For the next few weeks it’s going to be all Brown Siblings – Erin/Todd/Ben around here!

I thought I’d do a Firsts post today combined with a Meet The Character post. So how about the first time Erin meets Ben in LAID BARE?

“Hot damn, it is Erin Brown. I was wondering if Todd had made you up to keep his mother from fixing him up with the single daughters of her church ladies.” Ben, well over six and a half feet of burly, used-to-play-football in high school, grinned as he burst into the room. Holy hotness, Batman. This hunk of homegrown northwest man gave Todd a serious run for his money in the mouthwatering department.

Erin blinked a few times, blushing. “You’d be Ben, the “B” in BCT Security Solutions, then.” She wiped her hands and held one out for him to take. She wasn’t small by any means but Ben dwarfed her anyway.

When I first wrote Laid Bare, I didn’t really have any real inspiration for either Ben or Todd. They were both three dimensional in my head, but I didn’t really have anyone in mind. But I get asked, quite a bit actually, who I think looks like Ben and Todd – so I went looking around and I like to think Henry Cavill is a lot like Be, only Ben has broader shoulders and is about four inches taller.

Ben knew what was going on, watched her, slowly drinking his beer and talking with Todd. It should have embarrassed her but instead it turned her on. Ben was incredibly hot and she’d be lying if she denied some attraction. She wondered though, too, about the way Ben looked at Todd sometimes. Todd never seemed to notice or comment on it. Ben oozed sexuality in a way that sometimes seemed to catch Todd in his radar. It was hot, she had to admit it and hello, how could people not look at Todd and think he was gorgeous and fuckable?

But Ben was something else altogether. A total package of guh inducing looks but he was also smart and thoughtful. He didn’t say something unless it needed to be said. He was tall and imposing and had a sort of smoldering hotness she instinctively responded to. She’d developed a friendship with him but she’d been very careful not to flirt the way she did with Cope. Because Ben was her type. She’d often thought, the way Todd was in Ben’s presence, that the two of them played a sort of sexual game with each other without coming out and actually saying so. But fantasy was not reality. Reality had consequences.

She took a deep breath. “I think we should tread carefully here.” Erin pushed Todd back and scrambled to sit on the low table so she could face them both. Christ, they were like sexy bookends.