Billionaire Novelist 4 : Every Romance is a Revenge Fantasy(15)

It wasn't enough, and so he decided he would propose all over again to Brynn, so they could start fresh, like the beginning of a novel. He bought a new ring, and he went to her apartment when she wasn't expecting him.

He didn't have a key to her place, which in retrospect was probably the thing that saved him from pounding the guy's face in. As it was, Brynn and her guru answered the door with flushed faces and guilty expressions.

Smith put together their last dozen dates, remembering all the mentions of her guru. He'd imagined a Yoda-like old man with white hair and sinewy arms, not some long-haired, bearded freak who looked like a perpetual couch surfer and smarmy wife-stealer.

Detective Dunham would have popped the guy in the face and then held him down while he answered questions and spat out teeth.

Smith Wittingham turned around and walked away, shaking his head.

Brynn was sobbing, calling after him, but he was done. Done. The end.

After Brynn, Smith went on a few dates, and he kinda-sorta f**ked a few dumb girls who flirted with him at a book signing. Okay, he f**ked a lot of them. But only for about a year, and then he curbed his dumb-girl habit, cold turkey. He switched over to a regular schedule of clean living, which included tons of exercise, frequent showers, and once-daily mast***ation, whether he was in the mood or not.

Turning forty was raw and ugly, like a garbage bag full of dirty tin cans.

Turning forty-one was a relief, by comparison. The worst was behind him, and he found himself enjoying the company of his parents, much to his surprise. After the cancer treatment, Smith's father had slowed down and taken a new attitude toward life. The mistresses had all been dispatched with, because he'd been disgusted by their lack of concern when he was in the hospital. Smith's mother looked like a woman in love, fussing over her husband like a newlywed. Smith wouldn't say it out loud, but he thought it: cancer had great timing, on occasion. The non-lethal kind, at least.

Smith started training for a marathon, and he found himself spending more and more time online, talking to his fans. In his early days of publishing, Facebook had just come into existence, and so the emails from fans came without photos, unless he asked for them, but he preferred not to. He enjoyed talking to women about their hopes and dreams, and sometimes in forums, he posted under a woman's name. What struck him most was women's concerns for the well-being of others. Most of them talked nothing of themselves, but only about their children, and what good or bad decisions the children were making.




 

 

He thought of the child he and Brynn had lost, and felt ashamed by the thin tendril of relief mixed in with his sadness. Parenthood would have been challenging for both of them, especially Brynn.

It was time to move on.

When his regular typist, the jovial lesbian who by now had three kids of her own, was unable to come out that summer to the cabin, he had to make a tough decision. "Let's try someone young," he told the employment agency.

The strangest coincidence happened next, with him getting a familiar name in the shortlist of potential typists. Because he worked in the world of fiction, where there was no such thing as coincidence, he felt this was a sign. He recognized one young woman's name, as the daughter of a fan he'd spoken to online. They'd connected through Facebook, and her photo was not unattractive.

Tori's mother had a sweet disposition, but the woman did have red hair, like Brynn, and he suspected her daughter would as well. Could he have some young, attractive redhead type for him?

He considered using dictation software, or even taping the book and sending it out for typing, but he felt like an idiot, talking into a microphone with nobody in the room. He needed an audience, or nothing was real.

When Tori came busting in through the door the first day, panting about some crazed killer zombie moose that had pursued her in the Vermont woods, he felt two things at once: elation and terror.

Their first session working together, with her typing, had gone well enough, considering he'd been thinking about Tori's body most of the time. After they'd finished up, he'd put in a call to the agency, asking they send someone else as soon as possible. His contact person said it would take a few days, including the medical tests they always ordered as an additional precaution for their extremely wealthy clients. Smith told them to put a rush on it, and he'd make it worth their time.

He planned to tell Tori in the morning that he was letting her go, with full payment, of course.

Then she'd shown up in his doorway, looking like a strawberry sundae on a hot summer day.

He'd taken her roughly, more against his will than hers, and she seemed to love it more and more, the rougher he got.

After he'd evicted her back downstairs to her own room so he could clear his head, he called the agency and canceled his previous order.