Blog Tour: Waiting for You by Shey Stahl - Excerpt + Giveaway

Blurb: Bailey Gray is tired of her perfectly planned life. Everything about her life has been organized and lived out to the expectations set of her parents. She is the class valedictorian, has perfect grades, the perfect friends, a perfect boyfriend, basically perfect life...or so everyone thought. That's when she realizes the path planned isn't always the path chosen.

On graduation day she makes a decision. One that changes everything she thought she knew about her intended future.

On a whim, she runs away with the town rebel, Dylan Wade, in search of the unknown.

Dylan Wade isn't looking to run away from anything.

He knows what he wants as he's been waiting on it for years.

On a journey to find the unknown, they discover a friendship they once knew along the open highway and have not a care in the world. Between the yellow and white lines of the heated summer asphalt, a spark draws them together as Dylan's past and Bailey future try to ripe them apart.

Could it be that Dylan and his GTO are exactly what her perfectly planned life needs?

Excerpt:
I woke up to the morning as the sun peeked into the room through the thin brown curtains. It took me a moment to remember where I was and what I was doing here. Growing up, I was never allowed to sleep in and when I saw the time, I panicked thinking my mother would be pushing through my door any minute with her annoyingly chipper façade.

 

Only I wasn’t in my room. I wasn’t even in my house.

 

The memories of yesterday and last night came to mind. I couldn’t believe that I confessed in a moment of sheer stupidity that I had a crush on him when we were kids and secretly had a thing for bad boys.

Stupid of me.

 

I stretched a little. The bed wasn’t comfortable so my back was aching and stiff.

 

I noticed I was on the edge of the bed, barely hanging on so I went to shimmy over but was pushed more off the bed as Dylan groaned beside me.

 

Trying to move away from him and keep my place on the bed, it didn’t work. I landed on the floor, arms flailing, legs kicking as I tried to catch myself.

 

Dylan heard the thump and leaned over the side of the bed. “Why are you on the floor?”

 

“Jackass,” I replied with a sour edge to my voice as I picked myself off the floor, rubbing my ass.

 

Dylan swung his legs around the side of the bed and sat there for a moment looking out the window. His head hung and he removed himself from the bed reaching for his cigarettes in his jeans neatly folded on the chair next to the bed and then walked outside on the balcony, chuckling. I watched him closely, admiring the way his back muscles flexed as he walked and the tattoos that I never knew were there on his back. I wasn’t sure what they all were but they were beautiful. None seemed to be overly colorful but instead darker shades of black, gray, red and some with a navy blue. He must have noticed me staring because before he opened the door he turned and smirked.

 

Embarrassed, I looked down at my feet dangling off the side of the bed, noticing I need to paint my toenails. My mom would have been horrified if she would have seen them. Every Saturday morning my mom, Mercedes and her mother Teresa got together for what they called Spa Saturday at Tuscan Spa Sanctuary in Olympia.

 

Though they specialized in a Zen-bliss as they called it, it was torture for me and today, being Saturday, I was relieved not to have to attend.

 

After I regained some composure, I made my way out to the balcony where Dylan was leaning against the railing. Smoke billowing around him as he took a deep drag from his cigarette, his attention captivated by the street below.

 

His tattooed back and muscles distracted me. His back was to me, so I tried to decipher what the shapes and the writing that surrounded them were. There was one down his spine that appeared to be some sort of scripture in a foreign language.

 

The moment I opened the slider door, the heat of the morning hit me. It was a nice change from the crisp mornings of the Puget Sound. Though we hadn’t gone far, the climate in southern Oregon was noticeably different.

 

Dylan looked over his shoulder at me when the slider clicked against the metal frame. His smirk was present when his eyes raked down my body, taking in my black cotton shorts and small tank top.

 

Since he was examining me, I did the same noticing he wasn’t wearing much other than a pair of navy blue Nike workout shorts with the elastic band of his white boxer briefs peeking through the top.

 

Sitting in the plastic chair near the door, I drew my legs up to my chest. “Where to today?”

 

Dylan raised an eyebrow and then put his cigarette out against the railing, tossing it over the edge. “I told you,” he grinned but it wasn’t a grin that held, “city by city,”

 

“Okay…what city today?”

 

“San Jose?” He suggested, raising his eyebrows again.

 

“Okay.” I stood up. “Can I shower first?”

 

His eyes shined playfully but there was more to the smile than he was leading on. “Can I join you?” He asked, looking completely serious.

 

“Nope,”

 

“Such a tease,” he mumbled chuckling when I shook my ass a little at him as I closed the slider.

 

The flirting and teasing was even more apparent this morning after our confessions but it was also nice. There’s something about flirting with someone you’re comfortable around. It was playfully refreshing. I wasn’t sure where any of this was going to lead between us but it was nice not to know for once. When everything was planned for you, spontaneity and the unknown is something worth living.

 

 

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