He hung up and stuffed his phone in his back pocket, then pinched the bridge of his nose as though struggling with an impending headache.
“Your little stunt this morning has put me between a rock and a hard place.”
He wasn’t looking at me as he said it, and that gave me chills. His expression was very ‘murdering you is going to be such an inconvenience.’
“What rock and what hard place?”
He sighed. “I can’t keep you here against your will, but my agent is suggesting I do my best to convince you to stay here until the book is published.”
Keep me here? Hell no! But…to avoid the police being called…
“How long would that be?”
He arched an eyebrow. “It could be a while. Possibly months.”
I snorted and slapped my hands together, then realized he wasn’t joking. “You can’t be serious.”
His mouth set in a grim line. “Serious as a heart attack.”
We stared at each other for a long moment before he went on.
“I wish I were joking, but Charles thinks it may be the only way to make sure the entire manuscript—or even the ending—isn’t leaked online.”
“Even if I had read it, I would never!”
“As sincere as you seem, I can’t risk that.” He shrugged and looked out the window, his face a mask.
Where was all this paranoia coming from? Was this his personality?
Wait…
I wasn’t a creepy stalker fan, but I followed enough of his news to remember the promise of a book that had never come to be.
“Is this about Steel Echoes?”
He made a sound of angry frustration. “You really are a fan.”
“I told you I was,” I replied, confused. Why would I have lied about that?
“Not only a thief then.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response. If he didn’t believe me yet, he probably wasn’t going to.
“Someone betrayed me—someone I’d never imagine betraying me even if it were life and death, but I guess we all have to learn that lesson the hard way.”
“Someone betrayed you, so you never released the book? That seems a bit melodramatic, don’t you think?”
His dark eyes flashed with the temper I’d seen earlier in the backyard.
“What was I supposed to do?”
I shrugged. “Publish it. Who cares if someone else read it first? I mean, it’s not ideal, but how many spoilers could the person have posted? For that matter, some readers start posting spoilers just hours after a book is published.”
“Yeah,” he sucked his teeth in annoyance. At least the rage I could read in his bearing seemed to have a lot more to do with the friend, or whoever had been responsible for the betrayal, instead of with me.
“She didn’t just read it though. I had no real way to prove it wasn’t her work, so I was shit out of luck when she published it. I could have taken her to court—would have if I’d had a contract for the book—but I’d hate airing my dirty laundry in public.”
“Shit. Was it your girlfriend?”
“My sister, Ashley. I’m not sure if I’m more pissed about her stabbing me in the back, or the fact that she slapped a cheap cover on it and didn’t get it edited. I hadn’t even gone back to finish the subplot yet.”
He buried his hands in his hair and pulled upward in frustration. So that was why his hair always looked like that.
“It wasn’t fucking finished, so it sits there making her a bit of money, you know? Something like forty bucks the first month, tapering off as the months went by. She hasn’t done any promo. She doesn’t have an established pen name or anything, so she gets nowhere near the sales I would have with the same book. There’s my creation, sent out into the world looking like Frankenstein’s monster, with no one to take care of him.”
“And you can’t help but check up on him.”
“Every fucking day.”
That was the saddest fucking thing. Would it be wrong to ask what name it had been published under? I’d been looking forward to reading it and had wondered what had happened to it, but under current circumstances, it seemed like a bad idea to ask.
“I would never do something like that,” I whispered, meaning it as much now as I would have before he’d been so rude to me. “Not to anyone, let alone to my favorite author.”
“But you can see—” He took a deep breath as though trying to keep his voice steady. “You see why I can’t let you leave until it’s safe. I can’t deal with that happening again. I couldn’t write for almost two years. I’m almost out of money.”
I felt bad for him, but I couldn’t abandon my life and hang out in his cottage for the next few months. I didn’t even know this guy—not really. It was like one of those reality shows where contestants had to live with strangers for months, except this would be without the cameras. The only payoff for me would be keeping my clean record so I could still be bondable when this was over.
“I can’t stay here, I need to find a job. I have an apartment to pay for. I can’t sit around twiddling my thumbs until your book is done and on the market.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” I snorted. “Because I’m a real human being with a life. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, rich boy. Some of us don’t have your kind of talent, so we have to spend our time living hand to mouth, terrified we’re going to end up living in our cars.”
“If you have a car, why did you bike all the way up here in this heat?”
“It’s a hypothetical car, dumbass!”
“Ah.”
His phone rang shrilly in the silence of the room, and I leapt to my feet.
He frowned at me. “Chill, fuck. You’re freaking me out.”
“I’m freaking you out?” I asked irritably. The guy had some nerve.
He held up a rude hand and answered the phone, grimacing.
“Charles,” he said by way of greeting. He listened for a moment, grim as any assassin in a movie as he eyed me, making no mystery about me being the topic of conversation. I wished I could hear the other end of the exchange. Something Charles was saying made Vandal arch a brow, his expression going from terrifying to thoughtful.
“No, no, she doesn’t seem like the type. I mean, I’m guessing, but she seems like a normal-enough kid. She claims she was here for an autograph.”
Maybe he was going to let me go after all?
His gaze went from me to something behind me—possibly the framed, spray-painted artwork of Bela Lugosi that hung above the couch.
He nodded again, as though agreeing with the caller.
“How old are you?” he asked, assessing me.
“Twenty-two.”
He relayed the information to Charles, and they kept talking. What my age had to do with anything I had no idea. Charles kept talking, his voice a low buzz in the otherwise silent room.
Sighing, I ran an impatient finger over the crocheted blanket protecting the couch. The colors were unexpected—lime green, plum purple, and black, like a crafty grandmother would make for her teenage goth grandson.
He grunted a few more times. The next time I glanced up at him, he’d ended the call. The contemplative look directed my way made me squirm inwardly.