Oh shit. Paloma is...scary. “I’ll do my best.” I offer her my winningest smile.
She arches an eyebrow. “You’ll do better than that.”
Paisley pulls out a chair beside Cecily and sits. “Paloma, stop scaring him.”
“It’s not my problem if he feels frightened by being called to greatness.” She sends me a long look tinged with dislike.
Ohh. She knows why Paisley dislikes me. And she, in solidarity, dislikes me, too.
Paisley moves the meeting forward. “Klein is a debut author who does not currently have a social media presence.”
“Professionally, you mean?” Cecily asks.
“And personally,” Paisley answers, gaze shooting at me before bouncing back to Cecily.
Satisfaction warms my chest at the brief memory of Paisley admitting she searched for me online.
Cecily’s gaze narrows, eyebrows tugging in the center. “Is there a reason you’re a social ghost?”
Social ghost? What the hell kind of term is that?
I shrug. “I don’t feel like telling people what I do every day. And I really don’t care what other people do every day.”
Cecily starts to roll her eyes, but stops herself.
“Revolucionario,” Paloma mutters.
Paisley presses her lips together to keep from laughing. “Ok, ok.” She presses her palms on the surface of the table. “Klein is a client. No eye-rolling, and no name calling.”
Her gaze locks on me.Damn, but she’s pretty. Wide-eyes, dark lashes, slender neck. How else would I describe her if I wrote a character profile?
“Why don’t you tell me what your goals are for your brand?”
Paisley’s question yanks me from my errant thought. “My brand?” What kind of question is that? I’m a person, not athing. I’m not Nike.
She leans back in her chair, considering me. “Tell me about your book.”
Here’s the thing about being a writer. You can write an entire book, in my case 110,000 words, and be unable to summarize it in five sentences. It’s like an overflowing sink and you’re using a paper towel to clean up the water. There are too many plot lines and ideas and character struggles and conflicts to capture it all in a paragraph that also sells the concept.
“Well,” I begin, my palms growing clammier by the second. It’s only an audience of three and I’m losing it. I lean forward. The chair creaks. “It’s a romantic suspense/mystery set in the 1920s.”
Paisley motions for me to continue.
“An influential family arranges a marriage for their daughter to a local mafia family, but when she turns up dead they have her twin sister secretly take her place while they scramble to solve the murder.”
Paisley’s eyebrows lift. “That actually sounds good.”
“You sound surprised.”
She shrugs, writing something on her notepad. “Is there on-page intimacy?”
“Why?”
“So we know the tone of the novel. We don’t want to present your book in the wrong light.”
That makes sense. “Yes.”
Paisley makes a checkmark on her page. “Does the murder take place on-page, as well? Is it descriptive?”
