Page 22

She was persistent, wasn’t she?

“I don’t know that I’m going to use it anyway. It might not even work with the story.”

She didn’t seem upset. “That’s fine. I’ve got lots of ideas. I’m a romance reader, after all.”

And that was one of the reasons I’d even hired her in the first place. Someone who loved and respected the genre was the only kind of person I could have working for me.

“I need to get back to work,” I said.

“Let me know if you need more ideas,” she said, tapping her head. “Got ’em all up here.”

I shouldn’t have asked.

Chapter Eight

Cade

I couldn’t believe she’d actually asked me for help. She didn’t appear to be the kind of person who needed help with writing, but she’d asked. And somehow, somehow, I’d come up with something good in the moment. My brain had actually done me a solid and coughed up an idea that made sense and was really fucking romantic.

Who wouldn’t want their love interest to take them to see the monarch butterfly migration? I know I would. If I had a love interest, but it had been a while. Dating was so tricky for me. Either I’d subdue myself so much so I didn’t scare someone off, or I’d come out, guns blazing and they’d get scared off by my too-muchness. That was hard on the ego, I wasn’t going to lie.

Even though she hadn’t asked me, I came up with some more date ideas. Some simple, some completely outrageous. They kept popping up in my brain, so I started an empty email for them. I didn’t know if I was going to send it, but I typed them out anyway.

* * *

“Read a few of your books this weekend,” I informed her over lunch. Her reaction was subdued.

“Did you? And?”

I tried to keep my face neutral and made her wait.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not going to hurt my feelings, Cadence. You can tell me you didn’t like them. As long as it doesn’t affect your ability to do your job, it’s not a problem.”

Finally, I smiled. “I really liked them. I read three, and they were great. Let me tell you what a relief it was. You’re incredibly talented.”

She nodded, as if she’d heard that before. Of course she had. Probably hundreds of times, by people far more discerning than me.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now I have to watch some of the movies and compare. What is that like? Having a movie made of your work?” That was something I’d been dying to know.

We were on the porch eating grilled sandwiches that she’d made alongside salads. Last week, I had reluctantly admitted to her that it did matter how you cut your sandwiches. Both of ours were cut diagonally as a result.

I had kind of given up on bringing my own lunches because what she had was always better. I did bring my own snacks, though. I hadn’t gotten to the point where I could just raid her fridge when I wanted.

“Movies are tricky. On one hand, I feel such a sense of wanting to control everything, and then I have to let go of that control at the same time. I’ve been able to get producing credits on a lot of the more recent ones, which was nice. It wasn’t easy, at first, to let someone else direct my characters and my vision. When they cast actors that I didn’t think looked like my characters, or they made plot choices I didn’t agree with. The first few were lower budget and I cannot watch them now. I know some of them have a weird cult following, but I just can’t.” She cringed.

“Well, now I definitely want to watch them,” I said. I loved a good bad movie. Maybe I could go over to Hunter’s because she had a better TV and we could invite Reid and make a whole thing out of it.

“Knock yourself out,” she said. Eloise really was unbothered about a lot of things. Guess that’s what happened when you’d been in a career as long as she had.

“What else did you do with your weekend, other than reading my backlist?” she asked.

“Went out with my friend Hunter on Friday. Thought about going out on Saturday but wasn’t feeling it. Did a lot of reading and trying to clean out my closet. Very exciting. What about you? Other than the alien books.” Now was my chance to find out all the exciting adventures she was probably having on weekends.

“It was my nephew’s birthday on Saturday. Camille’s son, Noah. That kind of wore me out. Hence the reading for the rest of the time.”

A kid’s birthday party was the last thing I expected. My assumptions about Eloise and her life were constantly rearranging and changing.