Page 50 of No Words

Elijah nodded at me coolly. “Hey,” he said.

“Would it be all right if he got a few pics of you and Will in action, signing some books?” Chloe asked.

“Absolutely.” I posed with my pen hovering over the last of Lauren’s books, while Will did the same. Elijah began snapping away in a manner that really did seem quite professional.

“How’s Molly doing, Elijah?” Will asked.

“Good, I think,” Elijah replied, as his camera clicked. “Katie called a little while ago from the hospital, and said Miss Molly—I mean, Miz Hartwell—is four centimeters dilated, whatever that means.”

I heard all the mothers left in the tent—Frannie, Kellyjean, and Bernadette, as well as a few others—make sympathetic sounds.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” Kellyjean asked. These kinds of things were important to her. In the Salem Prairie series, werewolves were always getting witches pregnant, and vice versa. Birth control did not exist in Victoria Maynard’s supernatural universe.

“They want it to be a surprise. I mean, to everybody else. They know.Iknow, because Katie told me.” Elijah was evidently someone important in the lives of Molly and the sheriff and his daughter. “But I’m not supposed to say. So, uh, Miss Wright, if you wouldn’t mind scooting your chair a little closer to Mr. Price’s—” To my dismay, he walked over and moved my signing table a few inches nearer to Will’s.“And, Mr. Price, if you could scoot closer to Miss Wright so I could get both of you in one shot... that’s right—”

Will obligingly moved closer to me. So close that I could smell his cologne, which had a fresh, clean, citrus scent, and feel his body heat against mine. So close that I could see that he’d already begun to grow a five o’clock shadow even though it was nowhere near five o’clock. So close that I spied a few dark chest hairs curling out from the opening of his shirt.

And that wasn’t all that was happening, either. Something about the combination of his scent and how tantalizingly masculine those dark hairs looked was making me feel warm. Much warmer than I knew it was in the tent, since electric fans had been set up to cool off the area as we signed, even though the temperature was really quite pleasant.

Still, sweat was beginning to break out along the back of my neck and along the insides of my thighs beneath the skirt of my dress.

This was not a good situation. This was not a good situation at all.

“How are you?” Will asked.

I blinked at him, startled. “Who? Me?”

He grinned, not glancing away from the camera. “Yes, you. How are you doing? All right, then?”

“Er.” I was about to burst into flames, but other than that, fine. “Yes.”

“Now if you could just lean across the tables.” Elijah was talking to Lauren. “Like you’re asking them a question, the way I saw you doing a few minutes ago?”

“Me?” Lauren looked delighted. “Of course!”

Lauren leaned across the table, her long, straight hair sweeping across the white tablecloth, brushing my hand a little bit and enveloping both Will and I in the scent of her apple-blossom shampoo.

This was preferable to the scent of Will in which I’d been enveloped before, but was doing nothing for the heat I was feeling. Was he not feeling it? He didn’t appear to be, and neither did Lauren. They both looked cool as cucumbers, smiling away as Elijah clicked, clicked, clicked—

“Okay!” I sprang up from my chair and backed away from Will. Thankfully air rushed in and began to cool all the places that had begun to become slick with heat. “You have enough photos for now, right, Elijah?”

Elijah looked down at the screen on the back of his camera. “Uh... yes. Yeah, these are great. Thanks.”

“Great.” I grabbed my bag from beneath my signing table and darted away before anyone could think of some other reason to force me to sit back down next to the good-smelling nuclear reactor that was Will Price. “Well, I guess I’ll see you all at dinner—”

“Oh no you don’t, Miss Jo Wright.” Kellyjean was suddenly at my side, snaking an arm through mine. “We’re not letting you slink back to the hotel to work for the rest of this beautiful day.”

“Uh.” I had to lean my head to the side in order not to be struck by the rim of her enormous beach hat. “No, I really do need to get back to the hotel. I’m super behind onKittyKatz number twenty-seven. I finally got a good idea for it, so I’m just going to go work on—”

“You’re not doing any such thing.” Kellyjean’s grip on my arm was surprisingly forceful. “You’re going to go out on Will’s boat with us this afternoon for lunch. Weren’t you the one telling that little girl over there that if she wants to be a good writer, she has to have experiences worth writing about?”

“Um.” I flung a desperate look in Bernadette’s direction for help, but she only grinned at me, evidently enjoying my discomfort.You did say that,she mouthed, and pointed finger guns at me. “Yes. But Lauren is twelve and a new writer, and I’m in my thirties and—”

“Hey!” Lauren had zipped up her suitcase and was now flinging me a disbelieving look. “I’m nineteen!”

“Oh, sorry, nineteen. But I’d really just like to—”

“No excuses.” Kellyjean’s hold on my arm had turned to a death grip. “You’re going toloveit. We’re going to drink wine, and maybe do some sunbathing—”