Page 47 of Smoke and Fire
“Yeah.”
“Have they ever had a local author do the meeting with them?”
“Not since I’ve been here,” I drawled.
An itchy feeling crawled through my chest with a looming sense of doom. She deflated a little. With a wave to her bag, she said, “I came because I heard a really famous author comes in here to write sometimes.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, a romance author.”
The feeling crawled down my back. Her eyes dropped to the counter, where Jess’s seventh book,Blame is a Weakness, was tucked off to the side. Not necessarily splayed out like usual, but certainly not invisible. She grinned as she motioned to it.
“That author, in fact! What a wild coincidence. I see you’re reading her too. I shouldn’t be surprised.” She chuckled. “Everyone reads Jess these days.”
“Oh, those books?” I swallowed hard. “Yes, I just discovered them from the leader of the local book club.”
“What’s her name?”
“Lizbeth?”
A gleam entered her eyes.
“Lizbeth is a website developer,” I said quickly, already catching her train of thought. “Not a romance author, although she probably should be. She’s read all the books in the library, then supplied them with more.”
“Well, Jess is a very famous author that has never revealed herself. There’s a lot of speculation about who she is. Really, she could be . . . anyone.”
My voice was almost an octave too high when I asked, “No one knows?”
The girl studied me for a moment, and I wondered if she could see the beads of perspiration forming on my skin. Lying had never been my forte. If my life depended on me telling a falsehood, I’d be dead in seconds.
“No.” She shook her head. “And she’s been tracked here.”
“By who?”
She waved that off. “Doesn’t matter. I wanted to come see if the rumors were true. I’d love to sit down and talk with her a little bit about one of her books, that’s all.”
I swallowed hard, my mind racing. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Working for Bastian was supposed to be an easy gig where I moderated social media responses to make sure fights didn’t break out, answered a few questions, and sorted email. This whole lying-to-a-stalker thing had notbeen a desired skill in my supposed resume.
To get away her scrutinizing gaze, I glanced around.
“You’re welcome to stay and wait. A lot of people come in to bum off the WiFi, so I can’t guarantee it’ll be easy to track an author down. Lots of women come,” I added, then cleared my throat. “They don’t say much, for the most part.”
“So you don’t know a local romance author?”
Her dark eyes probed mine again, and suspicion lay deep in their depths.
I swallowed hard.
“Nope. Don’t know Jess.” I forced a wry chuckle that sounded strangled. “Wish I did, though. Love her books. I didn’t know she’d been tracked to here.”
That much was sort of true, since Jess didn’tactuallyexist and I definitely loved the books. The woman pointed to my current book.
“A fave, for sure. Just wait until you get to twenty. Twenty one releases next week and I’m just dying. My girlfriends and I are having a Jess retreat at a cabin we rented up here. They’re all flying in before the launch so we can prepare for it together. The onlything that would make it better is to meet Jess herself.”
She squealed.
I almost swore.
