably wrote that book in his mother’s basement. In his underwear. Tighty-whities to be exact. While he counted out how many Ziploc bags it would take to store his next victim. Okay, that was morbid. My next read would definitely be a romance.

  The thing was, no one knew much about Bennett Kane other than that he’d written this incredibly successful suspense/thriller. He didn’t flood Instagram with selfies or publicity photos. Instead he posted the most random things —like the corner of a stop sign or a bowl of salsa—and never captioned them. He didn’t do public signings. And even though his debut novel was a massive success, he’d only done four online interviews, all of which touched solely on the book. Questions like: What was your inspiration for the story? What can we expect next from Bennett Kane? Not a single peep about his personal life. The guy was either an enigma or a sociopath.

  And he was emailing me about dinner.

  Before I finished humming the Twilight Zone theme song, my phone lit up with a notification. He’d emailed me back.

  * * *

  Bennett Kane

  to me

  1:37 PM view details

  * * *

  **Unless reviewer invites author on a date.

  It’s in the footnotes.

  So, dinner?

  There will definitely be a next time,

  Bennett

  I really needed to watch how I worded my reviews. Was he really this bold? His writing style suggested he might be, and I had heard that often an author’s personality seeps into their writing. I’d caught on to his dry humor. In fact, it’s what I liked best about his style. Well, that and the super seductive undertones. On second thought, tighty-whities might not be his thing…

  This was ridiculous. I sat here wondering about a stranger’s underwear. How long had it been since I’d gotten laid? Too freaking long. I was fuckstrated—imagine sexually frustrated on steroids.

  I opened my email app and started to send a polite but firm reply. This couldn’t happen. No matter how much the curiosity made my pink parts tingle. I hardly dated men I knew, much less men I knew nothing about.

  The bell above the front door chimed, and Stella walked in.

  I glanced across the sea of tables and over to the front door. She stood by the entrance with her hands behind her back. Her black and white yoga pants fit like they were molded especially for her curves. She wore a regular man’s T-shirt but tied it in a cute knot on one hip. And did she ever have a bad hair day?

  To be fair, I didn’t cry every time I looked in the mirror, but I was definitely the ugly friend in this relationship. Stella looked like she’d spent a month tanning nude on a beach in St. Croix while I kept waiting for the day a wicked sorceress showed up to poison me with an apple.

  “Sorry miss, the Smoothie Shack is down the street,” I teased. I mean, she did look like she just came from the gym. Minus the sweat.

  “Yeah, right next door to the ice cream shop,” Stella replied as she pulled her hands from behind her back and held out two milkshakes.

  I jumped to my feet and hurried across the café. I reached for my own little slice of chocolate heaven, but Stella pulled it back.

  “Tell me you love me,” Stella said with a smirk.

  “Like a nineties R&B song, baby.” I moaned into the straw when I took my first sip. Chocolate heaven, just like I thought.

  An hour and a half later we shared a dressing room in Nordstrom at the Mall of Georgia. Unless you had a Wi-Fi connection and a credit card, decent clothes shopping in Hickory Falls was out of the question. Stella and I made the trip to Atlanta at least once a month.

  “I thought we were here for you, not me,” I said when Stella handed me tiny dress number three to try on. I took one look at the scrap of black fabric and handed it back to Stella. “I’m not wearing that. Ever.” It was obviously made for a toddler.

  “Come on, Rie. You’ll look hot.” Stella spun me around so that my booty faced the mirror. “I mean, Oh. My. God. Becky...”

  Did she really just channel her inner Sir Mix-a-Lot in the dressing room? No one looks hot next to Stella. Lukewarm, maybe. But never hot.

  “Look at that gut,” I finished, running my hand across my slightly bloated lower abdomen.

  Stella shoved the dress back at me. “The dress, Rie. Just try it on. For me?” She poked out her bottom lip. Like that was going to do anything. I lifted a brow but didn’t budge. “Saturday is Baxter’s birthday party and I want you to look nice,” Stella pleaded.

  Baxter? As in her tiny Yorkie?

  “You’re throwing your dog a birthday party?” Because that’s a totally normal thing to do.

  “Okay, so there’s no party. But it is his birthday and I do want to go out. Pleeeeeease.”

  She looked like she wasn’t above groveling at this point. I thought about playing hard to get just a little bit longer. Maybe I could get another milkshake out of the deal. But I gave in. It was one dress. What could it hurt? The fact that I ow
ned more outfits to sleep in than to go out in probably said a lot about me as a person. Besides, every girl needed a little black dress—in case she ever got asked to dinner.

  Korie Lawson—owner of Rie’s Reads book blog and the fullest red lips I’d ever seen. She was from a small town in Georgia that somehow sounded familiar. She had sixty-thousand followers. Which meant sixty-thousand people were now doing the discount double-check on my book, a book I’d sold almost a half-million copies of. And that’s just in the U.S.

  I reread her review of my book for the fifth time, then scrolled down and read the review before it. Then the one before that. And the one before that. Her choice of words made me laugh. She was spunky. I liked that. She read all genres, from romance to young adult fantasy. She didn’t lock herself in any one box, and I liked that too. Almost as much as I liked staring at the picture in the top left corner of her website.

  She had not only called me out in front of thousands of people, but also mentioned my smile. And my abs. Then something about a date. Metaphorically, of course, but I wasn’t the kind of guy to back away from a challenge.

  So, I emailed her. Then she shot me down faster than a kamikaze fighter pilot, which only added fuel to the fire. I didn’t want to just change her mind. I wanted to blow it.

  It had been three hours since my last email and… nothing. Not a peep. I’d have liked to say my momma didn’t raise a quitter, but the truth is that my mother didn’t raise me at all. Thanks to her poor choices, I was attending parent-teacher conferences for Jess at the same time I was learning to drive. I was probably the only virgin since Mary who was forced to become a parent at the age of fifteen.

  I should’ve probably just left the review alone, gone back to my day job where my advice saved Fortune 500 companies from impending financial doom. But every time I looked at my computer screen, all I saw was those lips. They were the kind of lips that made me want to make my next novel a romance.

  So, I did what any normal hot-blooded man would do. I stalked her Instagram.

  Big fucking mistake.

  Picture after picture of this woman and those goddamn lips. If I thought her blog had personality, it had nothing on her social media. The more I looked at the screen, the more I wanted to know about the woman on the other side of it. The latest post was of her brushing her teeth and it was captioned, “Supporting the fight against enamel cruelty.” Clever. In another one she held a fully cooked turkey—“All in favor of replacing Valentine’s Day with a second Thanksgiving say yum.” So, she was single. I really liked that. But the one that finally did me in, the one that made my fingers all twitchy and forced me to send the DM was of her lying on her bed, on her stomach, with the sleeve of her baggy pink shirt falling off her shoulder just enough to catch a glimpse of the most perfect cleavage I’d ever seen. I drooled. Actually fucking drooled at the thought of having my mouth on her porcelain skin. Her long, dark hair fell in a curtain around her and those beautiful lips were the richest red. She captioned that one, “It’s all fun and games until Monday rolls around and you have to wear a bra.” Which she very obviously was not doing in that picture.

  I.

  Was.

  Done.

  bennett.kane.

  This would probably be easier if you’d just give me your number.

  I kept it light, simple, easy. I’d never had to work this hard for a date in my life, especially one that would end up being four states away. But something told me she would be worth it.

  Stella bought three dresses that would make a Victoria’s Secret model blush, and I left Nordstrom with my black Band-Aid and a pink, lacy tank top to wear with my favorite jeans. We stopped at the food court for ice cream, because what better way for a girl to look sexy in spandex than to stuff her belly with calories and sugar.

  Stella dug into her hot fudge sundae. “You never told me about your date with Thorgeous,” she said.

  Her bright smile surrounded the plastic spoon. It annoyed me that she could eat like a horse and stay in shape, while I had to count calories and work out until I puked to keep my curves from getting out of control. I would end up spending an extra hour on the treadmill burning off this ice cream and my chocolate shake while she could probably lose weight while watching me eat a salad. This genetics thing sucked balls.

  “It would’ve been awesome if he wouldn’t have ever opened his gorgeous mouth.”

  “That’s too bad. You two would’ve made beautiful babies.”

  I poked the tip of my finger into a puddle of chocolate syrup on the side of her bowl. “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for him to procreate. If it’s not, it should be.”

  The whole thing reminded me why I only dated about six times a year. Stella, on the other hand, was a serial dater. She never spent a weekend alone, and since my only other best friend was married, that meant I spent tons of weekends alone.

  “You know, Rie, one day you’re going to meet a guy who’s going to make this whole Princess of Solitude vibe disappear.”

  “Princess of Solitude? Hooker, please. I’m the queen.”

  I sucked the chocolate off my finger then took a sip of my water. Like that was going to somehow counteract the calories currently racing to my thighs. I was about to show Stella my imaginary crown when my phone pinged.

  INSTAGRAM

  bennett.kane. sent you a message.

  If they handed out awards for persistence, Bennett Kane would get my vote. Oh wait. They did. The cops called them restraining orders.

  Stella pulled the spoon out of her mouth with a loud pop. “What are you smiling at?” she asked.

  I wasn’t smiling. Was I?

  “Nothing.” I suddenly didn’t want the extra calories that my chocolate ice cream promised to bring. I also wasn’t telling her about Bennett. Not that there was anything to tell. Which ended up being the perfect reason not to tell her. “We should get going before we get stuck in five o’clock traffic.”

  It wasn’t a lie. Driving through Atlanta at five o’clock was like swimming with a paper cut during shark week.

  Once we got on the interstate, I opened my app.

  bennett.kane.

  This would probably be easier if you’d just give me your number.

  I didn’t answer his email, so he resorted to creeping my social media. Why did I think that was cute in its own he-might-have-a-screw-loose kind of way?

  Korie_Lawson

  Are you sure you don’t already have it? I mean, your stalker game is on point.

  I’d barely turned up the radio when my phone pinged again.

  bennett.kane.

  “but man did he have a gorgeous smile. Or set of abs.”

  “Bennett Kane. I like your style. It might even earn you a second date