She leaned back in her chair and fanned herself, enjoying the breeze blowing through the open window next to her desk. It might have been early summer, but the nights were still cool and refreshing. And with her body’s thermostat warming up, she would take all the help she could get to turn down the heat.
By day Jenna was a paralegal for one of the top firms in New York. At night and on weekends, she ditched the suits and high heels, pulled on her “writing clothes”—basically, pajamas and fuzzy slippers—and became Lillian Bangs, author of hot romance that gets you wet.
Social life? Who had time for that? This was New York, where the movers and shakers never slept. And like Sinatra said, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.
And Jenna planned on making it. She had big dreams, and futzing around going to parties and dating wasn’t going to make those dreams come true. Hard work, discipline, determination, and hands on the keyboard and butt in the chair—or HOKBIC, as she called it—was how she would bring her dreams into reality.
And she was well on her way.
She already earned more from her writing than she did from her day job. But until she paid off her student loans and book royalties tripled her paralegal salary, which was just under seventy-five thousand a year, she wouldn’t even think about becoming a full-time writer. She had a plan to get herself where she wanted to be, and she figured after five more books, she would be there. Until then, she would double up on her student loan payments, tuck as much as she could into savings, diversify her investments, and stay the course.
It was a type A plan, but she was a type A personality. Awake at four thirty in the morning, full workout by five thirty, out the door by six thirty, and at her desk ready to work by seven thirty. After putting in a full day at the office, she came home and worked on her books until ten o’clock, then went to bed. Rinse and repeat.
Except on weekends. She worked until after midnight on Friday and Saturday nights, when she didn’t have to get up before dawn the next day.
And today was Friday. For the next forty-eight hours, she worked for Lillian Bangs LLC.
She absently grabbed her cup of tea and took a sip . . . and immediately spit it back into the cup. Ew, cold. She hadn’t been working that long, had she?
She checked the time. Almost nine. She’d been writing for two hours. Where had the time gone?
That was what happened when she wrote. What felt like one hour turned into three or four. But wasn’t that how time passed when you were having fun?
With at least three more hours of writing ahead of her, cold tea wouldn’t do.
What coffee was to some people, hot tea was to Jenna. She thought better, plotted better, envisioned her characters better . . . simply because she had a cup of tea by her side. And how could she be expected to make Josephine and Delano fall in love and have hot sex with cold tea? Cold tea equaled cold sex, and she couldn’t afford to have cold sex on the pages of her next novel. Cold sex chilled readers, and chilled readers didn’t buy books.
Pushing away from the small, thrift-store writing desk that was situated next to her living room window, where she could overlook the tree-shaded park across the street, she grabbed her teacup, then headed to the kitchen.
After dumping the dregs of cold tea down the drain, she grabbed another teabag of Constant Comment, then refilled her teapot and set it on the stove. While the water heated, she dug an Oreo from the ceramic jar in the corner next to the refrigerator, leaned against the counter, and crunched into the two black wafers and smooth, creamy center.
If her coworkers knew what she did every night after work and all weekend, they would shit in their ergonomic chairs.
Not that Lillian Bangs had the kind of following Nora Roberts did, but she had a growing and loyal fan base that devoured everything she wrote. And she knew for a fact that two of the other paralegals at the firm read her books. She’d heard Meredith and Brandi talking about them in the break room one Monday morning several months ago as she had been putting her lunch bag in the refrigerator.
And given all the hushed giggles and face-fanning that had been going on between them, they had enjoyed what they’d read.
“Did you read the new Lillian Bangs book over the weekend?” Meredith had asked.
Brandi gasped. “Omigod, yes! I couldn’t put it down!”
They huddled closer together as they fixed their coffee, and Meredith looked around like she was making sure none of the bigwigs were within earshot. “I didn’t even know sex like that was possible.” She leaned closer to Brandi and lowered her voice. “Nick didn’t know what hit him when we went to bed last night. I was so hot, I came three times.”
“I know, right?” Brandi’s voice was emphatic. “Same with me and Eric.” They drifted toward the door. “I made him do that thing Julian did to Marianne.”
Julian and Marianne. The hero and heroine of Jenna’s latest book.
“Which thing?” Meredith asked.
“The one where he takes her right to the edge, then stops.”
Meredith raised her coffee mug like she was about take a sip, then stopped. “Edging?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“And . . .?”
“Oh my God, my toes nearly blew off when he finally made me co—oh, hi, Jenna.”
Jenna had smiled and given them a little wave before they had hurried off, giggling about how hot Lillian Bangs’s sex life must have been to write such realistic scenes.
If only they knew. Jenna didn’t have enough free time to date, let
