Contemporary Romance/Erotic Romance
Date Published: 07-23-2021
What would you do if you had twenty minutes alone with your idol?
Gemma Fox is a self-confessed unlucky-in-love geek treating herself to a weekend at a pop-culture convention on Australia’s sunny Gold Coast.
Drawn there by the temptation of seeing her celebrity crush, Everett Rhodes, the last thing she expects is to wind up trapped in an elevator with him. Parting ways, Gemma has no reason to suspect that their paths will cross again. After all, he’s a celebrity. She’s just a fan who lives on the other side of the planet.
Besides, her life is not a rom-com. (At least, that’s what she keeps telling herself.)
However, life has other plans. And Everett -stupidly charming, frustratingly handsome Everett- is hard to resist.
But when things get complicated, Gemma and Everett are both faced with the same dilemma:
How can they make things work when they live in completely separate worlds?
Excerpt:
The silence stretched on as the floors
seemed to inch down to the ground level. Then the lights flickered, and the
lift made a strange grinding-clunking sound, stopping abruptly. The display on
the screen said that they had reached the 7th floor, but the doors didn’t open.
“That didn’t sound too good,” Gemma observed
slowly, frowning at the still-closed metal doors. She pushed the ‘open doors’
button. They remained shut. The lights flickered again ominously.
“Pretty sure we’re stuck,” her companion
remarked, frowning and pulling out his own phone. She assumed he had a travel
sim installed or simply didn’t care about exorbitant roaming charges. “I don’t
have any reception.”
“Well, fuck,” she muttered, realising that
she didn’t either. They must be in a dead zone, because Murphy’s Law was an
actual thing in her world. “Neither do I.” She held up her phone to prove that,
for all her joking about crazed fans, she wasn’t lying to him.
She hit the emergency call button in the
lift.
Nothing happened.
Gemma blinked, incredulous. “You’ve got to
be kidding me.” She hit the button a few more times with increasing frustration
and just a hint of panic. She just about jumped out of her skin when a warm
hand landed on her shoulder.
“Sorry,” Rhodes backed up again, holding his
hands up in surrender. “Are you okay?”
Fighting down a hysterical laugh, she
swallowed and shoved shaking hands into her pockets. “I’m not the best with
confined spaces. For short periods of time, it’s fine, but…” she blew a breath
out slowly. “Sorry. I promise I’m not actually a raving lunatic.”
Talking to him was distracting enough from
the plight of being stuck in a small metal box suspended between hotel floors,
though, so she kept going. “I don’t suppose you have bodyguards or assistants
or handlers or something? You know, someone that knew you were getting into
this lift and who will raise the alarm if you don’t wander out on the ground
floor in the next couple of minutes?”
He laughed at that, and it surprised her that
it was a self-deprecating sort of sound and it was accompanied by a shrug. “No.
No, I’m not that famous. In fact, you’re the first person to recognise
me.”
Objectively, if she hadn’t been such a huge
fan (with a crush to boot) she mightn’t have recognised him at first glance,
particularly with the shaggy haircut he was sporting and if he slid his
sunglasses on. Additionally, his show had been off air for two years: if he
were off being successful and relevant, he wouldn’t have been booked at a
random pop culture convention in Australia, would he? But that thought seemed a
little unkind, considering how much she –and thousands of other people–looked
forward to these conventions.
“Oh.” Gemma shook her head, feeling a little
traitorous for her musings. “I’m willing to bet the closer you get to the
Convention Centre, the faster that will change. Whether that’s a good thing or
not, well…” she trailed off and offered him another small smile. “We’re not all
crazies, remember.”
“I thought that was my line,” the actor
grinned, and she felt her heart do a little flip. Damn him and his aesthetic
charm. He stuck out his hand, officially introducing himself, “Everett, or
Rhett, if you’d prefer.”
“Gemma,” she responded, shaking the offered
appendage. Cocking her head to the side, she mused on his chosen nickname. “I
never picked you as the ‘Rhett’ type. I would have thought it was Everett or
bust. You know, if I’d given it much thought. Which I hadn’t. Well, until now.”
His lips twitched upwards into a smirk.
“Rhetts have a type?”
“Yes,” her reply was one of affected
haughtiness, because she got weird when she got nervous. And boy was she
nervous. “They wear shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and thongs.” At his raised
eyebrows, she corrected, “Flip-flops, or sandals, sorry.” She looked him over
again, taking in the form fitting jeans, polo shirt (with sunglasses tucked in
at the unbuttoned collar, offering just a hint of his dark chest hair) and
dress shoes. “You’re dressed like an Everett.”
This earned her another laugh, but it was
warmer and richer than any of the previous iterations of the sound. “You were
trying to convince me you weren’t crazy, remember?”
“Oh,” she waved her hand dismissively, “I
abandoned that plan at least three seconds after I said it. Lost cause and all
that. Still,” she mused aloud, gesturing to the shut doors, “I wasn’t exactly
expecting this.”
About the Author
As a professional civil marriage celebrant, Anita makes a living telling other people’s love stories and celebrating real romance! Also armed with a Bachelor of Education (Secondary), Anita is a qualified -but not practising- High School English teacher who loves to read anything she can get her hands on, including fanfiction. (And, yes, she’s written her fair share of that, too.)
Living directly between Queensland’s sunny Gold and Sunshine coasts, Anita spends her days exploring the Great South East with her husband and their two rambunctious sons. When at home, she’s also a slave to two cats and one very spoilt Great Dane X.
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I enjoyed the excerpt and Handle with Care sounds like a delightful romance for me and I am looking forward to reading it! Thanks for sharing it with me and have a magical holiday season!
ReplyDeleteYay! I hope you enjoy the book! And have a fantastic holiday season yourself, too.
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