Page 29 of Hypnotized By Love

He took a step closer, letting me feel the warmth of his body, which derailed my wild thoughts that were veering into a place they shouldn’t, and I shivered again.

“Although I wouldn’t mind seeing how you planned to protect me. Would you throw your body across mine?” He asked it so innocently, but he somehow managed to have me considering the possibility.

“You’re not acting like yourself,” I said, and I wasn’t sure which one of us I was actually directing that statement toward.

He patted his chest, sporting a look of mock confusion, and said, “Funny, I feel like myself.”

Of course he would take me literally. “That’s not what I meant. You were passing out yeses today like they were candy. Which is unlike you.”

“Like M&M’s? Which are your favorite,” he said.

They were my favorite candy. “You don’t know that.”

“I do.” He was right, but I didn’t want him to be. Which made it so that I couldn’t think of a good retort.

My ability to formulate a response went away completely when I noticed that measured look of his was back, the one where it felt like he was assessing me and looking for a specific answer. I should have told him to knock it off, but instead I just glared at him.

Then he said, “You know, for someone who claims to hate me, you seem to be voluntarily spending a lot of time with me.”

Claimed? Did hate him, thank you. “Against my better judgment.”

“Uh-oh. Did somebody hypnotize you to do it?”

He was not in the least bit funny. “No, you don’t have a shell. You need protection.”

“You lost me.”

With an exasperated wave of my hand, I said, “It’s a whole thing about you being a shell-less turtle, but basically by tomorrow afternoon, you will be back to your old self that we all know and hate, and you can shoot down random women who ask you out and tell your delightful mother no to everything she asks you to do.”

Mason seemed to take my rant very seriously, mulling it over, and then said, “Do you know why I said no to my mom when she asked me to donate a prize for the silent auction? To evaluate someone’s manuscript and give them writing tips? Because I feel like a total fraud.”

There wasn’t anything he could have said that would have surprised me more. A fraud? Mr. Overly Confident, who had landed on bestseller lists?

“And it was embarrassing,” he added.

“It’s embarrassing to be a bestselling author?”

He averted his gaze, looking toward the trees. He put both of his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the railing. “It is if your dad is your only customer.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means my father, in an attempt to make up for years of neglect, decided to hire the services of an organization that guarantees getting on theNew York Timesbestseller list. I thought that I had landed on it through some combination of luck, talent, and maybe even having a senator for a dad, but it turned out that he just bought my way on.”

I should have felt triumphant over this news. He had just handed me a very serious weapon that I could wield to hurt him if I wanted to. I could hold it against him and mock him for it. Instead I just felt ... bad for him.

I didn’t like that.

So I did something unexpected. I was nice. “I’m sure your dad just thought he was trying to help.”

“Well, he helped me into tanking my writing career. My second book was a huge failure and didn’t make the list and didn’t move any copies, and my publisher ordered too many, and despite them doing their best to advertise it, it flopped. So now I’m back home, licking my wounds and trying to do freelance reporting jobs until I get my third book finished and can start submitting again. And I won’t even be starting over at zero. I’ll be in the negative. Publishers will see me as a bad risk. My agent might drop me if this new book isn’t something special. He suggested I use a pen name so that the taint of my failure won’t ruin my future prospects.” He let out a deep breath and said, “Wow. Sorry for dropping all of that on you.”

It had been our shared dream to be published. I had been wildly jealous that he had succeeded, and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams by landing on that list with his first book.

I had stopped wanting that dream for myself a long time ago, when I realized I wasn’t good enough and it wasn’t really where my passion lay. I still loved reading, but that was as far as it went.

I’d spent all that time being envious of something I hadn’t even really wanted for myself. What a waste of time.

And it must have been really hard for him to see his dream come true and then have it yanked away. I felt awkward, unsure of what to say. I settled on, “I didn’t even know you published a second book.”

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