It wasn’t hard to guess which detective Feliks would tip off first. Feliks was disconcertingly curious about the nature of my relationship with Detective Nicholas Anthony. Truth be told, so was I. But no matter how charming Nick was （or how amazing he smelled）， there’d been too many skeletons in my closet （or, more literally, in my washing machine, my minivan, and Vero’s trunk） to risk letting the detective get any closer to me than he already was.
“If Feliks wants EasyClean dead, he’ll have to do it himself,” I said firmly. Killing a man in cold blood was a line I wasn’t willing to cross.
Vero shook her head at her reflection as she tried on a pair of dark sunglasses. “I can’t believe you’re playing chicken with the Russian mob.”
“I’m not playing chicken. I’m putting my foot down. Feliks’s trial is in less than a month. He’s going to be convicted of murder and shipped off to prison, and this whole nightmare will be over.”
“If Feliks goes to prison, he’ll have nothing left to lose. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t tip off Nick just to spite you. He called again, by the way.”
“Who?”
“Detective Hottie.”
I studied a rack of scarves, feigning disinterest. “What did you tell him?”
“That you were in the backyard, burying a body— Ow!” She giggled to herself, rubbing the spot where my elbow had jabbed her. “You can’t keep avoiding him, Finn. He’s been leaving messages on your cell phone since that dinner at your mom’s, and you haven’t once called him back.”
I smacked my forehead. “You must be referring to the dinner Nick attended on crutches because he’d been shot by Feliks’s thugs, who—incidentally—had really only been intending to murder the two of us. Yes,” I deadpanned, “I can see where that would have been a promising start to a healthy and honest relationship.”
“You’re forgetting about the part where Nick made googly eyes at you across the ham platter while he thanked you for saving his life. Face it, Finn, he’s crazy about you. And you two have great chemistry.”
She wasn’t wrong, but no amount of chemistry was going to change the fact that I had done some pretty terrible things that Nick could never know about. Still, I couldn’t help the flutter in my stomach whenever I heard his voice in my mailbox. Or when I remembered the seductive low rumble of it against my ear the last time we’d spoken, under the mistletoe at my parents’ house. “What else did he say?”
“That he still owes you dessert. I’m pretty sure that’s code for: he wants to see you naked.” She drew a scarf over her head, wrapping it around her face until only the dark lenses of her sunglasses were showing. She waggled her eyebrows at me over the rims. “You saved his life, Finn.”
“No more than he saved ours.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t indulge in something sweet if he’s offering.” She threw up her hands at my shocked laugh. “I’m just sayin’， you know he’s only going to keep calling until you answer.”
A ringtone started deep in my diaper bag.
We both turned to stare at it. Vero drew her sunglasses down her nose. “Whoa. I think you just manifested dessert.”
I took a step back. “I’m on a diet.”
She reached into the bag with a roll of her eyes, grabbing my phone before I could stop her. “That resolution of yours is a load of horseshit. This is the age of sex positivity, body positivity, and hashtag MeToo. It’s Lizzo’s world, Finn; we’re all just living in it. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t have dessert.” Her expression dulled as she read the caller’s name. “It’s Sylvia,” she said, holding the phone out to me.
It may have been the first time I’d ever been relieved to see my agent’s name on the screen. I swiped to connect. “Hey, Syl. I’m at Walmart. Can I call you back?”
“No, you can’t,” she said bluntly. Her accent was always more pronounced when her patience was thin. More Jersey than New York. “We have something very important to discuss. Your editor called. She read your manuscript.”
I pushed my cart farther from Vero’s as she hovered in my personal space, her head tipped to hear. “What did she say?” I asked.
“She’s not paying you.”
“What do you mean, she’s not paying me?” I slapped Vero’s hand as she lunged for my phone. “I turned in a finished manuscript, Sylvia. I’ve earned the second half of my advance.”
“Only if your editor approves it. She wants a revision.”
“What kind of revision?”
“She wants more of the cop in the story.”
“But I put the cop in the story. There’s plenty of the cop in the story.” There was far more cop in my story than there probably should have been.
“The cop is hot, but the romance is not, and your publisher’s not paying you for fifty shades of boring.” I held the phone away from my ear as Sylvia shouted for a taxi. A car door slammed and she barked out an address. “You’re holding back on this one, Finlay. The cop and your heroine waste too much time staring longingly at each other’s assets. By the second act, they should be sampling the goods.”
“She’s still mourning the attorney,” I argued.
“The attorney disappeared in chapter one. That relationship is over. It’s time for your heroine to move on.”
“Well maybe she needs a minute to figure out what she wants,” I said bitterly. I pinched the bridge of my nose. It had been almost three weeks since I’d broken things off with the younger law student/ bartender I’d been seeing, and while breaking up with Julian Baker had felt like the right thing to do, I still ached a little thinking about it.
“Your heroine knows what she wants. She wants the cop. She said as much on page forty-three when she was lying in bed, alone, staring at the ceiling. If you’re not going to let her have the cop in the second act, at least let the woman have a sex toy.”
Vero gave me an I told you so smirk. I turned away from her.
“It doesn’t matter what my heroine wants, Syl. She’s a criminal. She can’t just jump into bed with a cop. She’ll risk getting caught.”
“That’s precisely what I’m talking about. Raise the stakes. Take some risks! You’ve got the perfect setup for a star-crossed romance. Your assassin has escaped from jail. She’s on the run from the one man she shouldn’t want but can’t deny her feelings for. Meanwhile, the cop is hot on her trail, determined to catch her. Only the longer they play cat and mouse, the more he wants to bring her to bed instead of bringing her to justice.”
“Oh, that’s good,” someone said in the background.
“See?” Sylvia assured me. “Even the taxi driver loves it.”
“You put me on speaker?!”
“Yes,” Sylvia and her driver said.
“The cop and the assassin should give in to their desires,” Sylvia insisted. “They should do it someplace dangerous—”
“On a plane,” the driver suggested.