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I was dead.
It was that simple. I was fucking finished.
A wave of emails started hitting my inbox, but one stood out. It was from Sebastian St. James.
I clicked it and stared at the few words written there.
* * *
Hey Dennis,
You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Fucker.
Laughing my ass off,
Sebastian
41
Kenzie
High fives were given all around the room. Astaire’s Ghost Fucker was officially live and proudly published by Ink House, along with the advertising budget to match an anticipated best-seller.
I think Noah was the only one in the room who didn’t seem surprised it had come together as planned.
“Do you think your friend will mind the bad reviews?” Travis asked.
The book had been live about two hours and it was already boasting about two-hundred reviews across all platforms with a two and a half star average.
“Nope,” I said. “I told her it’d probably go that way. She’s just excited to have something to talk to her followers about. Are you sure nothing we did was illegal?”
Noah looked up. He’d been tapping at a keyboard with a focused look on his face. We were still in the control room, but Travis had somehow managed to find plates of finger food he was sharing with Adrian.
“Illegal?” Noah asked. “Definitely. Several parts were illegal.”
“You didn’t think I’d want to know that before I got involved?”
“Would you have backed out if you knew it was illegal from the start?” Noah asked.
“No,” I said. “I guess not. But what if we get caught?”
“We won’t. There was a point where it was theoretically possible, but that point already passed. I cleared our tracks completely. There’s no trace anymore. We were never involved, and every last digital signature will point to things going exactly as they appear. Dennis reached out to Astaire, offered her an advance of forty thousand dollars for her Ghost Fucker manuscript. He then proceeded to book promotional opportunities for Ghost Fucker, send out advance review copies, and launched the book. It’s iron clad.”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m impressed.”
“And this is when you honor your end of the arrangement,” Adrian said. “We had a deal, Sebastian.”
“Yeah. As long as Noah did like he said and got me out of my contract, you can publish my next book when it’s finished. But I want to keep my old agent. He was good. You’ll have to poach him from Ink House, but that shouldn’t be too hard if he knows it’s for me. I want my old assistant, Nilla, too.
“We’ll retain your entire staff,” Adrian said dismissively. “Anything else?”
“I want you to have someone read Kenzie’s manuscript. My agent will be representing her. If you think it has legs, I want you to publish it. But I don’t want you to do it as a favor.”
I nodded my head. I’d talk to him about this part, and he’d said the lines just as we’d practiced.
“Deal,” Adrian said. He got up, brushing his hands. “If that’s all, I have a wife at home. I enjoy looking at her more than all of you.”
Travis made a sound like a whip cracking. “Imagine being stuck with just one woman. Incredible.”
“I don’t need to imagine not wanting to look at you any longer,” Noah said.
“Those guys love me,” Travis said once both his partners were gone. “So I’d say I saved the day, right?”
Sebastian put his arm around my waist and pulled me to his side. “In one way or another, I guess you did.”
Eventually, Travis got the hint that we wanted the room to ourselves. He scooped up what was left of the cheese-stuffed peppers and carried them out of the room in his arms. “Have fun, kids!” He called over his shoulder.
“Thank you,” I said, taking Sebastian’s hands in mine.
“This whole thing working was more your doing than mine. You were right. Travis was actually kind of capable. Or at least he had access to people who were.”
“I don’t just mean about the book stuff. Thank you for giving this a chance. I know it wasn’t easy for you.”
“It wasn’t, but I started to get the impression I didn’t have a choice. Loving you was inevitable, wasn’t it?”
“Did you just drop a love bomb on me?”
“I did,” he said. “I love you, Kenzie. You’re everything I was missing and all the things I didn’t even know I needed.”
“You needed a lactose intolerant woman who snores?”
He hesitated. “Yes?”
“Well, I guess I like you too.”
He playfully tilted my chin up with his finger, forcing me to meet his eyes. “Say it.”
“Bossy, aren’t we?”
He gave no response, unless looking smolderingly good counted as a response.
“Okay. I guess I love you too.”
He put his fingertip in the center of my chest and walked me back until I bumped against the wall. “Not good enough.”
“I do love you,” I admitted. My cheeks burned hot to say the words aloud. “But it took a while for you to grow on me.”
