Page 36 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
“Boy? What’s all this frenzy about?”
The bouncer laughed. The kind of laugh that says:I don’t know who you are, but you’re entertaining me way more than I should admit while on duty.
Tess, meanwhile, was dead serious. “I was on my way to an off-Broadway show and somehow got swept into this chaos. I doubt the Yankees are playing tonight… far too many damsels pressing to get in.”
The man looked at her like she’d just stepped off a UFO. Which, honestly, wasn’t far off.
“There’s a Zane Ryder concert,” he said, trying to decide if she was faking it—or if she’d simply been born that way.
“Zane Ryder?” Tess repeated, still angled three-quarters away, as if chatting with a gardener at Versailles. “Doesn’t ring a bell…”
The bouncer chuckled again, with the patience of someone who’s learned never to argue with eccentrics. He threw me a look, maybe wondering what a seemingly normal girl like me was doing with such an alien creature.
“She’s gotta be the only person on Earth who hasn’t heard of him. We played a date in Mongolia two years ago—he filled a valley with two hundred thousand people.”
Tess finally turned toward him, slowly, as ifnoticing his existence for the first time.
“You work for this man?” she asked, voice regal, weighing him like a queen appraising a jester.
“Eight years now.”
That’s when she moved. She glided toward him like a cobra dancing to a flute, raised her hand, and brushed his chin with three fingers—slow, deliberate, elegant as a threat.
“And he leaves someone like you out here? Guarding the provinces of the Empire? A man of your potential?”
The bouncer laughed again, but this time uneasily. He glanced at me, then back at her—who now looked at him with the intensity of a panther scenting weakness.
“They treat me well… and maybe I’m not smart enough to do much else…” he stammered.
Tess jerked back as if he’d slapped her. “How can a man call himself worthy of the name and say such things about himself?” she cried, pure Elizabethan tragedy.
The bouncer shrugged and turned to me for comfort in normalcy. “It’s an honest job.”
Tess shot him a look over her shoulder, pure black-and-white cinema. “You have untapped potential.”
“I… don’t know,” he muttered, visibly unraveling.
She stepped in again, slower this time, andtraced the back of her hand across his chest—somewhere between checking his temperature and a Mayan ritual greeting. “You will never be younger than you are tonight.”
The man leaned back a fraction, smiling awkwardly, like he couldn’t tell if he was about to be seduced or mugged.
Tess pressed closer, feline. “Why are you backing away? You don’t find me attractive?”
“No, you’re a very beautiful woman…” he said, fiddling nervously with the brim of his cap.
“Then why don’t you let go?” she murmured, tilting her head as if scolding a misbehaving puppy.
The bouncer scratched the back of his neck like a teenager on a first date and said, “Well… actually, I think your friend is really cute.”
15
I spun around like he was talking to someone behind me. Then I pointed to myself, confused.
“Me? You mean me?”
“I don’t want to sound cliché, but you’re exactly my type.”
“But… I didn’t even say anything!”
