Buzz Off, Romeo

A Sticky, Sweet, Slow burn series

De: Kelli McKenna

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

BIANCA

Let me be clear about something. I did not go to the Santa Barbara International Beekeepers Conference looking for love. I went to sell honey, network with professionals, and deliver a presentation I had rehearsed fourteen times. I had a color-coded schedule. I had business cards in a leather case. I had a laminated checklist.

The checklist did not have a contingency plan for Wesley Suarez.

Wes was my Romeo in our high school production of Romeo and Juliet. He was also the boy I was falling for the night everything went horribly, permanently wrong. We haven't spoken in fifteen years, which was working out beautifully for me until he showed up at my conference with a press badge and a condescending attitude about "hobbyist beekeepers."

Now he wants an interview. My bees want to sting him. I want him to go back to whatever rock he crawled out from under.

But the universe has other plans. Because the conference keeps throwing us together, a massive corporation is circling my grandmother's legacy like a vulture in a tailored suit, and a group of incredible women called the Queen B's have decided that my problems are now a collective effort.

I don't need a Romeo. I need a bulk jar supplier and maybe a lawyer.

I definitely don't need to know why he still looks at me like that.

WES

Here is what my editor told me. Go to Santa Barbara. Cover a beekeeping conference. Write something positive for once. Twelve hundred words. Easy money.

Here is what actually happened.

I walked into the welcome reception, approached an interesting beekeeper for a quote, and realized I was staring at Bianca Evers. The girl who played Juliet to my Romeo at Echo Park High. The girl I was falling for the night our world fell apart. The girl who hasn't spoken to me in fifteen years and clearly plans to keep that streak alive.

She's also brilliant, frustrating, beautiful, and talks to her bees like they understand her. They probably do. She has that effect on living things.

I was supposed to write a fluff piece about honey. Instead I stumbled into something much bigger and much more dangerous. And I am not talking about the bees.

She has walls. I have walls. We have fifteen years of things we never said sitting between us. And something about this conference keeps making those walls feel thinner than they should.

This is a problem. I am aware.

Buzz Off, Romeo is a closed-door, slow burn romance told in alternating points of view. Featuring second chances, forced proximity, a sunshine beekeeper, a grumpy journalist who is in way over his head, meddling friends, corporate villains, and enough yearning to pollinate every rooftop garden in Los Angeles.

No animals were harmed in the making of this love story. The American Humane Association was not contacted because the bees didn't ask for representation. One journalist's ego, however, did not survive.

Book 1 of the Sticky, Sweet, Slow Burn Series