I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and dropped the curtain. The mountain lion probably wasn’t even interested in humans anyway. Everything was fine.
Except nothing was fine.
I walked to the kitchen on shaky legs and poured myself three fingers of bourbon. Then I added another finger because mountain lions and Ollie’s betrayal apparently required equal parts alcohol.
The cabin was exactly as Gladys had left it yesterday: cozy, rustic, and utterly indifferent to my emotional devastation. Exposed log walls. Stone fireplace with a fire I’d somehow managed not to kill. Comfortable furniture that probably cost less than my monthly coffee budget in New York. It should have been peaceful. Restorative. The perfect place to lick my wounds.
Instead, it felt like exile.
I’d spent last night unpacking with a manic precision that comes from trying not to think about your life falling apart. Everything was organized. My clothes hung in the closet by color, and my toiletries lined the bathroom counter in order of morning routine usage. The books were stacked on the coffee table for priority reading.
And my laptop sat on the dining table, open to the document I’d promised myself I wouldn’t touch.
But Margaret had said, no work. No manuscripts, no editorial letters, no emails to authors. She hadn’t said anything about personal projects.
I sat down at the table with my bourbon and stared at the screen.
LADY ISOLDE’S LOVERA Novel by Farley M. Davenport
I’d been working on this book for three years. Three years of stolen hours after midnight, of weekends spent writing instead of socializing, of pouring my secret conviction into pages that no one had ever read.
The truth was, I thought I could write a better romance than half the authors on my list. I’d edited enough of them—fixed their sagging middles, tightened their prose, told them where their emotional beats were landing wrong. I understood story structure, character arcs, and basically everything about how romance novels worked.
Surely that meant I could write one.
I pulled up the blurb I’d been revising for the past six months and read it with fresh eyes:
In the candlelit salons of Regency England, Lady Isolde finds herself ensnared not merely by the sinews of Lord Thaddeus’s arms, but by the labyrinthine metaphors of his soul. Each flex of his biceps is a text to be interpreted, each sigh a semiotic rupture. Their passion is not simply physical—it is a dissertation in desire, a thesis bound in velvet and sweat.
As the manor’s walls echo with whispers of scandal, Isolde must decide: will she surrender to the embrace of a man whose body is both symbol and substance, or resist the dialectics of longing that threaten to dismantle her carefully footnoted existence?
A romance of theory and throbbing, Lady Isolde’s Lover is the novel that proves love is the most rigorous critique of all.
I took a long drink of bourbon.
It was terrible.
Not just bad—aggressively, pretentiously, almost satirically terrible. The kind of terrible that would make my authors laugh until they cried. “Semiotic rupture”? “Dialectics of longing”? What the hell had I been thinking?
I’d been thinking I was smarter than romance. That I could elevate the genre with my literary sensibilities and editorial expertise. That I could prove something to Ollie and Roger and everyone in publishing who’d ever dismissed romance as lesser fiction.
Instead, I’d written the fictional equivalent of a philosophy dissertation having sex with a thesaurus.
I highlighted the entire blurb and pressed delete.
Then I stared at the blank page and felt the weight of my inadequacy pressing down like a physical thing. I couldn’t even write a decent blurb. How had I thought I could write an entire novel?
My phone buzzed on the table—another text from someone I was ignoring. The count was up to one hundred and forty-seven messages since I’d left New York. Savannah checking in. My assistant editor asked about manuscripts. Friends expressing concern. And seventeen texts from Ollie that I’d deleted without reading.
I was three paragraphs into revising Lady Isolde’s opening chapter—where she attends a ball and engages in “a hermeneutic exchange of glances” with Lord Thaddeus—when I heard it.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I froze, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
The sound was coming from the front door. Rhythmic, insistent, like something was trying to get in.
Mice. Oh God, please don’t let it be mice. I could handle heartbreak and professional humiliation, but I drew the line at rodents.
