Page 25 of Lemon Crush

You said he irritated you.

There was a slight possibility that Wade Hudson didn’t irritate me anymore.

I sat back and flexed my fingers, shaking out my wrists while I looked over my latest efforts with a rush of satisfaction. I was writing words again. And not grocery lists or sad poems about my feelings. This was astory.

A filthy, smutty story.

The inspiration for it was currently outside, preparing to host an afternoon Lemons meeting. He’d texted this morning for permission and asked if it would bother me if he mowed my lawn and cleaned the pool of debris.

I had no idea a renter would be so handy.

Getting to my feet, I stretched hugely, rolling my head back and forth to work the kinks out of my neck and shoulders. Then I raised my arms over my head and wiggled my hips in a mini happy dance. “I’m back, baby!”

I’d thought my muse was gone for good. That the black hole left by my mother’s death, exhaustion from my illness and the new and wonderful world of hormonal issues had stripped away my ability to write forever.

I’d never been so happy to be wrong.

I went to the window overlooking the courtyard to see if Wade was still out there and the air left my lungs in a rush. He’d taken off his shirt and hooked it to the back of his jeans, his ball cap pulled low over his eyes. His broad, tanned chest gleamed with sweat as he swept the skimmer back and forth, scraping the leaves off the pool’s surface. The way his thick biceps bunched and flexed rhythmically had me fanning my hot face.

Who could blame me for being inspired bythat?

Careful. He might look up and see you drooling.

I should probably walk away, since I was staring at him like I was the lovesick adolescent he used to know. Or a woman outright objectifying the man to whom she’d promised privacy on a legal document, which might be problematic, unless she was using the experience like I was—for research purposes only.

Maybe it was time to break out the new toy that had arrived yesterday in a discreetly labeled cardboard box before I crossed a line.

Don’t judge me for the purchase. I still had needs, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been this turned on, because it had beennever.

I hadn’t been on a date or had sex in a while either—four and a half years and the early onset of perimenopause ago. It had been so long that I’d had to make peace with the almost-closed sign hanging dejectedly in the window of my lady bits store.

But business was starting to boom again, my muse was here for it, and all I could think about was Wade. Wade and all the kinky things I never got around to trying and a few of the old classics I wanted to test out on him.

Since that was only ever going to happen in my imagination, it was no wonder I’d started writing down each fantasy as it came into my head. Thankfully, and completely unintentionally, there was also an actual storyline in there as well. It might even befunny, though I didn’t want to jinx myself by looking at it too closely.

When I sent some of it to Chick during a weak moment a few days ago, he’d gushed over the pages, telling me Mrs. Roper parties were a thing now and all the rage on Insta, so I was following the popular trend.

I wasn’t sure what most of that meant, but the gist was, he wanted more. Badly.

“So do I,” I murmured, letting out a whimper as Wade set down the skimmer, pulled off his hat and used his dangling shirt to wipe the sweat off his brow.

He glanced up and I scrambled back from the window, my heart racing. If I wasn’t careful, my revitalized sex drive could throw a wrench into this new synergistic setup, and we both had other things to focus on. He had his meeting, and I had mine.

In fact, it was time to go refill my coffee before Morgan called. She FaceTimed me every day around now, right before they went out for their fashionably late continental dinners.

Stretching again, I looked around the open loft. There was a bed-less guest room up here that I referred to as my oubliette—not that it was a dungeon, but everything I couldn’t find space for got tossed in there and was promptly forgotten about forever. But for the most part, the upstairs served as my office.

I’d sold a few knickknacks over the last few months, and gotten rid of even more during my “life sucks, toss it all” period, but the pared-down room still felt like mine. My old chair still conformed perfectly to my back. The bookshelf was still full of books I loved. And the framed images on the wall—a quote about stories from Doctor Who and a Hamilton poster—were still there, along with a few readers’ choice awards and a printout of my days on the bestseller lists.

Though I always kept my laptop handy for streaming and lurking on social networks, I’d been avoiding coming up here sincethe advent of the Great Block. It was too frustrating to sit at my desk, staring at a blank page while surrounded by the stark reminders of everything I’d once accomplished.

I hadn’t been able to avoid them completely. At least once a month, my agent emailed to ask how I was doing and where I was with the book. The one I actually owed to my publisher. The last in the series. The final culmination of years of research and world-building, where all the hidden puzzle pieces and prophecies would finally come together in a crescendo of brilliant storytelling and…

Yeah, I had nothing. I’d stopped in the middle and hadn’t moved on it for two years now. My agent had negotiated her ass off with the publisher, getting me not one, butthreedeadline extensions because of my mother’s death and my long-term illness. This third extension ended in three months, and it was my last before I lost said agent and owed my advance back to the publisher. Before I was lowkey blackballed from the entire industry and everyone but readers on fan forums who couldn’t let go of an unfinished series forgot I ever existed.

No pressure.

The fact that I was writing complete sentences, producing decent word count and dialogue that didn’t completely suck, didn’t mean that my deadline anxiety had magically disappeared. But it did give me hope that by the time my agent’s next email rolled around, I might have something to tell her.

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