“Has she signed the contract yet?” Zach asked.

“No. We’re still ironing out the terms.”

“Is there a verbal agreement in place?”

J.P. eyed him warily. “Not yet. I told her we’d have to look at the figures and get back to her, but we were leaning toward yes. Why?”

“I’ll talk to her.”

“A good start.”

“And I’ll read the manuscript. If I think there’s any chance she—we—can make something decent out of her book, I’ll give her my last six weeks. But the book doesn’t go to press until I sign off on it.”

J.P.’s eyes bored into Zach. Zach refused to blink or look away. He was used to having final say on all his books. He wasn’t about to relinquish that power, not for J.P., not for Nora Sutherlin, not for anyone.

“Easton, one Dan Brown title will outsell in a month what the entire poetry section of a bookstore will sell in five years. Sutherlin’s ‘pornography,’ as you call it, could pay for a lot of poetry around here.”

“I want the contract in my hands, J.P., or I won’t even meet her.”

J.P. sat back in his chair and exhaled loudly through his nose.

“Fine. She’s all yours. She’s got a nice little place in Connecticut. Take the train. Take my car. I don’t care. She’ll be home on Monday, she said.”

“Very well then.” Zach knew he was likely safe. When the mood struck him, Zach could be merciless to an author about his or her book’s shortcomings. The great writers took the criticism. The hacks couldn’t handle it. If he was hard enough on her, she’d beg for another editor.

The argument now at a stalemate, Zach rose tiredly from the chair and with hunched and aching shoulders headed toward the door.

A small cough stopped Zach before he could leave the office. J.P. didn’t meet his eyes, only ran his hand over the first page of the Hamlet reader’s copy in front of him.

“You should read this book when it comes out,” J.P. said, tapping the page. “Fascinating exploration of the feigned madness of Hamlet—‘I am but mad north north-west…’”

“‘But when the wind is southerly, I can tell a hawk from a handsaw,’” Zach finished the famous quotation.

“Sutherlin’s only as mad as Hamlet was. Don’t believe everything you’ve heard about her. The lady knows her hawks from her handsaws.”

“Lady?”

J.P. closed the book and didn’t answer the insult. Zach turned to leave again.

“You know, you’re still young, Easton, and too handsome for your own good. You should try it sometime.”

“What? Madness?” Zach asked, nodding toward the book.

“No. Happiness.”

“Happiness?” Zach allowed himself a bitter grin. “I’m afraid my memory’s too good for that.”

Zach returned to his office. His assistant, Mary, had left Nora Sutherlin’s manuscript on his desk along with a file folder.

Zach flipped the file open and barely glanced at Sutherlin’s bio. She was thirty-three, about a decade younger than him. Her first book had come out when she was twenty-nine. She’d released five titles since then; her second book, entitled Red, had created a minor sensation—great sales, lots of buzz. Zach studied the numbers in the file and saw why J.P. was so eager to acquire her. With each subsequent release, her sales had nearly doubled. Zach ran through the little he knew of erotica writers in his mind. These days erotica was about the only growth market in publishing. But it shouldn’t be about the money. Just the art.

Zach threw Sutherlin’s bio and sales projections in the trash. He’d stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics—it’s just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader…one judged a book only by the book. He shouldn’t care that Nora Sutherlin’s personal life was rumored to be as torrid as her prose. Only her book mattered. And his hopes for the book were not high.

Zach examined the manuscript with suspicion. Mary knew he preferred to read his books in hard copy versions. But she’d obviously had a little too much fun printing out this one for him. Across the scarlet-red cover blazed the title in a lurid Gothic font—The Consolation Prize. Editors almost invariably changed a book’s title, but he had to concede it was an interesting choice for a work of erotica. He opened the manuscript and read the first sentence: “I don’t want to write this story any more than you want to read it.”

Zach paused in his reading as he felt the shadow of something old and familiar whisper across his shoulder. He brushed the sensation off and read the line again. Then the next one and the next one…

2

Some days Zach hated his job. The actual editing he loved, taking a novel with pretensions of greatness and actually making it great. But the politics he hated, the budget crises, having to let a brilliant midlister go to make room for a better-selling hack… And now here he was, hauling his arse into Connecticut to meet some loony smut writer who’d somehow convinced one of the most respected lions in publishing that she deserved one of the best editors in literary fiction. Yes, some days he hated his job. Today he felt quite certain it hated him back.

Zach parked J.P.’s car in front of a rather quaint two-story Tudor cottage in the tame and pedestrian suburb. He checked the address, his directions and stared at the house. Nora Sutherlin—the notorious erotica writer whose books were banned as often as they were translated lived here? Zach could imagine his own grandmother in this house forcing tea and biscuits on small children.

With a heavy sigh, he strode to the front door and rang the bell. Shortly after, he heard footsteps approaching—sturdy, masculine footsteps. Zach allowed himself the pleasure of imagining that Nora Sutherlin might simply be the pen name for some overweight bloke in his mid-fifties.

A man did open the door. No, not a man—a boy. A boy wearing nothing but plaid pajama pants and a cluster of hemp necklaces, one dangling a small silver cross, stood across the threshold from Zach and regarded him with a sleepy smile.

“Nineteen,” he said in an accent Zach immediately recognized as American South. “Not sixteen. She just tells everybody I’m sixteen for the street cred.”

“Street cred?” Zach asked, stunned that the rumor of the teenage intern had proved true.

The boy shrugged his sun-freckled shoulders. “Her words. Wesley Railey. Just Wes.”

“Zachary Easton. I’m here to meet with your…employer?”

The boy, Wesley, laughed and brushed a swath of dark blond hair out of his brown eyes with the graceful languor of youth.

“My employer is right this way,” he said, exaggerating the Southern accent for comic effect. Zach entered the house and found it cozy and homey, replete with overstuffed furniture and bursting bookcases. “I like your accent. You’re British?”

“Lived in London the past ten years. You don’t sound like a native, either.”

“Kentucky. But Mom’s a Georgia peach so that’s where I get this mess from. I keep trying to lose it, but Nora won’t let me. Has a thing for accents.”

“That does not bode well,” Zach said as Wesley grabbed a V-neck white T-shirt off a pile of folded laundry and pulled it on. Zach noted the boy’s slim but muscular frame and wondered why Nora Sutherlin bothered with the intern pretense. A nineteen-year-old lover might be rather disgraceful for a woman of thirty-three but certainly legal.

Wesley led him down an abbreviated hallway. Without knocking he pushed open a door.

“Nor, Mr. Easton’s here.”

He stepped to the side and Zach blinked in surprise at his first glimpse of the infamous Nora Sutherlin.

From all the rumors he’d heard, he’d expected some sort of Amazonian in red leather wielding a riding crop. Instead, he found a pale, petite beauty with wavy black hair barely contained in a loose knot at her nape. And no red leather in sight at all. She wore men’s style pajamas, blue ones covered in what appeared to be little yellow ducks.