But Aidan Maxwell was a big deal—and from what she’d seen of the relentless marketing materials his publisher used to push his books—he was good-looking. That would explain the steadily growing audience of women in the library.
“I should have guessed you two already knew each other,” Beverly said. “You’re both in here often enough.”
People often assumed she knew Aidan Maxwell because they were both writers living on the same island, but Whidbey Island was big, and she didn’t want to get into it. Instead she asked, “He comes in here a lot? Doesn’t he have research assistants?”
“Me.” Beverly pointed to herself. “When he’ll let me help him. He likes to do most of it himself. But he lets me help him often enough that he thought he owed me when I asked him to fill in today on short notice.” She glanced around at the steadily growing audience. “I think I need to get more chairs,” she said, her tone fretful. “Will you feel slighted if I have to leave you alone?”
“Not at all,” Emma promised. “In fact, why don’t I help you?” She didn’t let her distress show at the size of the audience. Now she had an even larger group of people with whom she wouldn’t connect, all of them here to see a big shot whose books couldn’t be more different than hers.
Beverly shot her a relieved look as she gestured for Emma to follow her to a storage closet and pull out more chairs. More women arrived to fill them as fast as she and Beverly could set them up.
She kept an eye out for the other author scheduled for the panel, trying to match the new arrivals with the author photo Beverly had sent in their informational packet. Finally, she recognized Jamal Ingram, who wrote young adult novels in verse. He made it with plenty of time to spare, but at five minutes ‘til, there was no sign of Aidan Maxwell. He was way past the requested arrival time.
“I need to go close the doors and be the bad guy to let the rest of the guests know that we’re full,” Beverly said. “I hate to ask, but do you mind getting the panelists settled in at the table?”
“No problem,” Emma assured her. She straightened from squeezing the last available chair into the room and surveyed the set up to see if there was anything else she could do to help.
“Do you mind taking care of this?” a deep male voice asked over her shoulder, and she turned to confront a broad chest covered in a denim shirt. Whoever it was stood so tall that it took a good bit for her eyes to travel up and find his face, then they narrowed. Aidan Maxwell. He looked just like the promo displays for his books. He was shrugging out of a leather jacket—a biker style. She barely refrained from an eyeroll. Of course it was a biker jacket. How predictable. And unutterably pretentious.
She opened her mouth to tell him she didn’t work there, but a woman had rested her hand on his arm and started speaking loud and fast about how she couldn’t believe it was really him at a pitch that hurt Emma’s ears.
Aidan turned to smile at the woman while holding the jacket out to Emma. She should just take it and set it on the chair designated for him at the table in the front of the room.
But she didn’t want to. Instead, she ignored him and walked off to take her own place at the front of the room.
Seriously? She hadn’t expected much from him, but to show up after the designated start time and treat her like she was the coat check girl from a cliched 1950s movie? Ugh. If she hadn’t been looking forward to the panel before, she flatly dreaded it now. It would be difficult to keep a civil tongue in her head while paneling with a cretin like that.
She slid into her seat as Beverly struggled to close the door on two women waving money at her, trying to wheedle their way in to stand and listen. Aidan’s seat was at the opposite end of the table from her, Emma noted with relief.
She decided to ignore him until he took his seat, turning instead to smile at the other seated author, Jamal. “I’m Emerson Lindsor.” She offered her hand for a shake, which he accepted warmly as he introduced himself. “Are you ready for this?”
“Maybe not.” Jamal cast a nervous eye over the sea of eager women, most of whom had their necks craned Aidan Maxwell’s way. “I don’t know if this is a teen poetry crowd. Think any of them would notice if we slipped out?”
It made Emma smile. It was good to know she wasn’t alone in her nerves. She checked her watch then flicked a glance toward Beverly, who had managed to get the door closed but now seemed to be trying to separate Aidan Maxwell from his fan.
Beverly caught her eye and sent her a frazzled look while mouthing, “Can you start?”
Emma pointed to herself. Me?
Beverly nodded like a bobblehead.
Emma took a deep breath. She could do this. She’d imagine it was her first day in front of a new section of literature students. Except her biggest classes only boasted about sixteen students. And none of them were regarding her as an inconvenience while they waited to hear from an overrated typewriter jock.
Each panelist had a mic in front of them. She cleared her throat and leaned toward hers. “Hello.” There, that was a simple, logical beginning.
Except the tide of chatter continued in the audience, unabated. Jamal shot her a sympathetic look. She leaned closer and repeated her greeting a little louder. This time most of the women in the first three rows paused or lowered their volume to look toward her. Heartened, she kept going. “Welcome to this panel of local authors. We’d like to get started to be respectful of your time.” She gave the word a little punch, hoping that it would penetrate the cloud of arrogance surrounding Aidan Maxwell, but he and the fan were still talking. In fact, a couple more women had joined.
He had an entourage now. Cute.
Beverly looked more perturbed than flustered, and that was a pretty good mirror for Emma’s own feelings. She lost some of her nervousness as her irritation rose. Now she was simply determined to get Aidan Maxwell reined in. She couldn’t believe he was still back there, casually chatting, as if he’d never learned common courtesy.
“We’re so pleased you could join us for a discussion of the subject we’re all passionate about. Books.” Aidan Maxwell turned when she said the word “passionate.” Of course he did. She repressed another eyeroll. “If you could all take your proper seats—” she sent him a pointed look, “we’ll have Beverly join us as the moderator. Can we bring her up here with a round of applause for the excellent job she’s done of organizing this event?”
The audience obeyed with some polite clapping. Beverly shot her a thankful smile as the groupies finally took their seat. She touched Aidan’s arm to indicate he should go ahead of her, clearly determined to play bouncer for any other eager fans who might be overcome by his handsomeness and try to waylay him again.
Even though his seat was at the other end of the long table, Aidan, with his ridiculous leather jacket hooked over his shoulder, broke off and angled toward Emma’s end of the table, where he paused and smiled down at her before extending the jacket to her. “How about now?”
She opened her mouth to say something cutting, but she couldn’t be sure what that might have been because he slung the jacket back over his shoulder. “Kidding,” he said. He sauntered toward the last open seat, and instead of sitting in it like a normal person, he turned it around and straddled it before resting his arms across the back.
Half the audience looked like it might faint right on the spot.
He had to be kidding with this stupid swagger routine. She didn’t know if she was more annoyed with him or with the women who fell for such textbook alpha male nonsense.
“Thank you for joining us,” Beverly said. “We appreciate your patience with the delay as we got everyone situated.”
Yeah, right. The seating hadn’t caused the delay. The late-arriving hotshot had.
“We’re delighted to have this wonderful panel of local authors here to discuss the creative process. I’d like to give a special thank you to Aidan Maxwell for filling in on such short notice.”
Emma almost wanted to give him a tiny bit of credit f
or stepping in at such a small-scale event, until she heard the loud applause for Beverly’s acknowledgment. It was borderline thunderous. She shot a look down the table to Aidan Maxwell. He wore a satisfied smile. Emma deducted the few points she had rewarded him for decency, then a few more just to put him firmly in the negative. What a tool this guy was.
“I thought we’d dive right in and have you tell us about your work for those who aren’t familiar with it,” Beverly continued.
Jamal gave a short overview of what he wrote as if it were an easy question. And maybe it was if you worked in a clear genre so booksellers knew exactly where to shelve you. Emma was never sure how to describe what she wrote, but she’d come here knowing she might make herself look silly in front of an intimate crowd of twenty-five when she couldn’t explain. She’d been okay with that. She wasn’t okay with doing that in front of a crowd well over a hundred. She wracked her brain to find a description of her work as snappy as Jamal’s.
She came up with . . . nothing.
“What about you, Emma?” Beverly prompted her.
“It’s hard to describe my book,” she said. She thought she heard a soft snort from Aidan Maxwell’s direction, but he was leaning away from his mic, so she wasn’t sure. “It’s about life, and how we fit into it, and redefining happiness.”
“It’s a self-help book?” That was Aidan Maxwell, leaning forward and looking down the table toward her with an expression of genuine curiosity.
She felt the beginning of a blush heating her neck. “Well, no.” She was really messing this up. “It’s fiction.”
“So, like a romance?” he pressed, looking bored again.
“No, I don’t work in genre fiction. I write literary fiction.”
“Ah,” he said, directing his remarks to the crowd. “Literary fiction. No wonder you can’t explain what it’s about.”
That won him a big laugh, and now her cheeks burned, but this time anger was rising. She’d dealt with belligerent males before. “It’s true that every single one of my books can’t be summarized with the exact same tagline.” Jamal choked back a laugh next to her.
“You think my books can? Go ahead and take a crack at it.” Aidan Maxwell didn’t sound at all ruffled.
“Smart man cop and sexy lady partner catch bad guys and put them in jail.” She leaned forward so she could meet his gaze. “How’d I do?”
“Not bad, although you forgot the part about the car chase and the explosions.”
“And foot chases with the sexy lady partner in high heels?”
“Naturally.”
She sat back, pleased that she’d held her own, although it would have been more satisfying if he sounded as nettled by her critique of his books as she’d felt by his. The crowd stayed pretty quiet, and as she scanned their faces, mostly she saw confusion.
Beverly gave a small, nervous-sounding laugh. “On that note, maybe you’d like to give us your own description of your books, Aidan?”
He waved off the request. “Nah. The professor got it right. I’m sure everyone in here knows what I write.”
The cocky assumption turned up the dial on Emma’s temper again, off-setting the surprising fact that he’d read up on his fellow panelists enough to know that she was a professor.
“Um, well.” Beverly looked down at the index cards in her hands and shuffled them quickly. “Given how different all of your genres are, I’m wondering if we’d be surprised by the number of similarities in your author process. If it’s not too presumptuous, I’d love to hear about your writing spaces. Let’s start with you, Emerson.”
“There’s a little coffee shop near my place. I love to write there,” Emma said.
“Of course you do,” Aidan interjected before she could explain why. “Are you even allowed to write literary fiction if you’re not in a café?”
His tone was light, and his groupies awarded him with another laugh, but Emma sensed a bite in the words. What was his problem? He’d started this by assuming she was a coat girl, and then doubling down even when he’d realized she was a fellow author.
Well, not a fellow author, exactly. He was in a totally different class. A low one.
When Beverly began another nervous shuffle of her index cards, Emma decided to ignore his sarcasm. She didn’t want to add to the librarian’s stress. Emma smiled at Aidan Maxwell as if she found the café joke funny. “I sit at the most isolated table and drink pretentious coffee, black, because it’s good for staring into the existential void. It’s a sugar- and cream-free kind of void.”
“That’s exactly how I pictured it.” Humor colored Aidan Maxwell’s voice.
A hand in the audience shot up, a young woman who looked college-aged. “Why coffee shops? Or anywhere busy like that? You don’t find it distracting?”
“My problem is that I’m in my head too much. Being in a coffee shop—or anywhere with some life to it—it’s good for me. It keeps me connected to the rest of the world, and I love to people watch, figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing, imagine their stories. The more ordinary a person seems, the harder I tend to look, and the deeper the back story I give them.”
“That sounds about right for a literary novelist,” Aidan said. “In your work, I’m sure all the characters are living lives of quiet desperation.”
It was true. Or at least it was for the one novel she’d managed to finish. But she didn’t like the way he was painting her with broad strokes, so she dished it back. “It’s more because the big personalities and bold details are usually the easiest people to figure out. Like macho guys who swagger around in leather jackets or fussy old ladies covered in rhinestones with little dogs in their purses. Those kinds of characters are cliches.” Beverly darted a glance at the leather jacket hanging from the back of Aidan’s chair, whose boyish smile turned slightly brittle. “I guess I like looking for the stuff beneath the surface,” Emma finished, pleased she’d finally gotten to him.
“I understand what you mean about cliches,” Aidan interjected. “Like college professors being stuffy tweed jacket and beret-wearing blowhards.”
Had he seen her beret? She wanted to reach for it, make sure it was out of sight, but caught herself in time. He was acting like her cat when it got cornered, and Emma calmed as she sensed she was getting beneath his skin. “I don’t know any professors like that, but to your broader point, I find walking cliches so . . . boring.”
She expected him to snap back, but instead he tilted his head and narrowed his eyes as if he’d figured out something important. “Emerson Lindsor? Wait, is your mother Arianna Lindsor, the memoirist?”
Emma felt the same complicated wash of emotion every time someone made that connection. Her mother was a brilliant writer, and she was proud of her for that. But it was hard for Emma to always have her work judged against someone the notoriously picky New York Book Review had labeled “the most searing voice of her generation.”
“Yes, she is.”
“No wonder you like your fiction tortured.”
Emma didn’t even know what to say to that because she wasn’t exactly sure whether she’d been insulted. Or had he just made a sly “your mama” crack? Or maybe there had been no judgment in his statement at all. Her mother’s memoirs were definitely heavy reading.
Even more than not knowing whether she’d been insulted, Emma didn’t like the tiny flicker of satisfaction she felt that someone had dared to do less than rave about Arianna Lindsor.
“So Aidan, why don’t you tell us about your writing space?” Beverly asked. She sounded stressed, and guilt flooded Emma. She had to quit engaging with Aidan. She had nothing to prove to him, and landing blows wasn’t worth making Beverly anxious.
“I like being outside on my deck with my view of the Sound. If it’s raining—” and he paused to let the islanders laugh since rain was a fact of life on Whidbey Island “—I’ll still work in my sunroom so I can at least look out at nature even when I can’t sit in it with my laptop.”
&
nbsp; Beverly moved on to a question about how they came up with their ideas, and Emma stuck with her resolve not to upset Beverly again. It seemed like Aidan Maxwell went out of his way to goad her a couple of times, but she smiled and answered diplomatically, or deferred to the other two panelists.
She wouldn’t say the next forty-five minutes flew by, exactly. The sparring with Aidan had distracted her from her own nerves, but now they flared again. Anytime she had the spotlight, it made time stretch and drag, but just as she was drifting toward the emotional exhaustion that always accompanied pretending to be an extrovert, Beverly opened it up for more audience questions.
Twenty hands shot into the air, and Emma fervently hoped Beverly didn’t plan to take all of them. By the time eight in a row had gone to Aidan, Beverly asked if anyone had questions for the other panelists. After a pause, Jamal caught Emma’s eye and mouthed, “Not our crowd.” Emma answered with a tight smile of agreement.
They were almost free. . .
A book signing would follow, but there would be no need for her to stay for that. Outside of her students who bought her book from the college bookstore, she didn’t even sell enough books in a year to get a royalty check. Not that sales were everything, she thought, eyeing Aidan Maxwell.
Finally, Beverly announced there would be no more questions, but that there would a limited number of books by the authors for sale and the audience should form a line while she got them ready for purchase. That caused an earthquake level of chair rumbling as ladies jockeyed for position at the front of the line.
Emma chatted with Jamal as she watched Beverly ring up the books. Just as she’d expected, the first ten customers all bought Aidan’s books, although Jamal also got a sale. Her small stack sat untouched. She was so used to this by now that it didn’t even disappoint her. In fact, it meant she was off the hook and could head home.
She caught Beverly’s eye and waved a small goodbye, thanked Jamal for being a pleasant co-panelist, and rose to leave. She’d just slung her satchel strap over her shoulder when she felt it collide with something followed by the sound of a masculine “Oof.”
D is for Doctor (ABCs of Love Sweet Romance Book 4) Page 17
