Wickedly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

“What?” she asked as if he were making a comment as offensive as Bourke’s. “What does that mean?”

  “Um,” Charming said, unable to find his verbal footing. “It means that this is a woman’s book, for women, about women’s issues. It’s not really… cool… to have a man write it… um… because the woman… can’t.”

  He winced, and she glared at him. He’d really blown it now. He’d insulted her as badly as Bourke had.

  Charming wanted to pick up his briefcase and leave. But he didn’t dare. Not when she was staring at him so intently.

  “I can’t believe you just said that,” she said.

  He held his breath, bracing for the worst.

  Chapter 21

  Charming had a horrible look on his face, as if he expected her to slap him.

  What kind of person did he think she was? If she were easily offended, she’d be hiding in a room in the Kingdoms, rather than making her way through the Greater World.

  “Good heavens,” she said. “How ridiculous can you get?”

  His beautiful blue eyes opened and he leaned away from the table, as if he expected a slap. He wasn’t timid—if he were timid, he wouldn’t have stood up to Bourke—but he was emotionally fragile.

  Mellie didn’t know if that was Ella’s fault or the fault of Charming’s father, and at the moment, she didn’t care. She was more intrigued by Charming’s reaction and his idea.

  “You’re being politically correct, aren’t you?” Mellie asked.

  “Um,” he said, gulping air as he spoke.

  “That’s a Greater World thing, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Um—”

  “I mean, really, what am I supposed to do if I want to change the world and I need help doing it? Enlist only women because it’s a women’s cause?”

  “It’s been done before,” he said, then bit his lower lip. He looked very uncomfortable. And vulnerable.

  And cute. She had never thought of him as cute before, but he was when he lost that cool façade, a façade that seemed more about hiding shyness than actually being cool.

  She tried not to smile. She had riled him. She liked that. Beneath the cool exterior of this man was tamped down passion, passion he seemed afraid of.

  “So who would I enlist?” Mellie asked. “Selda? She’s already told me she hates writing. Lavinia? She knows nothing about the Greater World. Snow? She hates my guts. Ella? She—”

  Mellie stopped herself before she said something she regretted. She always did that. She let down her guard and she said something stupid.

  “It’s okay,” Charming said in a flat tone. “She’s not much of a mother, so how would she be a stepmother?”

  His tone was so sad, so wistful, that Mellie reached across the table and caught his hand. She didn’t say anything. After all, he had finished the very sentence that she had been about to say. He often said what was on her mind. He had with Bourke. And even if he didn’t, she liked the way that Charming thought.

  She liked him. She liked him so much.

  “You said you can write fiction,” she said. “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged one shoulder again.

  “Charming,” she said. “You can’t make a statement like that without backing it up.”

  “I’ve… written a few things,” he said. But that sounded like a lie. Only “lie” was too harsh. It sounded more like a humble misdirection.

  “How few?” she asked.

  That shoulder went up and down again.

  “Charming…”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I wrote a lot when I first came to the Greater World.”

  “And put it all in a drawer?” she asked.

  “Noooo,” he said.

  “What did you do with it?” she asked.

  “Sold it,” he whispered.

  “To…?”

  “Magazines,” he said. “They’re called little magazines. And literary magazines. And some digests.”

  “Under what name?” she asked.

  “Names,” he whispered.

  She rolled her eyes. “Is any of your writing here?” she asked, putting her hand on one of the pile of books.

  “No,” he said. Then he leaned forward. “I can understand why you’d want to see my writing first—”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “I’m just relieved you’ve done a lot of it. If you were to ghost my novel, how would it work?”

  He looked at her as if she had grown another head. She almost touched her neck to make sure she hadn’t.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, you’d have to tell me what you want.”

  “You’re the guy with the vision,” she said.

  “But it would be your book,” he said.

  “If I could write the damn book, I would,” she said. “So how would this work?”

  “We’d come up with a story together,” he said, “and then I’d write it. And we’d put your name on it.”

  “Which name?” she asked. “The Evil Stepmother?”

  “Um, no. We’d use your Greater World name.”

  He was being serious and she had been snide. He had caught her off guard again, and when she was off guard, she was snide. It was a defense, and not an attractive one.

  She didn’t know how to be attractive to this man, a man every woman watched: from the business women in the coffee shop to the Goth barista behind the counter.

  Her hand still held his, and he hadn’t tried to move away. But maybe that wasn’t because he liked touching her. Maybe that was because he was still talking.

  She had to focus on what he was saying.

  “…and we should probably have another story lined up, because it might take a book or two before we get it right.”

  “By right, you mean without rants,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “We’ll put your rants in. If we do it right, they’ll be one of the most memorable parts of the story.”

  Then he blinked at her, his eyes widening. She was beginning to realize that was his look of dismay.

  “I mean, you know, your opinions. It’s not fair to call them rants.”

  “It is too,” she said. “I like to rant. I’m good at it.”

  He nodded, then winced again. Poor man. How many people had yelled at him for his opinion?

  “Do I pay you?” she asked. “Is that how this works?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then frowned. Then opened his mouth again and closed it again.

  “I don’t need money,” he said after a moment.

  “You told me at that book fair that ghosts got paid,” she said.

  “I did,” he said.

  “So if you do this as a favor, neither of us will be happy,” she said. “We need to keep it strictly business.”

  He looked down. She had a sense that he was disappointed, but at what, she wasn’t sure.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said after a moment.

  “So how do I pay you?”

  “If it sells,” he said, “fifty-fifty split?”

  “When you’re doing all the work?”

  “You’ll do all the publicity,” he said.

  She caught her breath. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “You’re the charming one.”

  “You’re the one with opinions,” he said.

  “You’re the one who can sway people to your point of view,” she said.

  “You’re the person with the agenda,” he said.

  “I’m the person people don’t like,” she said.

  “But you’re interesting,” he said.

  “And you’re not?” she asked.

  “No,” he said softly. “Not really.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, this handsome, charming man with two daughters and a long life, a man who liked to read and knew about all kinds of things, a man who cared deeply about things. This man thought himself uninteresting.

  In fact, he didn’t think himself uninteresting. He seemed convinced of it.
r />   She knew from long experience that telling him he was interesting wouldn’t help him. She would have to show him.

  “Fifty-fifty,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You write, I promote,” she said.

  He nodded again.

  “Not every book gets promoted, though,” she said. “I mean I’ve never heard of half these books.”

  She waved her hands at the books on the table.

  “If your book is one of those that gets no promotion,” he said, “you can do it yourself. It’ll be your excuse to call radio stations and do online chats.”

  “It didn’t work for PETA,” she said.

  He blinked at her. Apparently he’d forgotten the acronym.

  “People—”

  “I know,” he said, and she realized then that he wasn’t blinking oddly because he had forgotten the acronym, but because he was being polite. “It’s not the same.”

  “I can rant when I have a book, but not when I have a cause?” she asked, feeling confused.

  “Do you watch television?” he asked. “Listen to talk radio?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I watch TV shows. With plots. But not that talky stuff. It has nothing to do with me.”

  He nodded. “It will now.”

  She picked up her fork and finally ate that bite of cinnamon roll. It tasted good. Her coffee was cold, but she didn’t care. She was using the time to think as much as to refresh herself.

  “You really don’t mind writing this?” she asked.

  “It will be fun,” he said.

  “But you have your daughters, your bookstore—”

  “My bookstore is in the Kingdoms,” he said. “I’m not going there for a while.”

  “You said you were going to open one here,” she said.

  “The last thing LA needs is another bookstore,” he said.

  She frowned. She wasn’t sure she agreed with that.

  “Besides,” he said. “I can look for suitable property while I’m writing the book.”

  “Will you have time?” she asked.

  “Writing would keep me at home with the girls,” he said. “And they need me right now.”

  Writing would keep him home. He wouldn’t have time to see Mellie. But they could stay in contact. And that would be good, right? And when the book was done, maybe he would think favorably of her. Maybe he would be comfortable enough to introduce her to his girls.

  Maybe they could spend some real time together, not talking about books or fairy tales or evil stepmothers.

  She took a deep breath. “What about me?” she asked. “How would I be involved?”

  “After we do the planning?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’d write it, and then you’d read it.”

  “But the rants,” she said. “Would I get to write those?”

  “When we get to rant time,” he said, “I’ll call you and ask for one.”

  Not visit her, not meet her in the coffee shop. Call her. She took a deep breath. “So,” she said, “a collaboration wouldn’t mean working together every day?”

  “No,” he said.

  “But Dave said that he has to write in this room with other writers—”

  “That’s television,” Charming said. “We’re doing a novel. Novels are solitary activities.”

  “Even with two authors?”

  He looked at her. Her cheeks heated. “I mean one author and one… ranter?”

  He smiled. It was a warm smile. She really liked all his smile variations. “Even with two authors,” he said. “One cover name and one ghost.”

  She took another bite of the cinnamon roll, trying to figure out how to ask the next question. “What if I don’t like what you’ve done?”

  “Then we don’t submit it to publishers,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t mind?” she asked.

  “I’d mind,” he said. “Didn’t you mind when I was less than enthusiastic about your pages?”

  “Less than enthusiastic,” she said. He was good with words. Because that was an understatement.

  “We’ll need something in writing,” he said. “Some kind of agreement. Something simple. And we can meet to talk about this, and plan it, but not here.”

  “Why not here?” she asked.

  He looked pointedly at the guy in the baseball cap who had interrupted their fight with Bourke. Then Charming looked at the barista.

  “You want to talk about the Kingdoms here?” he asked softly.

  “Point taken,” Mellie said.

  “Besides,” the baseball cap guy said, “someone might steal your ideas.”

  “And write an unproducible screenplay,” Mellie snapped.

  Charming chuckled. To her surprise, so did the baseball cap guy. He got up, grabbed his laptop and his briefcase, and came over to their table.

  “You two are entertaining,” he said. “You finish your little project, whatever it is, and call me. I’ll help you promote it.”

  He dropped a business card on the table and then, without a word, left the shop. Mellie picked up the card. The man’s name was emblazoned across it, with a company logo below, and the word Publicist in big letters.

  She handed it to Charming. “Do you know what that is?” she asked.

  “Twenty thousand dollars a month that we don’t need to spend,” Charming said.

  She looked at the door. “He makes twenty thousand a month?”

  “If he works in this town, he does,” Charming said. “But he is spending his afternoons here, so he’s probably just getting started.”

  Mellie took the card back. “So are we,” she said.

  “It’s a deal, then?” Charming asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “It’s a deal.”

  The Final Manuscript

  Chapter 22

  Charming finished the book one Sunday afternoon in early April. The ending surprised him—not because he wrote something he hadn’t planned (hell, he hadn’t planned the whole book; nothing went according to his initial vision), but because he wrote “the end” pages (no, chapters) ahead of where he thought it would actually end.

  He got out of his chair, wandered around his study, and felt like he had screwed up somehow. He had no sense of whether or not the book was any good. Nor did he trust Mellie to make that judgment. She had made it clear in their many phone calls that she was slogging through his favorite books, pretending to like them, when it was clear she didn’t like them at all.

  He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking out the window at his garden. The flowers were in full bloom, something he and the girls enjoyed. In the Kingdoms, spring would have just arrived. Here, it felt like summer—without the actual killer heat of a real LA summer. Pleasant.

  What he needed was a first reader, someone who could be totally honest with him about the quality of the book, someone who would understand the risk Charming was taking just in writing it. Someone who would respect the secrecy that Charming had to maintain as a ghost writer.

  Charming only knew one person like that, someone whom he could trust, not just with his book, but with his writerly ego: Sheldon McArthur.

  Sheldon (Shelly to his friends) used to own the Mystery Bookshop in Los Angeles. In fact, Shelly started the business, selling it only when he decided to retire to a small town on the Oregon Coast. But Shelly couldn’t really retire any more than Charming could stop reading. So Shelly opened another bookstore up north, called North by Northwest Books.

  Charming had stayed in touch with Shelly after the move. Shelly sent books that he felt Charming should read, and Charming did the same for Shelly (not that there were many books that Shelly missed).

  Charming went to his desk, and called Shelly. Shelly cheerfully told him to email the entire manuscript. Then Shelly added, “It’s about time you wrote a novel.”

  Charming hung up, feeling relieved. The book was in the hands of someone who knew good literature, someone
who would be completely honest if the book failed.

  But there was one other person who had to read the book in this draft. By that agreement Charming had signed with Mellie, she had to read the book too.

  On good days, he had no idea what she would think of it.

  On bad days, he worried that she would hate the book.

  On terrible days, he worried that she would hate him because of the book.

  This was a terrible day. But he screwed up his courage (more than he even knew he needed), picked up the phone, and called Mellie to set up an appointment.

  He was going to hand her the manuscript in hard copy, just like she had asked.

  Then he was going to leave, and fret about whether she would ever talk to him again.

  Chapter 23

  They met in their favorite coffee shop. Well, Mellie’s favorite coffee shop. She had never asked Charming if he had liked it or not.

  But he was the one to suggest it, rather than his house or her Malibu beach house.

  She understood. He probably figured they needed to see each other in a public place to keep the discussion to a minimum. He had said on the phone half a dozen times that he wanted her to read it before she made any judgments about it.

  She understood that too. She had felt that way when he had looked at her manuscript, all those weeks ago.

  She arrived early. She ordered the cinnamon rolls and the coffees, asking the barista—the same one who had threatened Dave Bourke with a call to the police—to hold the second cinnamon roll and coffee for Charming’s arrival.

  Only Mellie had enough presence of mind not to call him Charming to the barista, who had smiled at her and asked how the relationship was going.

  “Oh, it’s not a relationship,” Mellie said with airy good cheer (or so she hoped). “It’s just business.”

  “Hmm,” the barista said. “It never looked like business to me.”

  Mellie frowned. How could it not look like business? They had books, they had briefcases, they had laptops.

  “What did it look like?” Mellie asked.

  “Like a major flirtation,” the barista said. Then she smiled. She looked a lot younger and more vulnerable when she smiled. “I mean, how can you not be attracted to that guy? He’s so handsome. And nice.”