Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
I didn’t like being here without her. It felt as though I was intruding on her privacy, and I was desperately trying not to do that. I had no choice now but to get her number, whether from her or the listing.
If he did this again and she was out, I needed a way to contact her.
I quickly checked outside, and with no sign of her, I walked through the living room to the connecting door to the kitchen. It was ajar, so I poked my head into the kitchen to see Winston lying in front of his bowl, scarfing down the food in there.
I closed the door with a gentle click, and I turned around.
Her laptop was open, and it looked as though it was a document filling the screen.
Was that her new book?
And was that my name in the title?
I leant forward, squinting. It certainly looked like it, so I inched closer to the laptop until I could read it clearly.
Yes.
There it was.
My name.
I was going to assume that “Max Is A Dick” wasn’t the official title of the book, but more of a placeholder.
Interesting choice, though.
I leant on the back of the chair and reached for the mouse, hesitating before I put my hand on it.
Now, why was my name in the title?
The actual title itself? Understandable, to be perfectly honest. I had been a dick to her to begin with, but the fact it was still there…
Why?
I scrolled, skimming the paragraphs to see what she’d been writing. She was an excellent writer—from what I was reading, she had a great command of the English language, and I even snorted when the female character walked into the hero and spilt her tea all over them both.
Romance followed a solid formula, and Ellie clearly knew it exceptionally well. I supposed that was why she was as successful an author as she was—she knew her audience and what they wanted from her and she provided it unashamedly.
Everything from the setting to the characters was described so thoroughly that I could see it in my mind, but it was the heroine’s evaluation of the hero that made me stop.
Black hair.
Blue eyes.
Tall.
That sounded rather familiar.
I wheeled back the office chair and sat down comfortably in front of the laptop. She had my attention now. Perhaps it was wrong of me to read what was clearly a work in progress, but her hero’s description was awfully similar to that of me.
The next chapter revealed the hero to be a duke.
My eyebrows shot up.
Was she writing about me?
Was her hero… me?
I kept reading, skimming the book until the lead character described the hero as “The Duke of Arseholery.”
That answered my question.
That sounded like the kind of thing Ellie would say about me.
I kept going. The house she described as the one the hero owned was eerily similar to Greygarth Lodge—it was a cross between this one and Greygarth House, actually. The interior was almost entirely made up, aside from a very accurate description of the library that made my lips twitch.
The final chapter was not the one I was expecting.
Whatever I woke up prepared for today, it was not reading a very graphic sex scene in a library between a blonde-haired woman and a man who was described as looking exactly like me.
Although I did appreciate how long she’d spent glorifying a fictional penis.
I was rather fond of mine, and it was good to see that kind of appreciation in literature.
I tapped my fingers against the desk. Ellie was clearly drawing a lot of inspiration from her surroundings and the people in it—there was a sticky note on the wall noting about a pensioner book club to be written—so it was quite easy to assume this hero was, in fact, me.
And what the fuck did I do about that?
There were a lot of questions in the heroine’s point of view wondering how the hero was single, and it wasn’t too much of a stretch to align those thoughts with Ellie’s own. She knew I was single, and there was no doubt that Penny had told her just how very single I actually was.
I chuckled.
Ellie was something else.
“Stupid cat. Stupid fucking disappearing magical Houdini of a rat bastard cat!” The door slammed to finish Ellie’s tirade, and I turned around just in time to see her walk through into the living room.
She froze in the doorway.
“Good morning,” I said quietly, drumming my fingers against the desk.
She swallowed, looking between me and the laptop. “What are you doing here?”
I pointed towards the kitchen. “Returning your cat.”
“Why are you sitting there? Did you—wait, what?” She blinked. “You found Winston?”
“In the goat barn on the hay bales. If I didn’t think the goats would eat his food, I’d just suggest you set him up there for the rest of your stay.”