of nature.
She cleared her throat. “I sign with my right,” she told him, her voice thin. “You have to let go, if you want me to, um, sign your books.”
He let go. She took her hand back, peeking at it as if expecting it to be somehow changed by that momentous contact, but it was just her usual thin, inkstained paw. She opened his first book, struggling to remember what she was supposed to do. Um. Yes. Signing books. She paused, pen poised over the paper. “Your name?”
Something flashed in his eyes. “You don’t know it?”
She stared up at him. How could she? Was she supposed to know it? She shook her head, mutely.
“My name is Kev,” he said quietly. “Kev Larsen.”
She scrawled something unintelligible to Kev on all four books, and pushed them back. He took them, moved aside politely for the next person, but didn’t go away. Oh, God. He was waiting for her. Oh, God.
Excitement bubbled inside her. She was so aware of his presence, looming by the table while she chatted with the last few die-hard fans.
Julie, her publicist, came marching over, and gave the guy a cold look. “Can I help you with anything?” she asked him.
The man ignored Julie. “I was wondering if you would have a cup of coffee with me,” he asked Edie. His low, quiet voice was wonderfully resonant. Full of sparkling harmonics that made her body tingle.
Edie hesitated, and Julie chimed in. “Have you two met?”
“Yes,” he said. The certainty in his voice brooked no argument.
Julie gave her a sharp look. “Is this true? Do you know this guy?”
Know him? As if she could be said to know him. But she couldn’t explain anything so improbable to the practical, nuts-and-bolts Julie. She hadn’t even grasped it herself, yet.
She nodded, jerkily. Yeah. She, uh, knew him. Close enough.
“Well, then. I gotta run. Tell me what’s going on later, OK?” She shot the man a suspicious look. “You sure you’ll be OK?”
OK? Such a bland state of existence, to describe standing five feet from her ultimate fantasy, Fade Shadowseeker, inexplicably made flesh and inviting her out to coffee. She managed to nod.
After Julie’s heels clicked purposefully into the distance, Edie shrugged on her coat, grabbed her art bag, and risked another peek.
Sure enough, he got her again. She went blank, wordless, staring stupidly up into those eyes. Frozen by his outsized charisma.
He offered her his arm. The little smile and the courtly gesture broke the spell, thank God. She took it, and they were walking together.
He pulled sunglasses out and put them on. They passed the bookstore coffee shop, but people whose books she’d just signed were there. She shook her head at his questioning glance. “Somewhere else.”
They walked out and strolled silently down the block together until they found another coffee shop, this one almost deserted. He held open the door for her, bought them both a cup of coffee at the counter, waited while she doctored hers with various sugary and creamy contaminants, and followed her to a table in the far corner.
He took off his sunglasses, rubbing his eyes. “Sorry about wearing these indoors,” he said. “I know it looks affected, but I had a head injury recently, and the daylight’s too bright for my eyes.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Please, put them on if you need them,” she urged.
“No, it’s OK in here. Not too bright. I’ve been waiting a long time. I want to see your real colors,” was his cryptic reply. She gave him a puzzled look, and he clarified. “I don’t want to look at you tinted green.”
“OK.” Her gaze flicked away. It had been more manageable when he wore the glasses. It was like looking at the sun. His gorgeousness was burning a hole in her retinas. Those eyes. So shockingly bright.
“So,” she began, trying to sound brisk. “What’s this all about?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.
That left her feeling uncomfortably on the spot. “Tell you what?”
He pulled the Fade Shadowseeker books she had signed for him out of the bookstore shopping bag, and spread them out on the table so all four covers showed. “You seem to know all about me.”
Unease deepened. She stared at him. “Those books are fiction,” she said. “Completely and absolutely creations of my imagination.”
“Yeah?” He opened the third book, Midnight’s Oracle, and flipped partway through. “See this? Where Fade goes over the waterfall?”
She leaned, looked. “Sure. I drew it. What of it?”
“That happened to me, four months ago,” he said.
She blinked helplessly, starting and abandoning a dozen different responses to that preposterous statement. Finally, she flipped the book open to the copyright page, and pointed. “Repeat after me,” she said. “All resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.”
“It’s true,” he said quietly. “A matter of public record. It happened on June 24th. Read about it in the online archives of the Oregonian.”
She wonderered where this game was leading. Maybe into a trap she should be smarter in avoiding. “I wrote that book before that date,” she informed him. “A year before. You could have read my book first.”
His lip twitched. “You think I staged it? You ever look out over the top of Twin Tails Falls? I broke my arm, my thigh. I wouldn’t have done that voluntarily. For any sum of money.”
“Oh, and I imagine you saved a teenage girl from drowning right before you fell, right?” she challenged.
He shrugged. “Actually, it was a teenage boy, in my case. I jumped in to help him out. Ask the kid if he pulled that stunt to live out the story in your graphic novel. Might be good for a laugh.”
She shook her head. “Coincidence,” she repeated.
“I would buy one coincidence, or two, or eight, or fifteen,” he said. “But not hundreds of them.”
Suspicion grew inside her, and with it, disappointment so intense, it made her throat burn. “I see where this is going,” she said. “For the record, I’ll tell you right now that I know absolutely nothing about your stupid little life, nor do I want to. Everything I have written or drawn is my own pure, spontaneous invention. So if you plan on suing me—”
“Edie, no.”
“That’s Ms. Parrish to you, mister, and if you want to sue for plagiarism, or whatever it is you’re contemplating, go ahead and try. It happens a lot. It’s one of the shittier things about being the daughter of an extremely wealthy man, and you’d be surprised how many shitty things there are about that. After the third time, my dad bought me insurance. I’ll give you the numbers of our team of
