Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 76647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76647 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Zeus whined by the door and made us all look up.
Drew stopped typing and stretched his arms out to the side. “I’ll take him out.”
“You sure?” Tristan asked.
“Yeah. I’m at a good stopping point.” He hopped off his stool and raised his arms above his head. From the corner of my eye, I caught the way his sweatshirt rose up, revealing a tan stomach and a smattering of dark hair. Then that strip of skin disappeared when he walked away—though it didn’t stop me from watching that view, too.
Once he and the dog were gone, it was quieter. Tristan typed away, but his fingers were softer on his keyboard than Drew’s. It took me a few minutes, but I actually got into the scene I was writing. In it, the protagonist had just been berated by her boss.
It hadn’t been hard to paint him as an unreasonable jerk—I had lots of experience with directors like that in Hollywood. But I wasn’t sure how to write the next part where she quits. My main character was a badass, but I wasn’t, so that part of the writing didn’t come easily.
For a while, I managed to forget where I was and who I was with—at least until a string of curse words reached my ears.
Tristan and I automatically looked toward the stairs at the end of the hall. Then he met my eye and winked. “Don’t worry, I’m sure he put the call on mute first. Probably.”
The vivid blue eyes in front of me were impossible to look away from. “Um, does he do that often?”
“Often enough.” Tristan grinned. “It’s a real problem since he’s in charge of our public relations.”
“He is? Seriously?” Seemed like Drew, with his easy-going, boyish charm, or Tristan himself would be better for that role.
“No. We don’t have a PR department yet, but we will—and he won’t be allowed anywhere near it.”
Oh. I felt a little foolish that I’d believed him. “So, um, you three are in business together?”
“We will be,” Tristan confirmed. “After years of planning, we’ve finally got financial backers and things are moving in the right direction—mostly.”
I’d assumed that most of the people who stayed in these cabins were artists of some sort, but it made a certain amount of sense to get away from it all and nail down the details for a new company. “What kind of business will you do?”
He explained briefly, and I had to admit, it was a surprisingly worthy cause. When I was a kid, before I started earning steady money from various acting projects, my mom had dragged me from one low-rent apartment to the next. Half had had black mold on the windowsills, flaking paint, substandard plumbing, or all three. I was very familiar with shoddy buildings, and I admired these men for wanting to build things the right way.
Still, it surprised me. At lunch, I’d nibbled at the sandwich Tristan offered me, while the three of them had chowed down like it was their last meal on Earth. At times, they seemed like loud, immature, overgrown boys, even though they were all older than me. But still, they were trying to do something that would help people and help the planet, and I had to admire that.
“So, what’s your book about?” Tristan asked. “Can you name a character after me?”
His question pleased me somehow. It seemed like the kind of thing one would ask a real writer. Of course, as far as he knew, I was a real writer. That’s what I’d told them, and it wasn’t like I had a sign on my forehead that read: “I’m secretly an actress.”
Still, working on this screenplay was proving to be one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and the fact that he seemed to casually accept that I was a writer gave me a boost of confidence, somehow. So much so that I found myself telling him more than I’d planned to.
“It’s a screenplay, actually.”
“Really?” His eyebrows rose, and for a moment, my heart pounded faster. He was a good-looking guy, with his tousled hair and his sexy blond stubble. “Going to try to make it big in Hollywood?”
My cheeks reddened. If he only knew how long that had been my goal and how hard I’d worked toward it. But in a very real sense, I was just starting out—as a screenwriter, that was. “Something like that, yes.”
“So, what’s your screenplay about? Can you name a character after me?” Tristan asked with a grin, and I couldn’t help laughing.
“I’ll think about it.” It was easier to answer his second question first. “As for the story, I’m writing the script from a female point of view. Where a strong, decisive woman is the lead instead of being just the love interest hanging off the hero’s arm.” Of course, the likelihood of a script like that ever getting made into a movie was very slim, but that was something I’d worry about later.