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)
ME: I didn’t ask you.
MEGAN: I know, but it’s a bit weird.
ME: Didn’t you once write fanfiction about Taylor Lautner and email it to him?
MEGAN: Nah. Different Megan.
ME: Mhmm. What do I do???
MEGAN: You’ve got two choices. You either deny it all and come back home, or you tell him the truth and potentially have a great summer of sex.
ME: You read too many romance novels.
MEGAN: 1, there’s no such thing, and 2, it’s not going to kill you.
I hated it when she was right.
MEGAN: Is he still there?
ME: No. I’m behind because I had to go hunting for the dumb cat so I made him leave.
MEGAN: You’re just going to have to be honest while explaining that you aren’t comfortable with him reading your manuscript. I joke with you, but I know how you get inspired and that it’s innocent, even if you are attracted to him. Your first drafts are a hot mess.
ME: Thanks.
MEGAN: No problem. Honestly, it’s weird that you’re writing about it, but he had no business reading it, even if your laptop was open. Not even I would read it.
I swallowed. I suppose I was uncomfortable with it all—my first drafts were only ever seen by a few people. They were full of inconsistences and mistakes because I threw out whatever was in my head, but they were also the barest parts of my stories.
The fact he’d read such a personal part of my writing process was almost worse than what he’d figured out.
It was my fault for leaving it open—and the door, of course—but I hadn’t been thinking this morning.
All I could do was sit and hope that he didn’t come back today.
And that I’d come up with a way to explain it all.
• • •
I had no way to explain it all. I’d thought about it as I’d driven into Windermere to go grocery shopping. I’d thought about it while weighing up whether I wanted apples or oranges with my lunch this week, and I’d thought about it while I’d ummed and ahhed over which cat food to buy Winston this week because the fancy food was on sale.
Spoiler: I’d bought the fancy food. Not that the little sod deserved it, but still. Such was the life of a cat mum.
It all came back down to the fact that I couldn’t explain why I was writing a book that was basically set at Greygarth Estate with a hero who looked exactly like the duke who owned it.
That was it.
I was going to have to be honest with Max and admit that I was attracted to him and he was what my brain pictured this hero to look like. And yes, that was a little creepy, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
The muse wanted what the muse wanted.
The muse wanted him.
That didn’t make it sound any less creepy, did it?
Balls.
I’d built my career on writing strong, independent heroines who could weather storms and handle anything that was thrown at them. If one of my characters were in this situation, she’d grab it by the balls and run with it.
She’d say she was attracted to the guy. She’d go for it. She’d hold no prisoners while she stood her ground and said her piece.
But I wasn’t one of my characters.
And that was why it worked.
I would never have the confidence of my characters. Most women wouldn’t—that was why I wrote fiction. It allowed me to write the kind of woman I wished I could be, and it allowed others to be that woman for a short period of time.
It was escapism at its finest.
But now I was in the kind of situation I’d put my heroine in and let her figure her way out of.
Except nobody was writing my story. I was the one who had to do that.
And now I had to work out how to navigate this.
What would my characters do?
What would Grace, my artist, do right now? What would Maisie, my party planner, say to her hero in this spot of bother? What would my beloved debut heroine Lola do if she was in the situation I was?
Three knocks at the door drew me out of my thoughts. Winston was sleeping happily in the window seat, so I knew he wasn’t the reason for the visit, whoever it was.
Like I didn’t know.
I stood up from the sofa, adjusted the neckline of my dress to make sure my bra was covered, and made my way to the door. I knew it was Max without opening it—the glass in the door allowed me enough of a view despite the distortions, and I took a deep breath before I pulled it open to look at him.
He was looking down at the bouquet of flowers he clasped in one hand. It was made of what looked like giant daisies in pink and white, plus various white and green accents that I just didn’t know the names of because my knowledge of flowers was seriously lacking.