Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100550 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 503(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100550 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 503(@200wpm)___ 402(@250wpm)___ 335(@300wpm)
“So, how’d you end up in Los Angeles?” I asked as he worked. I figured this was a fairly innocuous question. I hadn’t figured that Mal would be on the defensive again suddenly.
“Why is it always me who has to talk? How’d you end up in New York?”
Fine. I could show him how to answer a casual question politely.
“The usual way, I guess?” I felt the back of my neck turning red under the hot sun, and I was sweating through my T-shirt. “Columbia and UT were the places that gave me scholarships. University of Tennessee was really close to home, and I wanted to get a little further away…”
“To find yourself in the big city?” Mal said fake-dramatically.
“Honestly? Yeah. Kinda. So Columbia was the only real choice.” I shrugged. “I studied business and found I liked advertising. To me, it’s not about selling people shit they don’t need, it’s about helping to connect people with products they can use. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.”
I had serious doubts about whether it would continue to work that way when people like Kale Storms were in charge. All the more reason to start my own business sooner rather than later.
Mal finished detaching the seat and tossed the tools back in the bag at my feet. His hair was plastered to the back of his neck, and it didn’t make him look a whit less attractive, damn it. “That’s very Hallmark of you. Country boy learns important lessons in the city, then comes home. Isn’t that how it goes?”
I blinked. “Uh, no. I’m not about to take over my dad’s farm or whatever. And I don’t have a true love I left behind here. And eating Lou Klein’s apple muffins is the closest I wanna get to owning a bakery or an orchard, so…”
“Damn.” Mal jumped down from the tractor, and his eyes pinned me in place. “You know an awful lot about those movies.”
“I… I work in advertising,” I said with a sniff. “It’s important that I have an understanding of what is, um… appealing to middle America. As a, um… target demographic.”
Mal tilted his head to one side. “Aw, bless. That was almost believable. But not quite. You watch them daily, don’t you?”
“No! Weekly. At most.” I sighed. “Shut up.”
But of course he didn’t.
“Deep inside you—” Mal clutched a hand to his chest and spun in a circle. “—there’s a country girl longing to return to her roots. Maybe you could take over this very junkyard, Brooks Johnson, and…”
I grabbed his free hand and spun him again, right into my arms, with his wrist held at the small of his back and our torsos pressed together. For a second, we stared at each other, breath mingling, without a sound but the distant whoosh of the traffic on the highway. “What’s your role in this story, then?” I asked gruffly. “Prince in disguise?”
Mal swallowed hard and pushed at me with his other hand. “Yeah, right. Prince of the junkyard, you mean? I’m a metal artist from Homer, Tennessee, by way of Los Angeles. I’m a background character in your movie.”
“A really prickly prince who likes to ask questions but not answer them.” The urge to kiss him was way too strong, so I let him go abruptly, grabbed the tool bag off the ground, and kept strolling down the aisle. “How’d you get to be a guy who fears cows and cow art?”
“Pfft. The only thing I fear about cow art is how epic it is,” he deadpanned, catching up to me with the tractor seat clutched in his hand. “Only the truly enlightened among us can really understand it.”
“Yep. You and my mom,” I agreed. “So what about—”
“Holy shit, look at that auger!” Mal said, cutting me off as he ran toward the corkscrew-shaped implement.
I rolled my eyes at the sky. If Mal thought I’d be put off by his deflection, he was dead wrong. I hadn’t gotten where I was by quitting, damn it.
We’d taken two loads of stuff to the truck, and Mal had knelt to dismantle the exhaust pipes from a couple of newer tractors by the time I tried again. “So, why Los Angeles? Was it a beach thing, or…?”
Mal sighed, clearly irritated. He paused his work but didn’t turn around. “If you must know, Los Angeles seemed like an open-minded place where I could live in my car for a while without hypothermia, and I had just enough gas money to get me there. And I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, whatever those are, and now I’m happier and sexier than ever. Can we stop with the twenty questions now? It’s getting boring.”
Learning about Mal was anything but boring.
I stepped up behind him and put a hand on the small of his back, not to crowd him, but to let him know I was there. “Was it that bad at home?”