But two million dollars.
Well, that’s quite a silver lining.
With a prize like that, Malcolm could afford to make new dreams.
Something catches his eye below. It’s Rufus, strolling down the path away from the house. Decent chap. And that accent, with its crisp consonants and posh vowels, screams old money. Malcolm makes a mental note to ask about his schooling before remembering Eleanor Vandenberg’s words as they left Fletch’s study.
“Arthur’s editor will stay with you over the weekend, but he’ll be sequestered in the guest cottage across the drive. You will deliver your endings as you finish them, through the mail slot in the cottage door. Other than that, I must insist you haveno contactwith him whatsoever.”
“Bollocks,” he mutters under his breath.
It’s important to know what kind of man you’re working with. Oh, he knows it’s not the PC thing to say, but the fact is, an author and his editor should be cut from the same cloth. He’s glad that Fletch’s old editor got the boot—ever since he and Sienna got pawned off on River, he has to worry about pronouns as much as plot devices. No, he’s convinced that if hedidget to chat with Rufus, man to man, he’d have this in the bag.
The editor disappears around the corner, no doubt to hole up in his cottage. But the sight of him slipping away reminds Malcolm of the figure on the cliff. The one he’d assumed—erroneously—was Arthur Fletch.
“Who do you think it was?” he muses aloud.
“What?” asks Sienna, and before he even turns, he knows she’s giving him the look—he hates that look, which somehow conveys both disinterest and scorn, an impatient quirk of the brows, an unflattering set of the mouth. And there it is.
“The man we saw, on the approach. The one in the hat.”
Sienna shrugs, clearly more concerned with putting sweaters in the wardrobe. “It was probably the editor.”
Malcolm shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
Sienna blows a chunk of hair out of her face. “Maybe it wasArty’s ghost, come to welcome you because you’re such great friends.”
Malcolm frowns. “No need to be snarky.”
She shrugs again. “You’re the one who believes in ghosts.”
He grits his teeth. Just because one time at the Colosseum he felt the undeniable presence of something ancient and angry, and made mention of it to the guide.
Sienna looks past him to the window, and he can tell—
“You’re wondering about it, too.”
Sienna rolls her eyes and reaches for the manuscript. “Forgive me if I’m less interested in solving that mystery than this one.”
* * *
SIENNA LOOKS DOWN AT THE MANUSCRIPT INher hands.
Does paper normally weigh this much? Or is it the pressure? The promise? This isn’t just a book, after all; it’sthebook. And in order to win, not only do they have to devise an ending equal parts epic and unexpected, they’ll have to do it all while mimicking Fletch’s voice.
Which is the one thing she isn’t worried about. Back in college, she spent an entire semester turning in English papers written in the same style as the work she was critiquing, just for fun, and her professor remarked what a knack she had for imitation.
And he was right.
After all, she’s been mimicking Malcolm for years.
As if on cue, he crosses to her, wrapping his arms around her waist and resting his stubbled chin on her shoulder, the way he has so many times. It used to make her feel safe, feel loved. Now, she just feels stifled. The weight of him, like a fucking albatross.
But she doesn’t pull away.
He seems genuinely shaken by the news of Arthur’s death—for all Malcolm’s bravado, hehasalways been sensitive. Sienna pats him gently on the back. Drowning, she thinks, is a bad way to go. She pulls up the details from another of her mental lists, this one titledMost Unpleasant Deaths, which has come in handy over the years. Drowning entails the aspiration of water. The lack of oxygen. The filling of pleural cavities. The postmortem bloat. One of their earliest books together centered on a serial killer Malcolm had insisted on naming the Bathtub Bastard who snuck into sororities and drowned coeds in—you guessed it. Back then, Sienna hadn’t tried to rein Malcolm in, but she’d still done most of the research, so she knew that despite what people sometimes said, it really wasn’t a good way to die.
“Can you believe it?” he murmurs, and she thinks he’s talking about Fletch until he says, “Two million dollars, Sisi.”
