I also didn’t realize just how many people were absolutely fucking crazy about reading. And this was just a conference based on romance novels, for fuck’s sake.
Crazy was the appropriate word. Reader after reader screamed and nearly fainted when they approached Lamont’s booth or asked for an autograph. That was nothing compared to when the cover model men came out shirtless at the opening ceremony. Lamont’s husband, Tyler, had been one of those. One pelvic thrust of his porn-worthy body and the older woman standing next to me had an orgasm. That had been the only explanation for the visceral sound she’d made.
More than any of that, it was a security nightmare. The convention was nothing short of a mob, and trying to keep an eye out for Neal was nearly impossible. Although, with that particular crowd, and given Neal’s size, muscled body, and handsome face, they’d probably just think he was another cover model and begin screaming. That thought eased my stress a little bit. I could honestly see that happening.
If Jasper was worried about Neal, he wasn’t letting it show. He looked fully at ease and was treating each person who came up as if they were his dearest friend.
No, not shy at all.
A woman who stood between Jasper’s and Lamont’s booths grabbed Lamont’s arm and pulled him over into Jasper’s, without asking permission. She gave a little squeal and threw both of her arms around their necks, though she had to give a little hop to reach Lamont’s shoulders, and then nearly hyperventilated as her companion, who I assumed was her husband, snapped photos. Lamont and Jasper went along with every request, including simultaneously kissing her on either side of her face as the photo shoot continued. She kept going on and on about Lamont’s sexiness, and how she couldn’t get over how adorably cute Jasper was.
Her descriptors threw me off. Lamont was sexy, in a handsome, shy way. Though he was just a touch better at the publicity game than Jasper, he actually seemed more reserved. But he was no sexier than Jasper.
Although, hadn’t I thought similar myself when Harrison had introduced me to Jasper for the very first time. Cute and adorable. Although even at that moment, there’d been desire and lust on my part.
I didn’t see it now, as the woman and her husband walked away and another one took her place before Lamont could return to his booth. I might be at Jasper’s side to protect him, but he wasn’t some cute little kitten. Every day that passed revealed another layer of strength and determination—the way he protected Xander the steady concern as he’d called to check up on Alex before we’d left Lavender Shores that morning, how he worked with all the kids. How he’d survived the years with Neal, how he’d fought for and achieved his own dream. How he looked me dead in the eye, told me that he had feelings for me but didn’t need to know how it would end. He was strong enough to live in the moment, with everything swirling around him, and simply taking and enjoying what came.
I had been taught and shown repeatedly what a man was supposed to be. What strength looked like.
As Jasper broke away, stepped over to Lamont’s booth, snagged a book while giving me a quick wink and then returned to the little group waiting at the Lavender Pages section, I realized I was learning a whole different truth of what strength looked like. And I couldn’t help but wonder if it was made of more sturdy stuff than the examples I’d been given.
My thoughts were cut short by a hand squeezing my biceps. On instinct, I jerked my arm free and glared over. When there was no one at eye level, I looked down to find a pixie-sized woman in her midforties.
“Sorry about that.” The smile plastered on her beautiful face negated her apology. “You’re so burly, I just had to feel.”
“Uh….”
Before I could think of anything more intelligent to say, she reached out and squeezed my ass.
“Excuse me.” I stepped away.
For the first time, a look crossed her eyes that suggested she was wondering if she’d overstepped her boundaries. “Aren’t you Mitch Hammer?”
“No, ma’am.” I took another step back and bumped into the edge of the table containing Lamont’s books. “I don’t know who that is. Sorry.” Why was I apologizing? I’d just gotten groped. That had never happened before. With the exception of a bathhouse, but there it was expected. I cast a glance over at Jasper, who was still busy with Lamont and a group of readers. I wasn’t sure if I was checking on his safety or hoping he’d rescue me.
“Are you positive? I’m pretty sure I saw you in a porn with Tate Dallas a few years back.”
I looked back to the woman, horrified. “No. I can most definitely assure you I have not been in porn. I also don’t know who Tate….” Oh, yes, I did. I’d heard the name in passing. That had been Lamont’s husband’s porn name. Another implication of her words made me more curious than offended. “Wait a minute. You watch gay porn?”
“Well, of course. It’s the best kind.” She tossed a thick wave of blonde hair over her shoulder. “Although, Tate Dallas wasn’t just in gay porn, but those are my favorite.” She stretched out her hand and began reaching for my chest. “Are you sure you weren’t—”
I snagged her wrist. “Do you have a disorder where you sleepwalk, perform sexual acts on camera, and then forget about it the next day?”
Her blue eyes widened, and she shook her head.
“Then I suggest you quit asking me if I’m sure if I’ve done porn or not.” I let go of her wrist. “I would also suggest not touching me again.”
She suddenly looked close to tears.
Funny. I didn’t feel bad about that.
“Here you go.” Lamont appeared out of nowhere and thrust a book in the woman’s direction. “I heard you mention my husband. This is a copy of the book with him and me on the cover.” He waited for the woman to take it from him and then gestured across the room. “He’s over there at Cheryl Lee’s booth. I’m sure he’d love to sign it for you.”
I was a long-forgotten memory as she beamed. “Oh! Thank you.” She clutched the book to her breasts as if it was gold. Then, confirming our interaction truly had no impact, she touched the flower and wave forming a heart tattoo on Lamont’s wrist, and then the matching one on the cover of the book. “This really is you.” Her gaze traveled over the black-and-white image—two shirtless men trapped in an embrace, their bodies arched in passion, surrounded by fog with a decaying boat behind them—and then over Lamont’s body. “You should do porn.”
Lamont, despite me labeling him as shy moments before, only chuckled. “Thank you. Anytime I do something like that, I make sure to wear a mask.” With a wink he sent her away. “Now go flirt with my husband, and make sure you let him know I sent you.”
Off she went, and I turned in wonder toward Lamont, but cast another quick glance over his shoulder to make sure Jasper was fine. He was. Unceasingly engaging every person who passed into a conversation. “I know we don’t know each other very well, but I used to be a police officer. That entire thing was sexual harassment. You don’t have to put up with that.”
He just laughed good-naturedly. “It’s a little overwhelming, right? My first convention was bigger than this one. It took everything in me not to run away.”
“If it weren’t for Jasper, I’d do just that.”
Lamont’s expression shifted, just for a heartbeat, but long enough to show that he’d heard more in my words than just a bodyguard looking out for his client.
Well, whatever; he wasn’t wrong.
Graciously not commenting about it, Lamont leaned against his booth and joined me in watching Jasper. “He’s really good at it. It took me a lot more conferences to even come close to being comfortable with working a crowd the way he does. And he’s not even an author.”
Though I didn’t understand the ins and outs of any of it, I felt a sense of pride at the compliment. Which, I supposed was silly. I didn’t have anything to do with Jasper’s strengths. Nonetheless, I was proud of it for some reason. “Well, the man’s passionate about books. He loves his bookshop, it’s his world. I didn’t eve
n know there were bookshops left in the world anymore.”
“That’s not much of an exaggeration.” Proving he was just as much of a bookworm as Jasper, there was sadness in Lamont’s tone, but then he brightened. “One of the many reasons Lavender Shores is magical. Jasper’s little bookshop never needs to worry about going out of business. There’s something about books—people go on vacations and find a place they love, and a book is one of the mementos they’ll keep forever. Even if they don’t read it. They’ll put it on their bookshelf and remember that enchanting week in Lavender Shores, that perfect picnic they had at the palisades, the herd of deer that stopped traffic downtown—how they walked the streets and felt like they were doing something more healing than just window-shopping.”
I could see what he meant. That was exactly how Lavender Shores was beginning to feel. And his words soothed. In the back of my mind I’d worried about what would happen to Jasper if his shop went the way of all brick-and-mortar bookstores. But I thought Lamont was probably right. Jasper didn’t need to worry. Things happened in the boundaries of Lavender Shores that didn’t occur anywhere else. Barely a week there and even I could see that.
“He’s a special man, Jasper.”
I refocused on Lamont, though his tone was benign enough, that knowing look was back in his gray-blue eyes.
Turning back toward Jasper, he glanced over at that exact moment and grinned. “Yeah, he is. He really is.”
The convention crammed so much into a day that I was beginning to think Jasper and I weren’t going to be able to make use of the king-size bed in the hotel room after it was all over. It was ten o’clock in the evening, and the last event had already been going on for an hour and showed no signs of stopping. By the end of it, we’d get to the room, look at the bed, and both pass out before we hit the sheets.
“It’s a little overwhelming, isn’t it?” Jasper nudged my shoulder as he leaned closer to whisper. “Lamont tried to prepare me, but I didn’t quite get it.”
I gestured toward the front of the huge ballroom. Another couple from the audience, the fourth one of the evening, had been pulled onstage, and were now barely dressed. “How the hell could you prepare yourself for this?”
His eyes narrowed in concern. “You’re having fun, though, right?”
Maybe there’d been something in my tone that had given me away. “Yeah. Of course I am. Aren’t you?”
“Completely. Just getting to meet all these authors, when I’ve spent so much time reading their books, is amazing.” He chuckled, though it was barely audible over the hoots and hollers from the crowd as something salacious happened onstage. “Although now that I’m friends with one personally, it’s not quite as big a deal, but it’s still fun. I was completely starstruck the first time Lamont walked into my store and I found out he was the writer behind the Ginger Peach books. I acted like a complete mooning idiot.”
“Well, you looked like one of the stars today, the way you worked that room.”
Jasper cocked his head, and a slight blush rose to his cheeks. “Thanks. It was surprisingly a lot of fun. The way people carried on, it felt like I was one of the authors, not just a bookshop owner.”
“Well, the way it seems, all these authors are these people’s gods. If that’s so, you take care of where they go to worship.” I patted his knee. “You’re the in-between who connects them. And I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that you’re sexy as fuck.”
Though his blush deepened, a heat rose in his eyes. Then he glanced down at my hand, which had slid to his leg of its own accord.
Apparently, my hand had very good taste.
Suddenly self-conscious, I started to pull away, but Jasper placed his hand on top and laced his fingers through mine, curling to grip under my palm.
He glanced back at me, as if asking for permission.
I answered with a squeeze, and then he sat back.
We watched the evening event just like that. Side by side in the crowd, shoulders pressed together, my hand in his lap, our fingers intertwined. The event had something to do with random couples from the audience recreating steamy romance novel covers that were projected onto the large screen. It seemed whichever couple did the best would win a huge gift basket filled with book shit valued at a thousand dollars.
It really was an entirely different world. One that I couldn’t understand but was kind of fun—gift bags with a grand’s worth of merchandise; a secret universe of A-list stars that people who didn’t read had never heard of; fans screaming; people who lost their minds over characters in a book. It felt a long, long way from the police station in Tennessee. Although, I’d noticed in the program there were conventions coming up in Nashville. Maybe this world had been there the whole time and I’d not been aware. Not that I would’ve been the least bit interested if I’d known.
With as much as Jasper was enjoying himself, it looked like that part of my life was changing. If the conference made him this happy, this was hardly going to be my last time at one of these things.
The crowd burst into applause as one couple left and the MC began to search for the next victims.
As she picked a stunningly handsome African-American man from the front row and the blonde who’d accosted me earlier, the implications of what I’d just thought slammed into me.
I was picturing going to more of these things. And not because I thought they were so much fun.
Holy fuck.
A shot of pure, unadulterated terror coursed through me. Holy fuck.
Two days ago, Jasper and I’d had a conversation about living in the moment. Simply enjoying being together while we were. Nothing more, nothing less. And there I was, envisioning going to book conference after book conference because it made Jasper happy.
Holy shit, and what the fuck, and holy hell.
Lamont had mentioned he wanted to flee at his first conference. Now I knew exactly how he felt. Although, I was willing to bet multiplied several times stronger.
I turned—the terror increasing—toward Jasper.
Feeling my gaze, he looked away from the couple onstage and smiled happily at me, then gave a squeeze before refocusing on the stage again.
The terror didn’t vanish, not really, but… I wasn’t sure. The terror stopped being terrifying, I supposed. It was still there, but instead it seemed a bit… hopeful?
And again, what the fuck?
I inspected our interwoven fingers. Mine large, broad, and tan. His narrower, with long perfectly formed artist fingers, and pale.
I liked the sight of it. It was beautiful somehow. It felt… safe.
The crowd screamed in delight and offered me a distraction that I wholeheartedly took.
The cover on the screen displayed a pirate, his open shirt billowing in the wind, sword thrust skyward. A woman lay at his feet, her bodice ripped, her skirt trailing like water behind her over the planks of his ship as she seemed to be attempting to crawl up his leg. Clearly, the intention had been to make her look like she was overcome with lust. To me, it looked more like the pirate was about to get his junk bitten off by a beautiful zombie.
The reason the crowd had screamed, however, was that during the recreation of the cover image, the newly chosen couple had managed a fairly decent recreation, helped along by the large fan a few feet from them whipping their hair and clothing about. But instead of simply crawling up the handsome, makeshift pirate’s leg as depicted, the blonde woman, proving that her boundaries hadn’t improved since earlier in the day, had reached up and squeezed the man’s significant bulge.
Though his eyes grew wide in surprise, the man proved to be a good sport by exaggeratingly shoving his pelvis into her grip, while making overtly sexual thrusts toward the ceiling with his sword.
When the crowd finally quieted and the emcee managed to stop laughing, she wiped her eyes and spoke into the microphone. “Good luck to whoever comes next. That one will be hard to beat.” As she spoke, the couple walked offstage, adjusting their clothing, and then ret
urned to their respective seats. “Let’s see… we covered a lot of the tropes.” The raven-haired emcee listed them off on her fingers. “Cowboy, fireman, the manny, billionaire, biker”—she nodded toward the man who’d just sat down—“well-endowed pirates.” The crowd hooted and hollered again at that. “We still have bodyguards, farmer, and vampire to get through.” She kept her hand over her ear as she leaned forward. “What do you dirty birds want next?”
The crowd began to scream out their choices, and an entirely new terror washed over me, this one ice-cold. Probably sensing my emotions, Jasper glanced over, eyes wide.
No way. There was no way this was happening.
And even though I couldn’t figure out how it was going to unfold, I could feel it, sure as shit. I could feel it.
Just as I’d settled on clutching Jasper’s hand as tight as I could and then making a run for it, Tyler Dixon, who was two seats down from Jasper, with Lamont in between them, stood up.
The emcee noticed him instantly and hushed the crowd. “We have a volunteer.” She gestured toward Tyler. “I’m sure you’re all familiar with Tate Dallas’s work.”
Again, the crowd went wild.
“No, not exactly!” Tyler lifted his hands in the air and waited for a lull in the noise.
Mentally, I was already picturing how I was going to kill him. It was a shame, considering how pretty he was, but there was no other option.
“You all have seen plenty of me over the years. It’s time for fresh meat.” Proving he had a death wish, he lowered his left hand and stopped as it pointed to me.
When his eyes met mine, I glared at him and growled. “I will kill you.”
He just grinned, the fucker, and looked back at the emcee. “I happen to know we have an actual, honest-to-God bodyguard in our presence tonight. Seems a shame to let such an opportunity go to waste.”
And again, the crowd went crazy.
I hoped every single one of their damn throats would be bleeding by the time the night was over.
“I’m so sorry.” Jasper looked at me, horrified. “I am so, so sorry.”
The Alcove (Lavender Shores Book 7) Page 19
