Good question. Technically, I’ve been meeting my word-count goals, but unfortunately, I keep running into a different challenge. Despite all my efforts to keep it from happening, a romantic subplot is brewing between my main character and the grumpy local detective she’s been forced to team up with. I didn’t originally plan to make him such an eligible bachelor, but somehow he’s become a handsome single father with a heart of gold. My saving grace is that I’ve managed to maintain my protagonist’s tough-as-nails exterior. She’s the anti-romance heroine, and in a way, it’s been satisfying for me to write a character who makes target practice out of every trope that comes her way. Honestly, she could probably teach me a thing or two.
I realize Jo is waiting on my answer, and I shake off my self-doubt. “It’s going great!”
Trapper finally reaches the bottom, and Jo rolls the wheelchair downstairs into position before hitting the brake. With a familiarity that can come only from endless repetition, she grasps Trapper around his middle and helps him up before easing him into the new chair. He makes a muffled sound of discomfort but gives her hand a grateful squeeze as she releases him. Jo smiles down at him, and I wonder, not for the first time, if something other than friendship exists between them.
“Hey there, Margot,” Trapper calls as he powers his chair closer to my desk with Jo walking beside him. “Hope Scout’s not bothering you. He thinks he’s quite the lady’s man.”
I smile. “Seems more like a bacon man to me.” I look down at Scout, who has lain beside my chair, glacier-blue eyes pointed upat me. “But you’re not bothering me, are you?” I ask in the voice I use for all babies, furred or otherwise.
Trapper chuckles. “How’s everything? You ready for tomorrow’s excursion?”
My face must say everything, because he laughs.
“Don’t tease her, you old badger,” Jo says, swatting his shoulder.
I pop a bite of muffin into my mouth. “Any idea what we’re doing? Just in case I need to send my lawyer a last will and testament?”
Trapper waves away my words with his functional hand. “You don’t need to worry. Forrest won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Besides a sprained ankle?”
“Anything serious,” Trapper amends with a smile. “How is it, by the way?”
“All better,” I say, flexing it below the desk. “If there’s any hiking tomorrow, I should be fine.”
“There’s always hiking,” Jo deadpans before putting a hand on Trapper’s shoulder. “I’m headed to the greenhouse, but I’ll be back soon. Don’t keep her from her work, Trap.”
She walks off with a swish of her long braid, and I take another drink of coffee, studying Trapper over the rim. This isn’t our first one-on-one moment, but I’m still not fully at ease around him. Not because I don’t enjoy his company—on the contrary, he’s warm, interesting, and genuinely seems to care about my well-being. In fact, he’s exactly what I used to wish my own father was like. But it’s been a long time since all my wishing hardened into believing that good dads don’t exist. A cold comfort, maybe, but one that I’ve relied on, and one that Trapper challenges at every turn.
“I won’t keep you long,” he says. Clever brown eyes twinkle out from deep crow’s-feet I imagine were earned from years of squinting at snow-bright landscapes. They make me wonder if Forrest inherited his green eyes from his mother and where she might be now. “But I wanted to ask if you’ve ever read any Jude Devereaux.”
My eyes widen, surprise nearly knocking me sideways. “Jude Devereaux?” I repeat. “Of course I have. Historical romance isn’t my genre, but she’s a classic. Are you a fan?”
Trapper chuckles and nods. “Well, my wife was, before she passed, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t read one or a dozen. Only thought I’d mention it because I still have her whole collection upstairs if you’re ever looking for reading material.”
“Oh,” I say as his words stop my mind like a stick shoved through bike spokes. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He nods. “Thank you, dear. We’ve had time to adjust. It’s been, what… going on eight years now, I believe.”
I’m silent as some ill-defined emotion wells up inside me. I remember Forrest’s firelit face that night in his cabin as he told me about his mother teaching him to cook. How I’d sensed something as fragile as tissue paper stretching between us, barely concealing this piece of himself. I hadn’t wanted to see it, but now…
Trapper gives me a small, reassuring smile before answering the unasked question in my eyes. “Triple-negative breast cancer. Happened just like this,” he says, snapping his fingers. Old pain deepens the weathered lines of his face. “It’s the most aggressive type. Forrest can tell you all about it.”
“Forrest?” I repeat, slow on the uptake.
Trapper nods once. “It’s his area of expertise.”
And just like that, the pieces fall into place like bricks dropped on my chest. Forrest already told me on the hike that he was a breast cancer researcher. He told me and I… I rolled my eyes.
Nausea grips me. When did I become so jaded? No wonder he doesn’t want anything to do with me. I’ve been trying so hard to fit him into a neat little romance hero box, but this is his very real, very messy life. I think of the grant and everything he’s giving up to care for Trapper, and admiration and sympathy gather around my heart like soft cotton wool. It’s the last thing I need to be feeling for him, because this isexactlythe sort of crisis thathappens to all my romance heroines. I even have a name for it: the Melting Point.
My formerly independent leading lady finds out that the annoyingly attractive jerk she’s been forced into proximity with is a secret cinnamon roll: crusty on the outside with a warm, gooey interior. She discovers that he’s starting a nonprofit for blind animals, or has a weekly standing date to watch telenovelas with his grandmother, or (just another hypothetical example) is dedicating his life’s work to curing the disease he lost his mother to. I see all the caution tape. I understand how this plays out. But it doesn’t mean I can fully control what’s happening inside my chest. Because Forrest isn’t a romance hero with a simple character arc, safely trapped and untouchable within his pages. He’s complicated, roaming around freely, and highly touchable. Above all, he’s off-limits.
“And he istheexpert,” Trapper goes on, as if he hasn’t noticed the nuclear reactor meltdown happening inside me. “No one as highly regarded in the field. If you only knew how many institutions have been fighting over him since he was sixteen. The technology he and his team were developing before I—” Trapper stops himself with a frustrated sigh. It’s not the first or, I’m sure, the last time I’ve heard him and Jo sing Forrest’s praises, but this tidbit is new.
“Sixteen?” I repeat. “Seems pretty young. Did he win a science fair or something?”
Trapper chuckles, a mixture of pride and sorrow pulling at his features. “Not exactly. He got headhunted by Stanford after he wrote a letter to the editor of a well-known science journal and corrected one of their papers. He criticized them for ‘lack of rigor,’ I believe.”
