Violetta and Grosvenor exchange thoughtful looks.
“Sylvia isn’t wrong when she says that sex is selling well,” Violetta finally says. “Maybe she’s long overdue for joining the trend. She’s becoming outdated, not timeless.”
The director’s lips thin. “It could work. Maintains the integrity and the inspiration…”
“She’s good.” It takes me a moment to realize Violetta is talking about me.
“The last seven books, eh?” Grosvenor asks, and Violetta nods.
That’s the number of books I’ve ghost-written for Sylvia.
They know. They’ve been talking about me.
I’m hot all over now, stifling in my semi-casual professional clothing, wishing that I could get into my air conditioned car and vanish to my other client’s house.
Violetta shows Grosvenor something on her phone. “The sales keep increasing. That’s not entirely due to my efforts. It’s the reviews—readers adore the fresh style that ‘Sylvia’ has been developing.” Her eyes bore into me. “They love her. What she brings to the brand.”
“Have you been writing for long, dear?” Grosvenor asks me. He is sounding extra kind now that the talk is of money, and making more of it.
I can barely speak above a whisper. “All my life.”
“She has been tutored well,” Violetta adds. “She’s flourishing under her mentor.”
Violetta knows. How can she know?
Nobody knows about the informal workshops I’ve been given in writing.
“I’d like to see a new outline by Wednesday, Christine,” Grosvenor says. “Is that possible?”
I’ve already been reworking the book.
“Yes,” I say.
He rubs his shriveled fingers against his eyes, massaging them into the sockets. “Thank God. Maybe we won’t go bankrupt this year after all.”
He walks back inside, muttering to himself.
Violetta lingers. Her gaze is like razorblades down my spine. “Don’t forget to check your email,” she says, as though she could possibly know the distinctive buzz heralding emails from him, and then she finally follows Grosvenor.
*
I’m locked inside my car when the shaking hits me.
For the first time, the director is acknowledging the greater role I’ve played in Sylvia’s brand. Violetta has recognized my talent. She attributes the growing sales to my growing ability as a writer.
This should be a dream come true.
I don’t want to be optimistic about this. I don’t want to think it might turn into anything more. Considering Sylvia’s mood, the fact I’ve survived the day with my job intact is enough to have adrenaline screaming through my nerves.
My thumbs shake as I unlock my phone and open the email.
It’s from him, of course. My other author. My client, my mentor.
He wants me to visit him.
A car pulls into Sylvia’s driveway alongside mine as I turn off the emergency break and begin inching down the slope.
It’s the new editor—the man that Grosvenor and Violetta have been waiting to meet.
He steps out of the driver’s side of the car. Slams it behind him. The sunlight catches his hair, glinting off of auburn waves that fall to his shoulders. Having such long hair shouldn’t look professional, but on him, it does. The square lines of his tailored suit make sure of that.
When he turns to look up at Sylvia’s house, I catch his profile and forget how to breathe.
That arched nose. Those sculpted cheekbones. The playful eyes. I haven’t seen him in so many years—not since he was first developing what have become incredibly masculine features—yet I recognize him in a heartbeat.
The new editor at Moonlight Sonata is Raoul Chance.
My foot hits the gas, sending me down the driveway a little faster. The cough of my engine draws his attention.
Our eyes meet through the windshield.
Does he recognize me?
What happens if he does?
I can tell by his gestures that he wants me to stop the car so that we can talk, but what I can’t tell is exactly what he wants to talk about.
It’s probably business.
I’m sure it must be business.
More likely than not, he’s already fielded calls from an infuriated Mario Stone. Raoul doesn’t realize who I am, and he wants to admonish me for upsetting the crown diamond of their publishing house, the great Sylvia Stone.
Surely, the editor isn’t trying to stop me because of all the summers we spent together at my father’s house as children, but I can’t convince my heart of that. It’s fluttering wildly against the inside of my chest like a caged songbird.
I pretend not to see him, pretend that his gaze on me doesn’t burn all over my aching skin, and accelerate down Sylvia’s familiar driveway in reverse. I’ve left her in a hurry to escape her temper or run errands so many times I don’t even need to check the rearview mirror.
Raoul Chance. I can’t believe it.
It really is a day for miracles.
Two
By the time I cross the border into Maine, my heart has slowed a little bit.
But not all that much.
Visiting my second author always gets my adrenaline going.
He lives on Lake Symphony. You’ve never heard of it, although I’m sure you’d recognize it if you saw its weedy shores and algae-riddled waters. My mentor has written a lot of books taking place in remote Maine locales identical to Lake Symphony.
His writing has embedded the place in the public consciousness, elevating his lake to mythological status.
I know, because the first time I visited his lake house, I was struck by a surreal sense of recognition—the feeling that I had visited that lake before.
At a glance, I had instantly recognized the rotten wood of the fishing dock. The overgrown trees clustering the shore. The particular way the sun reflected off the water and clouds of mosquitos swarming its surface.
It was impossible for me to have visited Lake Symphony before taking this author as my client, of course. I’d never had cause to visit the state of Maine in my life, much less a gloomy little lake overlooked by a single, joyless house.
Yet I knew I’d been there before.
Maybe not in my waking hours, but in nightmares.
I still find it unsettling to go to Lake Symphony, and I’ve been working with the sole occupant for almost a year now. It doesn’t help that I still don’t have the gate code, which is required to enter and exit. I still have to drive up to the comm system, press a button, and introduce myself before I’m allowed to pass through the barbed wire fencing.
The trees are trimmed around the fence to make it impossible to climb, but as soon as I pass through, I’m consumed by forest once more. It’s so dense as to be lightless. I feel eyes watching me as my Kia crawls up the unpaved driveway.
The whole presentation is creepy and paranoid, yet utterly appropriate for its lonely inhabitant.
That’s because Erik Duke is my second author.
Yes, that Erik Duke.
Internationally bestselling horror and thriller author. The man behind the pen for dozens of number one New York Times bestselling novels to have been published in the last thirty years. Hailed as one of the greatest names in American horror literature, his name usually spoken in the same breath as other greats like Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft.
The author who has never made a single public appearance, not at conventions or press conferences or industry parties.
The author worth billions who has given two phone interviews throughout his entire illustrious career.
The author who’s standing at his bay window waiting for me to arrive, barely visible through the reflection of sunlight on glass as a specter of a man who drifts away as soon as he sees that I’ve made it safely through his property.
That Erik Duke.
My heart still races every time I see him, and the way he disappears from his window doesn’t do anything to make m
y agitation abate.
When I’m in his domain, he is always watching me.
Always.
*
I have my own parking space in front of Erik Duke’s house. He’s cleared away the brambles so that I can park my Kia beside the front stairs. I know it must have been Erik who did it because he doesn’t have a groundskeeping staff, or any staff at all—no housekeepers or personal chefs for the greatest living horror author. He’s too private for that.
Sylvia Stone might fill her house with people eager to bow to her, most of them shirtless young men with six packs, but Erik prefers his solitude.
I step out of my car and slam the door. There’s more clearance than usual around my bumpers. It looks like he’s trimmed the weeds back again, maybe that very morning.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit touched by the gesture.
Erik isn’t waiting for me at the front door when I enter, but it’s unlocked, like it always is when he expects me.
I push it open.
His entryway is tidy, but dusty. He doesn’t spend much time in here. The furnishings are sparse—a few prints from professional photographers, a rug that he bought from an artist who lives in the nearby town.
The second floor stairs overlook the entrance. He might be up there, but it’s too dark to tell.
“Hello, Mr. Duke,” I call out, knowing that he’ll be listening even if I can’t see him.
With that greeting, I go about my business, unconcerned by the fact that Erik had summoned me yet not shown up for so much as a “good afternoon.” Even if he wants me around, he doesn’t always emerge for my visits.
But the evidence of his involvement is always there.
Unlocked doors. Lights turned on. A fresh jug of iced tea in his 1970s avocado-colored refrigerator.
The newest pages of his manuscript are on the counter in his kitchen, which is as narrow, tidy, and unused as the entryway. He writes his first drafts on typewriter. Erik’s a bit of a dinosaur where that’s concerned, but I find it terribly charming. And I never fail to be impressed by how immaculate these drafts are. He leaves a few notes in the margins where errors have been made, but such mistakes are few.
His current book is a dark masterpiece. He has been combining the fresh chapters by rubber band so that I can’t read them without removing it, which I’ve been instructed not to do.
Nevertheless, I’ve sneaked reads of the top pages of every chapter. The glimpses I get into his next bestseller are chilling.
The book is about a man driven to madness by lust. He’s watching a woman in a nearby town—I call her a woman, but she’s barely more than a girl—and half the chapters are the man’s vivid dreams of possessing her.
I know little more than that. The paragraphs I read are very psychological. I can’t wait to peruse the rest.
But I won’t get to read them until the draft is done. Never until the draft is done.
Still, I’m eager to read the beginning of this new chapter. Glancing over my shoulder, I ensure that I’m alone in the kitchen before lifting the rubber band and skimming the top page.
Oh dear.
It begins with a murder. Blood. Dismemberment. Shadow.
A man speaks behind me. “What do you think?”
My heart leaps into my throat. I drop the pages on the counter and spin to face the doorway.
And there he is.
Erik Duke.
Sometimes I think that the reason that he doesn’t make public appearances is because he would be too dangerous to have in a crowd. He’s overwhelming in person. Incendiary. He could set an entire stadium on fire with a glance, and that intensity presents a literal threat to public health.
Erik is not an unusually tall man, perhaps six feet, but he looms the way that the forest looms on silent winter nights. There is no room for anything in the room between us. He extracts the oxygen from my lungs merely by existing.
Today, he wears a hooded sweater to protect himself from the bite of autumn. He’s carrying a life vest in one hand, a paddle in the other. The hems of his jeans are muddy. He’s been on the lagoon.
“I didn’t remove the rubber band,” I manage to stammer. That seems important to communicate. I have to make sure he understands that I haven’t disobeyed him—that obedience is my utmost priority.
Funny, I know. I work for Durand-Price’s interests, not Erik’s.
Yet it’s his approval I long for.
Erik brushes past me. He smells of soil and clean sweat. The inch of space between our bodies vibrates in the instant of passage and I think I might faint from proximity. The fact that he doesn’t respond immediately is much worse than being chastised.
He opens the kitchen’s rear door to hang his kayaking equipment outside on the patio. Golden light reflects off of the lake, shining into the house. The brief taste of oxygen clears my head fractionally.
The door creaks as he shuts it. We are trapped in the kitchen together once more.
“Well?” Erik asks. “I asked you a question, Ms. Durand.”
My throat is dry when I swallow. “The writing’s as impressive as always. I can’t judge the content without reading the rest.”
“Do you want to?” His voice is husky. It’s criminal that this man is so disconnected from the marketing of his intellectual property. He could make a million by narrating his own audiobooks, surely.
I’m distracted by his voice. It takes a moment to realize what he’s actually saying.
“Are you offering to let me read your work in progress?”
“I’m stuck,” Erik says, not without difficulty.
“Oh.” I duck my head, tuck a blond curl behind my ear. My cheeks are warm. “I can definitely help you with that. There’s no hurry, though. You’re already well ahead of deadline. If you’d prefer to continue mulling over the plot on your own—”
“No. I want you to read what I’ve written.”
Oh dear. Erik Duke wants me to read his work in progress.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so flattered by anything in my life.
“Whatever you need, Mr. Duke.” It’s difficult to keep my tone professional when I feel so giddy on the inside. “I’m your assistant, after all.”
“Call me Erik,” he says.
My cheeks flame hotter. “You call me Ms. Durand.”
“It’s different.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you called me Christine.” My heart feels like it might explode as I make the offer. Suggesting that level of familiarity—it feels so intimate.
Erik steps toward me. “Christine,” he echoes. He’s testing the name on his lips.
I’m surprised by the thrills that race from my heart to my thighs at the sound of those two simple syllables.
I’ve never heard him say that before. It’s always been Ms. Durand.
He sheds the hooded sweater. Writers are not, as a rule, an athletic species; dedicating one’s life to the reading and writing of books is exercise for the mind rather than body.
Erik is not like most writers.
His hard form has been developed by the long hours he spends on his property, both on the lake and off. He has barely an ounce of body fat to conceal the cords banding his steely arms and torso.
His figure is impressive, but not developed for vanity. Sylvia Stone enjoys the appearance of being a woman who owns a yacht. She likes the idea that she might set sail at any moment, assuming that her ship is adequately stocked with sugary desserts.
Erik Duke is a man who doesn’t care for appearances. His strength is functional. I wouldn’t be surprised if he vanished into the wilderness one autumn day and didn’t return until spring thaw, whittled down to his absolute minimum by months of darkness and ice.
The sight of his pecs and shoulders stretching out his shirt makes my lips go dry.
He knows I’m watching him. He’s watching me, too.
Something is different today.
Erik is always intense, but his thoughts are seld
om with me. He’s always thinking about his books.
But today, he’s present. Today, his eyes are on me, and he’s thinking about me, and those thoughts have cast a shadow over his features that look like the dangerous approach of a thunderstorm.
I’m afraid.
I’m excited.
I really, seriously can’t breathe.
So I take his sweater from him, resisting the urge to bury my face in it, and step into the entryway. I hang the sweater neatly on a hook beside his winter jacket. I pulled that coat out of storage on my last visit—Maine winters have a way of appearing in a hurry, and I wanted Erik to be prepared.
He follows me into the entryway.
“What seems to be the problem with your story?” I ask, busying my hands with the folds of the sweater. The question takes the conversation away from the frightening prospect of intimacy of names, the intimacy of standing too close to Erik Duke, and into much more familiar territory. Books are my job. I can do books. “Is it the main character? The plot?”
“I don’t want to talk about it until you’ve read through the draft.” Erik is holding the chapter from the kitchen.
I reach out to take it. My hands close on the page. He doesn’t release his grip, so we are connected by the pages, and electricity flows between our fingertips through the words that he has written.
“You didn’t send me your latest story,” he says.
As strange and surreal as it is to work for someone like Erik Duke in the first place, the most surreal part is that he is interested in developing my skill as an artist as well.
Every few weeks, Erik instructs me to write a short story for him. He will read it, critique it, edit my rewrites.
He doesn’t want me to write his books, the way that Sylvia wants me to write hers.
Erik wants me to write my own.
My giddiness lifts to a heated buzz. He’s noticed that I haven’t turned in his last “assignment.” He doesn’t just read what I give him; he cares that I’m taking the time to write at all.
“I’ve been working on Ms. Stone’s books too much to have time for anything else,” I confess. “I was almost done helping with her next book, and she decided to make…significant editorial changes.” She deleted my entire draft and practically spit on the keyboard.
All He Asks 1 Page 2
