Page 5

I stop.

Freeze.

Because the William Pennington is standing squarely in front of me.

He’s even taller up close, his chin a solid foot, if not more, above me. I’d wager he has just a handful of years on me, given the single slight—though not, I have to admit, wholly unattractive—crease across his otherwise smooth forehead. A baby crease. The kind of crease that says, “I’ve reached a point in my life where I won’t try to take you to Sonic for a first date, but not the point where I go to bed before ten.” Mature in a way that, if he was placed side by side with some frat boy, he’d come out ahead, looking wholly more dependable but not so much older he was less attractive.

His eyes are even bluer this close, as shocking and pristine as blue ice on the frozen lakes of Michigan. Even his irises seem to be covered in crystals, as when snow descends on a glacier and air bubbles are squeezed out. (This, by the way, is what I get with my job: loads of random trivia stuck in my head to use on a whim.)

But at this precise moment, I have a hard time thinking about icebergs or the Jökulsárlón glacial lagoon in Iceland. Because right now, William Pennington is staring at the sheet in his hands. And right now, I have only the ability to focus on the overwhelming feeling reverberating up my spine: terror.

Hair-raising, mind-numbing terror.

I’m paralyzed.

I am going to get fired. This is it. I, Savannah Cade, am going to lose my job over a stupid, stupid piece of paper.

Why did I doubt myself at the last minute and smuggle my manuscript into work?

Why didn’t I just press Send on that email this morning and let things lie?

But while I wait in agony, his arctic-blue eyes scan the page as though he has taken no notice of me or the fact that the whole room is silently watching. No emotion plays on his face. Nothing, except for the small frown nestled between his brows. His eyes dance from line to line, word to word.

With every muscle in me, I manage to put my hand out, my fingertips silently begging for its return.

He ignores me. Reads on.

The room is deathly quiet.

Everyone is looking at us—him and me.

Although, where else would they be? This is the moment of the beheading.

I’m going to be the next one axed.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Maggie (Pennington Arch, eight years) looking at me with huge, doleful eyes that say, “I’ll always remember you and that time we shared that yogurt in the kitchen.”

It’s too much to bear.

“What’s going on?” Ms. Pennington’s voice crackles from the front of the room.

Her voice seems to break the spell, and William Pennington blinks.

He looks up and for the first time takes me in properly. My face, like all good-southern-girl faces, doesn’t seem to know how to respond to direct eye contact with anything besides a smile, and to my horror, I feel my lips begin to creep up on the sides.

Stop it, I tell my lips sternly, to which they sort of halt halfway and slowly, with incredible effort, tug back down.

Perfect. Throw insane into his growing impression.

He blinks again, his expression unchanged.

It’s the pinnacle moment. The moment that, with no exaggeration, will decide my future at the company. Because Ms. Pennington doesn’t just not like commercial fiction. She loathes it. And romance, according to her, is the lowest form. It is, according to Ms. Pennington herself, the stuff read aloud in Dante’s lowest level of hell. On par with pink Moscato, girls in wraparound scarves holding pumpkin-spice lattes, and country music.

And yet here I stand, in possession of “literature’s kudzu.”

Standing before her own totalitarian son, a complete stranger brought in from the big city to swing the ax, and I’m wearing a weak, semi-unstable smile.

I may as well start thinking about how to pack up my office.