Absently, I brushed my fingers along the spines of the books at McNally Jackson, a bookstore nestled in the thick of Nolita. I followed the rows of titles and last names around to the next aisle—romance—and quickly moved on to sci-fi and fantasy. If I didn’t look at them, they didn’t exist.
I never imagined being a ghostwriter. Hell, when I first got my agent and sold my first book, I thought I’d be invited to literary panels and I thought I’d go to book events, and I thought I had finally found the door to the stairs that would take me up and up and up into my forever career. But the door closed as quickly as it opened, and sent an email saying, “We regret to inform you . . . ,” as though my book flopping was my fault. As though me, a girl with a nonexistent social media following, less money, and almost no connections, was responsible for the fate of a book published by a multimillion-dollar company with every resource and connection available to it.
Maybe it was my fault.
Maybe I hadn’t done enough.
And anyway, I was here now, writing for a romance author I’d only ever met once, and I was about to screw that up, too, if I couldn’t finish the damn book. I knew the characters—Amelia, a smart-talking barista with dreams of being a music journalist, and Jackson, a stability-shirking guitarist disgraced from the limelight—trapped together on vacation on a small Scottish isle when their Airbnb host accidentally double-books the property. The isle is magical, and the romance is as electrifying as the storms that roll in from the Atlantic. But then she finds out that he lied to her about his past, and she lied to him, because while the booking was indeed happenstance, she decided to use it to try to win over an editor at Rolling Stone.
And I guessed the plot hit too close to home. How could two people reconcile and trust each other when they fell in love with the lies the other person told them?
Where did you go from there?
Last time I tried to write that scene—the reconciliation one, the one where they face each other in a cold Scottish storm and pour their hearts out to try and repair their damage—lightning struck Jackson dead.
Which would’ve been great if I ghostwrote revenge fantasies. Which I didn’t.
I began to nose through the used J. D. Robb section when my phone started to vibrate in my satchel. I dug it out, praying it wasn’t Ann Nichols’s agent, Molly.
It wasn’t.
“Great timing,” I said, answering the phone. “I have a situation.”
My brother laughed. “I take it your meeting didn’t go well?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I told you that you should’ve led with an orchid and not a succulent.”
“I don’t think it was the plant, Carver.”
My brother snorted. “Fine, fine—so what’s the situation? Was he hot?”
I pulled out a book that did not belong in political thriller—Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston—and decided to walk it back to the romance section where it did, in fact, belong. “Okay, we have two situations.”
“Oh Lord, he’s that hot?”
“You know that book I let you borrow? The one by Sally Thorne? The Hating Game?”
“Tall, stoic yet quirky, has a bedroom wall painted to match her eyes?”
“That’s it! Though his eyes are brown. Like chocolate brown.”
“Godiva?”
“No, more like melty Hershey’s Kisses on like the worst day of your period.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah, and when I introduced myself, I said my name—twice.”