Page 12 of How NOT to Seduce a Rockstar
“I was rifling through the shelves like a detective searching for a missing case file. They had everything:How to Snag a Man in Ten Minutes (or Less).Make Yourself Like Him Even if He Makes You Sick.He Hasn’t Texted Back? He’s Either Dead… or Worse, Married.But none of them fit me. Too modern. Too American. And then I saw it. A gem. A relic.How to Seduce a Doomed Artist.Written—brace yourself—by the Contessa Éloïse de Saint-Rouge, born 1856, exiled from Paris for ‘indecent conduct,’ former muse of cursed poets, scandalous painters and, apparently, even a lion tamer.”
My eyes widened. “Well. Impeccable résumé.”
Tess went on, brandishing the tome like she’d just pulled Excalibur from the stone. “The subtitle says:A Practical Treatisefor Audacious Women; or, The Art of Melting the Hearts of the Unattainable.Bea, this thing was originally written in French in 1894! And this”—she shook the heavy volume for emphasis—“is a 1941 American edition. Hardback. Gold-embossed. Smells like scandal. When I grabbed it, I swear I felt a shock. Like electricity up my arm. As if the Contessa herself had clutched my wrist and whispered in a husky voice:Je vais t’aider, ma chérie.”
“Sounds less like an author and more like a slightly deranged French aunt who’s read too many novels.”
“Bea, that book had been waiting for me for over eighty years. Eighty. And get this—inside the back cover there was still an old checkout card. Handwritten names, dates borrowed, dates returned.”
“The old borrower’s log. Ah, nostalgia.”
“And do you know how many people had ever checked it out?”
“Let me guess: zero.”
“Exactly. Zero. I even double-checked the digital catalog. Not a single trace. Nothing. Nada. I was the first! The first in eighty years to touch it! That book had been lying in hibernation, like a vampire in its crypt, waiting for me to awaken it!”
“Remind me of the title again?” I asked, already regretting it.
“How to Seduce a Doomed Artist.”
I snorted. “Tess, come on… Chad? An artist? Damnation, maybe. But art? Please. Unless you count ‘leaving dirty socks everywhere’ as some kind of conceptual performance piece.”
“Ugh, no. This isn’t about getting Chad back.”
“Oh, really?” I arched a brow. “Then who exactly is this masterpiece for?”
She lit up like she was announcing a lottery win. “For Zane Ryder, obviously!”
5
“Excuseme, what?” I said, forcing out a laugh to cover the icy chill that had just run down my spine. The kind of chill that means: she’s about to say something insane. “I think I misheard you.”
“Zane Ryder,” Tess repeated, as if she were invoking the name of a Greek god. “The rockstar.”
“Iknowwho Zane Ryder is…” I answered slowly, the way you speak to a psychiatric patient. “But I was really hoping I’d misunderstood.”
“Bea, come on. If he’s not the greatest doomed artist of our time, then who is?”
“But… but… Zane Ryder?” I stammered. “Did you steep your brain in tequila and drink it as a cocktail?”
“I don’t see why you’re so disappointed,” she shot back, offended. “I’ve got a manual for seducing doomed artists. What am I supposed to do with it, huh? Use it on Jack—the forty-five-year-old who still lives with his parents and plays ‘Smoke on the Water’ in his buddies’ garage?”
“So you’ve decided… to seduce Zane Ryder?” I asked, enunciating each word like a verbal comprehension test.
“Yes.”
She said it straight to my face, without a flicker of hesitation—like she was saying yes to a coffee date, not to conquering a living legend.
“You, Tess Martini—Brooklyn girl with a mortgage on your washing machine and a bank balance in the triple digits—have decided to climb Everest. Barehanded. In flip-flops.”
She lifted the book above her head with the expression of a nineteenth-century heroine and declared: “And I’ve got the perfect guide to get me there!”
“I thought you didn’t even like Zane Ryder. Not as a musician, not as a man.”
“True. As a musician, he doesn’t thrill me. His stuff… meh. No bite. And as a man… let’s just say my taste leans more toward cardigan-wearing librarians with emotional baggage. But let’s not forget therealgoal here: making Chad boil with envy.”
“Chad doesn’t even deserve the thought of you climbing Everest just to get revenge on him.”
