Elle Kennedy: Worst Pick-Up Line Ever

“Hey, hot stuff, what do you say you meet me out front after you get off?” the busty blonde cooed as she sauntered up to the bar. “And then we can get EACH OTHER off…”

So, this is the first line of One Night of Trouble, my latest Entangled release.

It’s also a real pickup line that was drawled my way once, which I loved so frickin’ much that I wrote it down so I could include it in a book. Except then I forgot about it. For more than a decade. Until about a year ago, when I was cleaning out a file cabinet and found a bunch of old notebooks. On the inside cover of one of those notebooks? This pickup line, with a little note underneath it: ***USE IN A BOOK.

But let’s backtrack and set the scene.

Elle is 17 years old. OK, wait, not sure why I’m talking in the 3rd person. Like Jimmy from Seinfeld (George is getting upset!!)

Back to scene. I’m 17 and working at a luggage store in the mall. I hate my job because my boss makes all the female employees wear high heels—when half the time you’re climbing ladders to reach the top shelves where all the huge luggage pieces are stored. Workplace accident waiting to happen. So I’m up on a ladder organizing luggage when a really short guy (seriously, he was like 5 feet tall) with a very thin mustache (it was weird) wanders into the store, comes up to me, checks out my butt for a very long time, and then unleashes the awesome pickup line.

“Hey, hot stuff, what do you say you meet me out front after you get off? And then we can get EACH OTHER off…”

Now, I’m very smooth, so naturally I said, “Oh. Um. No thanks. Would you like to buy some luggage?”

And he said (my second all-time favorite line EVER): Girrrrrl, do I look like the kind of guy who travels?

Then he left.

More than ten years later, I decided to immortalize my pickup artist by writing him into a book. In the form of a busty blonde, though, because the line is directed at my hero, who is a bartender at a nightclub.

I love being a writer.