Free A Perfect Mess by Zoe Dawson

of loss and sadness, like most Cajun songs.
    “What is that?”
    “It’s a fiddle. Someone’s playing, givin’ the bullfrogs something to romance the pretty ladies with.”
    She laughed. “It’s so beautiful,” she sighed. “But back to your story. You know, it’s no wonder a lot of people from the rural South have a reputation for being a little crazy. That seems downright suicidal.”
    “Right. That’s why I prefer to go out after dark with a beautiful woman rather than risk my life with my dumbass brothers.”
    The light wobbled and I cursed my stupid tongue, but when I looked at her, the smile she gave me was dazzling. It went straight to my head and exploded into tiny white stars. Her eyes moved over my face and dropped to my mouth. My breath hitched. Our gazes caught, and my internal temperature upped several notches as my blood heated. The two levels of the invisible contact met, meshed, pushed together, rising into another plane altogether.
    She didn’t say anything, but her eyes followed my tongue as I wet my bottom lip. Our laughter drifted away, forgotten, on the sultry air, and awareness thickened the humidity around us.
    She jolted and looked away. “Oh, there’s another one!”
    I speared the frog. Down boy! I ordered my hardened dick. Frog-gigging wood. Freaking A, that was a first.
    #
    When we reached that beautiful house she’d commented on before, I pulled into the driveway and pushed the remote to open the garage.
    She turned to look at me. “This is your house.”
    “It is.”
    She punched me in the arm. “You really are annoying, Booker.”
    I got out of the Jeep chuckling. “Just let me get these frogs taken care of. Come on in.”
    She got out and followed me through the door from the garage as I hit the remote again and the door slowly descended behind the three vehicles.
    “Oh, man,” she breathed softly as she rushed to the full bank of windows that looked out onto the bayou. “This is so amazing. I’m so jealous of you. Look at that view!—and your deck and garden! The ferns and flowers. Looks like your brother was here, too.”
    “Yep. This is where your aunt saw my brother’s work. She contracted him after that.”
    “He really is talented. Even my friend, Ashley, who’s studying landscape architecture, thinks so.”
    “Yeah, I saw what your friend Ashley thought of my brother, and I don’t think it had anything to do with his artistry.”
    She turned, flushing again, catching her bottom lip against her teeth and wincing. “She’s pretty wild.”
    “Well, that’s okay. Boone is, too. Recklessly wild. Sometimes I worry about him.”
    “Everyone has to find their way, Booker. Looks like you did. So, bestselling author? In what genre?”
    “Horror and fantasy.”
    “Why horror?” she asked leaning her shoulder against the sliding glass door.
    I shrugged. Because I understand it. Because I lived it. It’s inside me. “I guess because it was a good outlet for all my teenaged anger.”
    “Teenaged?”
    “I wrote the books in high school. Had them sitting on my computer. When this self-publishing craze started, I polished them, got myself an editor and contracted a cover designer. The first book went up last September, and it immediately went viral. I got a lot of press and a lot of offers for the second and third books, but I turned them down. I don’t like being told what to do. Got a problem with authority. And when those next books went up, they’ve been even bigger successes.”
    “The rebel author. Why doesn’t that surprise me? What pen name do you write under?”
    “O. B. Thomas.”
    Her eyes widened and she sucked in her breath. “Seriously? I’ve heard of you.”
    “You’ve read my books?”
    “No. I…horror scares me. Does the O stand for Outlaw and the B for Booker?”
    “Bingo. Thomas is my middle name.”
    She just stared at me with admiration in her eyes. I have to say, it was pretty sweet. “I’d better get to these frogs. I’ve got