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NowI was getting turned on.
His mouth tugged to one side. “Take this left, and you’ll find the cottage.” He leant down, bringing his lips to my ear. “Try not to get lost again, Ellie. At least not until you’ve seen the library.”
Max stepped past me and walked away, leaving me staring after him. I swallowed, but it did nothing to alleviate the scratchiness in my dry throat.
Was he just…flirting? With me?
And was I flirting back?
More to the point, why did I like it?
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELLIE
Winston, Winston, Where For Art Thou, Winston?
The big house was just that—big.
Greygarth House was one of the largest homes I’d ever seen in my life, and I couldn’t believe Max owned this entire place. No wonder he’d opened half of it to the public. It was too large for a family, never mind just one person.
Heck, even half of it would be.
How did he live in that place alone?
Did he live alone? Didn’t the upper class still have household staff?
Hmm. Max didn’t strike me as the kind of person who’d keep a fleet of staff all hours of the day, so perhaps not.
I really didn’t know anything about him. It wasn’t like I had any business knowing anything about him, but now that we were kind of getting along… I don’t know. It was bugging me.
Iwantedto know more about him. I couldn’t decide if it was the writer side of me that couldn’t let go of the incessant need to research and cram my brain full of stuff or if it was just… me. Wanting to know more about him.
I wanted it to be the former. The writer in me. The researcher. The people watcher. The nosy cow.
I feared that wasn’t the case.
I feared it wasmewho wanted to know. Ellie the person, not Ellie the writer.
I didn’t know what to do if that were true. Yes, he’d flirted with me yesterday, but it had been such a one-eighty from how he usually spoke to me that I didn’t know what to make of it.
Was it flirting for the sake of flirting? The casual kind you did without realising? Was that how he just spoke to women in general? I hadn’t seen him with anyone, so I assumed he was single, but there was no way the man lived like a monk.
Not looking the way he did.
I really didn’t have the time to be debating this. I had to haul my arse inside and talk to Esme and her book club about my last release. After Max had confirmed what I’d thought about May, I was pretty nervous.
Despite what I’d said to him, it wasn’t nice when people didn’t like your books. I put so much time and effort into them that it did sting when I read a bad review or someone said they didn’t like it—it didn’t mean I thought they were wrong or that their opinion wasn’t valid, because a one-star review was just as valid as a five-star review.
I was only human.
And I’d never had someone say they didn’t like my book to my face before. The people who left bad reviews usually only did so because they had the anonymity of the Internet to hide behind.
I didn’t blame them for that. I didn’t like leaving bad reviews on the Internet, never mind in person, so it was what it was.
But still, I felt like a kid on their first day of school.
I didn’t want to go in there, and if I did, I kind of wanted someone to hold my hand.
