Page 150 of Falling for the Enemy

Her friend sighed. “I’ll talk to Grey.”

After talking to Wren, Jocelyn only felt like eating her feelings. She hadn’t gone to town that morning for her usual order at the Harbor Crumb, so she searched the fridge for anything that wasn’t a condiment, settling for a shitty cup of coffee and a defrosted bagel with butter.

Two bites and one sip and she tossed both in the trash, over the roses.

Writing was impossible.

Every time she tried to construct a sentence, the blinking cursor mocked her. How could she focus on romance when her heart was so broken?

For a good thirty minutes, she paced. She’d tried to channel her energy towards cleaning, but housework never comforted her the way it did others.

Shifting gears, she turned her attention to other things. Her email had been backed up for weeks, and she needed to weed through the spam, respond to her readers, and follow up with her editor who was still waiting for her draft.

It was easy to delete mail when she felt no sentimental attachment to anything. She was operating on autopilot, mercifully numb due to some sort of subconscious survival tactic and ruthlessly deleting messages with lethal clicks.

For the last ten years, Jocelyn had only herself to lean on, and she’d managed just fine. It was time to get back to that sort of mentality.

She could handle this.

It was a breakup. People broke up all the time. She’d written dozens. She would get through it just like she got through everything else, with sheer fucking stubbornness, profanity, and plenty of peanut butter whiskey.

Once the spam was cleared out of her inbox, her mail had dwindled to a manageable one-hundred-twenty-two emails. She had the unwelcome thought of how that much unanswered mail would make Soren twitch and almost laughed.

No more thinking like that anymore.

No more holding herself in the contrasting view of his flawless perfectionism. She could go back to doing things her way. Not that she ever budged on doing them differently.

But there had been this recent sense of awareness, some niggling that she could maybe try a little harder to be less…catastrophic and abrasive.

Fuck that.

The emails from her fans helped. She started with the oldest first, answering each one with a teary smile and a ball of gratitude in the pit of her stomach. Without them, she’d be lost.

Each message came from an open contact form on her website. Some readers dropped reviews, others left a single question or compliment, while others sent character art and long letters telling her how much they loved her work.

It was the purest medicine for her dark soul.

Of course, there was always additional spam that slipped through her firewalls, perverts finding her contact form as easily as they slid into her DMs, but that was par for the course when you wrote smut, had a public platform, and a contact page on your website.

When the pervie emails slithered into her inbox, she simply deleted, blocked, and moved on. It wasn’t worth getting upset over. Especially because, in the end, the good messages far outweighed the bad.

Flicking through, she finally made it to the emails from that week, whittling her inbox down to a manageable twenty-six messages that still needed attention. She took inventory of her mental state, finding herself more grounded than she’d been two hours ago.

The last message was one with an attachment. Those were her favorite, because some of her readers were truly gifted at drawing and could bring her characters to life better than her own imagination. She opened the message and her smile dropped.

“What the fuck?” Cold cut through the warmth in her chest and her blood chilled in her veins.

This wasn’t from a fan.

Scrolling down, hand trembling, she stared at a picture of Soren and Olivia. She stared unblinking at the image, noting how handsome he looked in his tux and how disgusting the sight of her hand on his chest made her feel.

Breath seemed to pulse into her, cold and sharp. Under the picture was a short note.

From Friday night, at our family’s home in Newport.

No signature needed. She knew exactly who it was from.

Newport… That was in Rhode Island.