“Oh, totally. You’ve got all the elements of a great love story—stalking, murder, and corpse desecration. A feel-good Hallmark hit for sure.”
She pretended to be insulted. “Hey, now hold on a minute. She doesn’t consider it desecration; those body parts aremementos.”
We both chuckled and refocused on our laptops.
I felt the pull to pick up where I’d left off, a welcome but foreign sensation lately. My cowboy books were always a delight, but they weren’t trulymystories. I was executing someone else’s vision, which meant that I didn’t always agree withthe choices. I’d even gotten in a few email wars with Piper when I tried to push back on unrealistic plot points.
“Do you have a title?” Nia asked, right as my fingers were poised above the keyboard.
I nodded. “I have two in mind:The Bowstringer’s SonorThe Archer’s Paradox.”
“Ooh.” Nia’s dark eyes widened. “The son one is a little commentary on all of those books with daughter, wife, or girl in the title. Let’s go, feminism.”
I laughed. Nia’s books all featured complicated women doing awful things that her readers loved. Her soon-to-be-published sophomore novel,Speak Softly, was about a group of self-proclaimed witches who, depending on your belief system, used either magic or pharmaceuticals to chemically castrate abusive men.
“I’m leaning toward the second,” I said. “Since they’re both master archers.”
Or my herowouldbe, after he completed his training with my heroine. I’d left off with my reclusive, angry lead named Einar meeting his teacher-to-be, Zandria, when she accidentally strayed onto his property while pursuing a parasitic creature called a diogondii.
“So you’re cruising on your romantasy, but what’s happening with your ghostwriting stuff?” Nia asked me, not realizing that she’d stepped into a minefield.
The vise that lived at the base of my neck cranked a little tighter. “It’s, uh, sort of in stasis right now.”
I didn’t want to spill the whole a-stranger-is-my-muse aspect.
“What’s the company again?”
“Liaison Publishing.”
Just speaking the name made me feel a little nauseous. I was basically cheating on one of my primary sources of income to work on a book that had no guarantee of going anywhere.
Nia frowned. “Huh. I think I read some stuff on a forum about a dark romance writer not getting paid by them.”
“Recently?”
“Not sure,” she replied. “I didn’t check the date on the post.”
Liaison had always been okay about paying me. It took them over thirty days, sometimes closer to forty-five, but the money ended up in my account eventually.
“Maybe other divisions are having problems?”
I hoped so, for the sake of my bills.
Nia let out a long, dramatic sigh. “I’m feeling very uninspired,” she said, staring beyond me at the group of older men tossing metal balls in the gravel. “Let’s go play pétanque. Or get coffee. Anything but writing, because this is torture.”
“I’ve been living in that very headspace for too long, but I’m actually in a good place right now,” I said. “Sorry, not trying to brag.”
“Consider me jealous.” She pouted. “I’ll shut up and do a deep dive on how fast lye dissolves a human body.”
“A literal burning question for me as well; please share what you find.”
I refocused on the not-blank page on my laptop, settling into the joy of two characters trying to ignore their blistering attraction to each other while jockeying for dominance. My plan had been to write for an hour and then shift to poor, ignoredAustin and Abby, but I couldn’t pull myself away from the tension of Einar and Zandria’s first contact.
My cowboy would have to wait.
A text came through as I was absolutely cruising through a tense moment of eye fucking. I peeked at it and discovered it was Owen.
We’d been forced to end our Sunday morning session in a rush when the CPA front desk attendant called out sick and Owen had to step in until backup could arrive.
