by Holley Trent
“Good. Maybe I can add cook to my list of titles at the Burnout.”
“So that means you’ll never go home?” Bruce asked, glumly.
“I’m just kidding.” She gave him a hearty squeeze and a kiss on the cheek before abandoning him for her pot. “Lisa won some kind of local business development grant that’ll infuse a heap of cash into the venture. Has to be used on local hires, though. By the end of the summer, she’ll have her staffing situation sorted out and I’ll be able to work remotely. I’ll be back in the city full time.”
“Am I awful for being impatient?”
“No,” Dara said. “If you love people and they make you feel safe, you want them around you. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”
“That’s right. I find it incredibly flattering that someone loves me that much,” Everley said.
“You’re easy to love, Ev.” Bruce loved watching her blush.
Raleigh was focusing on his grits, smiling gently, adding nothing to the brew of conversation even as they picked up elsewhere in the room.
Bruce gave his foot a gentle tap with his own. He was always demanding attention, but Raleigh was used to that. “Compliment me so I won’t feel awful for being needy,” he whispered.
Raleigh set down his spoon, twined his fingers together atop the counter, and stared in the general direction of the backsplash.
“I don’t have a compliment for you right now,” Raleigh said. “I’m too tired. Brain’s not cooperating.”
“Oh.”
“But I love you, maybe because you are demanding and you picked me.”
“Maybe my supposed genius in music carries over every now and then to other things. I mean, look.” Bruce gestured to Everley who was in the midst of what appeared to be a heated discussion with the Vallieres about sugar in grits. He couldn’t tell which side of the debate she was on, but he loved seeing her happy, talking, arguing even. Being included. Just like him.
“We’ll do, right? Tell me we will, because I’m happy for the first time in a decade and I don’t want that to stop.”
“We’ll do.” Raleigh dragged Bruce’s stool closer so they were shoulder to shoulder. A bit of touch always helped, because Raleigh’s touches were always promises. When Everley tried to track past toward parts unknown, Raleigh grabbed her by the hand and pulled her back. “Won’t we do, Everley?”
“Who said we wouldn’t?”
“Bruce needed a reminder.”
“I get it.” Everley grabbed his face and kissed him fiercely until he couldn’t think, couldn’t fret. “Sometimes, I worry, too,” she said against his lips when they pulled away to breathe. “You’re not used to having what you need, and so it feels like a fleeting thing when you finally get it. But I’m not going anywhere. Neither is Raleigh. This is for us, too. Of course we’ll do.”
“I believe you.”
And he meant it.
And he didn’t feel bad that he’d probably need more reminding, because it always came with kisses.
* * *
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About the Author
Holley Trent is an award-winning and bestselling author of contemporary and paranormal romance. As a lifelong people watcher, she loves to create story worlds that mirror real world conflicts but have guaranteed happily-ever-afters. Her favorite question is “What if?” followed closely by “Well, why not?”
She was born in New York City, raised in the sticks of North Carolina, and now resides on the Colorado Front Range with her husband, two kids, and two elderly cats.
She’s an avid gardener, a competent knitter, and a frustrated high-elevation baker.
She’s been known to write a book on a dare. (Not this one, though.)
Connect with her online at www.holleytrent.com, where you can subscribe to her newsletters, and also on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/holleytrent, Facebook at www.Facebook.com/writerholleytrent, or Instagram at www.Instagram.com/holleysees.
Available now from Carina Press and Holley Trent.
There’s room in a heart for more than one kind of love.
Read on for an excerpt from Writing Her In, the first book in Holley Trent’s Plot Twist series.
Chapter One
Stacia Leonard pulled her lips into a tight smile. She nudged the signed hardcover copy of her book across the electric-blue tablecloth printed with her publisher’s insignia. Athena Publishing was big on branding. They probably would have tried to put a brand mark on her if her contract allowed it.
“I hope your aunt enjoys it,” she said to the fan whose eyes were a bit too open and grin a mite too manic.
“Oh, she will,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“That so?” Stacia gave her publicist’s foot a discreet kick under the table, and Raleigh immediately stood and gestured to the bookstore employee who was supposed to be managing the line. Apparently, she’d gotten distracted by a display full of kitschy, funny bookmarks and hadn’t noticed that the guy in front of Stacia had already overstayed his welcome by about three minutes.
The line was winding down and Stacia needed to decompress. She’d become a writer because she was antisocial. That had backfired epically. Apparently, being a successful author meant she wasn’t allowed to hide from the public. She was expected to engage and shit like that.
The employee finally got her head out of her ass and whisked the fan with the stack of books to the gift-wrap table.
“Just two books left,” Raleigh whispered. “Bet the manager has egg on his face now. He didn’t want to stock your books before. He said woman-penned mysteries don’t sell.”
Stacia simply bobbed her eyebrows and then smiled at the young woman who passed one of the remaining books over to her. “Hi. Would you like me to personalize this for you?”
The lady clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Nah. It’ll be worth more without my name in it, I think.”
Stacia scribbled her signature on the title page and blew a little air across the slow-drying ink. “I think you overestimate my collectability.”
“I don’t think so. I know you don’t do many appearances, so there aren’t many of these signed books floating around. Ooh!” The lady snatched the last book just as the store manager entered the line with one hand extended toward the final volume. “That one, too. Just in case.”
Stacia chuckled and signed that one as well. “There you go.”
“Awesome. My book club friends aren’t going to believe I saw you.” She furrowed her brow and ignored the manager looming beside her, clearing his throat. “You know, you’re smaller than I imagined.”
Stacia shrugged. “I get that a lot. According to my genetic genealogy test I’m half leprechaun. I’m not going to be breaking any backboards in this lifetime. I’m really good at getting under a limbo pole, though.”
The lady snickered as she walked toward the line exit. “Ah, that’s why I love you. You got a way with words.”
“Just think, my eleventh grade English teacher said sarcasm was a mental illness,” Stacia said to Raleigh. “Sometimes, I think she was right.”
Raleigh plucked some invisible lint off his necktie and smiled like the cat that got into the cream. “Sarcasm is your brand, and your brand sells pretty nice, doesn’t it?” He cut his hazel gaze to the store manager, who rocked on his heels with his hands jammed into the pockets of his pleated khakis.
“So I stand corrected,” the manager said in an undertone. “Any chance you’ll still be in town in four days? I put in an order for the other eight books in
the series. I hoped you’d sign a few for us to shelve.”
Stacia opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out, Raleigh said, “No way of knowing. If we’re lucky, Stacia will be home in four days working on book ten. If the studio guys want to quibble over creative license, we may be here longer.”
“When’s the TV show supposed to debut?”
“In the spring if the schedule doesn’t get botched.”
“Maybe we could do the launch party here.”
“Maybe,” Raleigh demurred, drawing out the “a” in the word for a few seconds too long. He turned to Stacia and pointed to the phone in his hand. “Gonna go see if the driver’s nearby.”
“Okay. I’ll wait outside.” She bent to grab her tote from under the table.
“No need to rush away,” the manager said. “I thought maybe we could set up some events before you left.”
“Raleigh will take care of that.” She slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and put a smile on her face before she stood. “And I really need to go outside. The air conditioning in here is going to trigger a fit of narcolepsy.”
“Yeah, it is a little bit aggressive. I keep meaning to get that fixed.”
“Uh-huh.” Stacia pulled up the hood of her cashmere sweater and pushed her sunglasses onto her ears as she stepped outside into the bright Los Angeles evening.
She leaned against the pergola support and rooted her phone out of her bag. No messages, but she hadn’t expected any. Her friends knew she never responded. They went months without speaking and then they’d catch up with hours-long phone calls that would fill up her social well for the rest of the year. There were eighty-seven Twitter mentions, which she’d let her assistant deal with, and a bunch of buzz on her Facebook fan page. She ignored that. Last, she scrolled through the bunch of notifications from an Instagram picture Raleigh had posted of her early in the signing. Most comments were permutations of “Wish I was in LA!” Her perusing of her direct messages, however, brought her up short. There was an unexpected and familiar name mixed in with the handles of so many strangers.
ADRIENVALL: you’re in LA?
It wasn’t the message that took her off guard. After all, the words weren’t so different from all the rest. What made her heart stutter was the name and the familiar headshot in the avatar.
Adrien Valliere was the face of the fictional potential love interest in her book series. The leading man, Detective Pierce Holloway, was introduced in book one as a background player. He became a powerful secondary character in book four and a coprotagonist in book five. On the cover of book five, for the first time, Adrien had appeared with the model portraying the plucky heroine, Jennifer Daughtry. Fans had nearly rioted when early art was leaked and they saw that he wasn’t on the cover of book six. The publishing house’s design team had to go on a frenzied, last-minute quest for Adrien Valliere stock art and had managed to dig up one more image that hadn’t already been used on a bazillion book covers. The cover had been beautiful, which was an odd thing to say about a guy photoshopped to hold a bloody hand mirror.
At that time, no one knew his name or how to find him for a custom photoshoot for the next books. He may as well have been a ghost. The photographer holding the copyrights to the images hadn’t responded to queries. The team had to do a hard pivot with the art direction, but the timing had worked out well. Cover looks were trending toward more abstract feels. No people, just a lot of stylistic blood splatter and some props. By then, it didn’t matter if Adrien was on the cover or not. When people thought about Pierce Holloway, they thought of him with Adrien’s face.
Him finally connecting with Stacia on social media after book seven hit the shelves, though, had apparently ignited an afternoon of mayhem at Athena’s art department. He looked even more like Pierce than he had when he’d posed for those stock photos eight years prior.
“Oh, shit,” Stacia whispered.
She’d never actually had a conversation with the guy. She followed him back because that was easier than stalking his account every day for new candids—the guy was amazingly pretty. She imagined that he’d followed her in the first place because he was in the image business, and she had a little name recognition.
She dragged her tongue across suddenly dry lips and tapped the reply field to activate it.
Mostly, she didn’t respond or she’d let her assistant answer any reasonable questions. Ignoring the guy whose face had probably launched her books to the New York Times bestseller list for twenty weeks straight seemed extraordinarily snobbish.
“Oh, shit,” she repeated, then input a response.
For a few days.
Seemed friendly, in her opinion, but not too friendly.
She hit the post button, then scrolled through all the new pictures from fellow author friends. Mostly pictures of their cats.
One new picture of Adrien. Ultra-close-up of a brand new ring of sickly looking blue and black bruising around his bright gray eye.
Stacia gasped and clutched her chest as she read the caption.
wife is playing with special fx makeup. how does it look?
“Dammit.” She let out the breath she’d been holding and closed the app.
She wasn’t sure what it was about him that was so unmooring for her. Every single time he appeared on her screen, her heart rate kicked up. She felt as though she needed to perform, somehow, and like she needed to for-real brush her hair and wear a grown-up bra. Maybe her feeling of discomfiting was because he was attached to a figment of her imagination. He wasn’t supposed to be real. There she was, being so very ordinary, and yet writing about people who were too perfect to exist in real life. Her ex had groaned about that all the time. You don’t think this guy is a little bit unbelievable, Stacia? Is that how you think men should be? I’d tone it down if I were you. Make it realer.
She hadn’t, and Oren wasn’t around anymore to editorialize on what was desirable.
Her characters were superheroes, really, and one had just slid into her DMs.
Another DM notification alert lit up as Raleigh stepped outside holding his phone to his ear.
She was glad for the distraction. If that was Adrien responding, she couldn’t imagine what he might want and was afraid it was something mercenary. There were so many damned con artists in the business and she’d been propositioned by nearly every sort.
“Driver is a few blocks from here,” Raleigh said. “Hit a bottleneck, but he’ll be here in a jiffy.”
“Cool. Hope you don’t mind if I forego dinner and go straight to the hotel. It’s six here but nine on the east coast. I’m ready to fall over.”
“If that’s what you want.” He muttered, “Party pooper.”
“True.” Stacia tapped her phone screen for the message. It was from Adrien.
“Oh, shit,” she whispered yet again.
wife says to ask—do you have free time? photo opp.
“Ah.”
That query wasn’t weird or scammy. Bold, maybe, but being in his business, he probably had to be.
“What, ah?” Raleigh asked.
“This would totally make Oren flip his lid if he ever sees it. Remember how he used to disparagingly call Adrien Valliere ‘Mr. Faultless’?”
“Oren wouldn’t know his mouth from his asshole, and he deserves a burial beneath a pyramid of rhino shit. But what is it that he might see that’d set him off?”
She wasn’t going to argue with him about Oren. The two had immediately clashed at first meeting. She and Oren had broken up a year ago and she didn’t want to set Raleigh off on another of his rants. At least, not in public. She fell into cyclical slumps about the things Oren had accused her of, however. She’d probably need to hear another of Raleigh’s “fuck that dude” sermons sooner than later.
“Adrien wants a picture with me,” she said. “Or me with him. Probably th
e latter.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Depends on who draws the eye. The guy with the perfect face gets my bet. I’d just be a prop.” A five-foot-tall prop with dopey hipster glasses because she’d lost a contact lens somewhere in Richmond International and her backup lenses were in the suitcase that hadn’t caught up to her yet. She’d left her assistant to get her luggage from baggage claim, and apparently there’d been a delay.
“Tell him ‘fuck yeah,’” Raleigh said. “I’ll take the pictures myself. The first one I send will be to that trollop who shares an office wall with me.” He bared his teeth and stuffed his phone into his suede messenger bag. “That scheming bitch.”
“What’s wrong with her? And are you really worried? You’re the one with all the high-profile authors.”
“I just don’t like her. I can feel it in my bones, she’s got that upstart gene. The moment I turn my back, she’s gonna start reaching out to my authors to ask if there’s anything else they need while I’m busy with you.”
“I think you’re paranoid, Ral.”
“The pot calls the kettle black. How rich.”
Stacia shrugged and hovered her thumbs over her phone screen. “I’m upfront about my neuroses.”
In fact, she was generally so paranoid about people’s intentions, that if Adrien had been anyone else, she would have told him to shoot a message to her assistant. Adrien wasn’t just another fan. He was part of the reason her mortgage had been paid off at the age of twenty-eight. That, and the fact she’d been writing two doorstopper novels per year since she got laid off from her first newspaper job right out of college.
She typed, Send me a text when you’re free and tapped in her digits.
Ice dropped into her gut right after she hit Send.
She didn’t give out her real number. Her parents had it. Her brother had it. Her closest friends had it. And of course, Athena had it, but only Raleigh ever called her.
She’d dropped her last number after Oren had moved on. She’d gotten tired of the You see, it’s just that...texts from him.
