Chapter 8
8
Travis Stone sat hunched at his desk, fingers flying over his keyboard as he raced to keep up with the crazy story unfolding inside his head.
As an author, it was one of his biggest challenges—getting the story down on the page before he lost track of the scene he was imagining and the details vanished into the ether, never to be remembered again.
The flashes of inspiration were always too quick and fleeting for his clumsy typing skills. When he was caught in the midst of a creative burst, as he was now, the real world around him ceased to exist as he disappeared into the imaginary world he’d conjured on the page.
His heroine, Maura Shaw, a brilliant historian and accidental amateur sleuth, was currently pitched in a battle of wit and guile against Phillip Rorkman, an international jewel thief who was in hiding in the little Cotswold village of Morton Marshford, following a heist gone wrong.
If Maura could lure the suave Rorkman into the open long enough for him to incriminate himself and reveal his true identity, she could use it as leverage to persuade the thief to help her break the thus far impenetrable locks on the crypt door at Castle Ferleagh, inside which, Maura believed, lay incontrovertible proof that her late friend and university colleague, Rick Flynn, had not died during a hill-climbing accident as assumed but had in fact been murdered.
Uncovering proof of foul play would help Maura convince the police that local millionaire businessman and owner of Castle Ferleagh, Grant Reagan, was the culprit, something she’d long suspected but been unable to prove.
After months spent piecing together evidence, and assessing motives, means, and opportunity, Maura had never been closer to revealing Grant Reagan as the evil murderer she knew him to be, rather than the genial, wealthy philanthropist he’d convinced everyone else he was.
Maura’s immediate problem was that aligning herself with the jewel thief Phillip Rorkman sat uneasily with her. He was, after all, a villain. He’d never hurt or killed anyone—well, not as far as she knew—but he was a thief. Maura didn’t like making common cause with such a person.
However, as he, and he alone, was her best chance at breaking the crypt locks in Castle Ferleagh, she saw no other choice.
Which was why Maura was in the middle of concocting a plan to lure Phillip Rorkman into revealing his true identity, so that she could then swoop in and ‘persuade’ him to help her with her quest for justice in exchange for keeping his secrets to herself.
Travis’s fingers rattled over the keyboard as he concluded a half-page section of internal narrative during which Maura Shaw wrestled with her conscience and her morals as she sought to trick Phillip Rorkman into becoming her unwitting accomplice. With the lengthy paragraph written, he leaned back in his chair and stared at the screen, wondering what would happen next.
He hadn’t made things easy for his wry and whip-smart protagonist in this book. Not that he ever made things easy for her in any of the stories he wrote about her. Complicated and twisty plots were one of the hallmarks of his Maura Shaw mystery series and the reason why readers kept coming back for more.
Pulling a notepad across his desk and picking up a pen, Travis scribbled out some thoughts and questions that sprang automatically from the chapter he’d spent the morning writing and which concluded with Maura’s internal debate about her stratagem involving Phillip Rorkman the jewel thief.
Is this a step too far morally for Maura? Travis wrote. Rorkman is a jewel thief! Should she really be working alongside this guy?
Frowning at the scribbled note, Travis tapped his pen on the page before writing some more.
The whole plot so far leads to this moment where Maura and Rorkman are forced to connect and trust one another. It works! And it’s a terrific predicament that I now need to get her out of. Yes, Rorkman can help unlock the castle crypt thanks to his lock-breaking skills. But I think there’s more to Rorkman than meets the eye. Is he really just a brilliant jewel thief, motivated by nothing other than the thrill of the heist and the enormous sums of money he earns as a result? Or does he have deeper layers hidden beneath his moustache-twirling fa?ade? Deeper layers that would stun Maura if she knew about them and force her to rethink her opinion about this rugged and resourceful and handsome thief?
Travis tapped his pen against the notepad again, liking where this line of thought might take him. So far, Phillip Rorkman felt oddly one-dimensional as a character on the page, and Travis didn’t like that. Clearly, Maura Shaw didn’t like it either, which was why her internal monologue about the man had gone on quite as long as it had.
He made a note in the margin of the page to trim that monologue a little when it came to revising the draft. Enough was as good as a feast, after all.
Returning to his thoughts on the conflict between Maura and Rorkman, Travis scribbled down a few more notes.
Maybe Rorkman doesn’t just steal jewels in order to satisfy his rich clients and line his own pockets? Perhaps he has a softer side, too? Maybe he also uses the money he makes in order to…
Travis tapped the pen again, deep in thought as he searched for the solution he wanted.
Maybe he also uses the money to fund a home for orphaned children? To pay for their care and proper schooling? Or maybe he dishes out anonymous money gifts to people in desperate need, and could point to hundreds of people he’s helped out of crises over the years, but who never knew he was their secret guardian angel?
Travis liked these ideas, or at least the general gist of them. They needed refining and also quite a bit of work to get the tone right. Rorkman was a dastardly villain, and quite an amusing one at that, too, and Travis didn’t want to lose those characteristics by turning him into something else entirely, which meant he’d have to tread carefully if he were to reveal this different aspect of Rorkman’s personality.
And then there was the question of what any of this would mean for Rorkman’s interactions with Maura Shaw. Travis wondered if learning about another side to Rorkman that Maura never dreamt existed would make her see the man in an entirely new light—as a villainous jewel thief, yes, but also as something more, too.
Might this whole set up—with the ploy to lure Rorkman out and use him to pick the crypt locks at the castle—be the first step not only towards Maura understanding more about the jewel thief and who he really was, but also a step towards her developing completely unexpected feelings for him, too?
Travis felt excitement bubble at this idea. With eight books under his belt in the Maura Shaw mystery series, perhaps the whiff of a surprising and trouble-filled romance was exactly the sort of fuel needed to keep the engine roaring.
His mind whirring with the possibilities he’d uncovered, Travis dropped his pen and set aside his notepad and began typing again at the keyboard, his fingers flying to keep up with the new ideas sparked by his brain-storming and what they might mean for the scene he was currently writing.
He’d only committed a few fresh sentences to the page when he became aware of a beeping sound coming from somewhere nearby. Lost as he was in the story, it took a moment for him to acknowledge the sound and realise where it was coming from.
Looking up from the computer screen, Travis blinked, taking in the room where he was working as his mind shifted from his fictional world and back into the real world. Sunshine flooded through the tall bay window that looked out onto Foxglove Street, and from the desk where he worked he had a view of the cherry trees in the front garden, frothing with pink blossoms as birds chirped and fluttered between the branches.
On a small coffee table beside the window, Travis saw his phone and realised it was ringing.
Frowning, he rose from the desk chair and crossed the room, wondering how on earth the device could be ringing. When he was writing, he always put his phone in silent mode to prevent interruptions. Phone calls, text messages, social media notifications, emails—all those things were deadly distractions for a novelist who worked at his peak when fully immersed in his fictional world.
You couldn’t become immersed in your fictional world if your evil phone was constantly reminding you about what was going on in the real world. Travis had learned long ago to put the phone on silent until he’d finished his words for the day. No interruptions or distractions were allowed, nor were they welcomed.
So why was his phone ringing when he knew he’d turned the phone to silent?
Grabbing it up from the table, he saw his sister’s name on the screen. He wondered why she was calling him—she of all people knew his mornings were sacrosanct writing time—and he wondered, too, how her call had made it through to the ringer in the first place.
He tapped the screen to answer.
“Travis!” Michaela said in an urgent voice on the other end of the line. “You forgot all about today, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?” Travis said.
This prompted a long-suffering sigh from his sister. “You’re supposed to be giving a talk at Hamblehurst library right now! But you’re not there! And the reason I know you’re not there is because my friend at the library called me to ask if I knew where you were. Obviously, when she phoned you, it went straight to your voice mail.”
Travis frowned as the cogs inside his brain started working. There was something vaguely familiar about what Michaela was saying. Hurrying back to his computer with the phone still clasped to his ear, he pulled up the calendar and scanned his schedule for the day.
And there it was, the appointment he’d forgotten all about.
Book club talk at Hamblehurst library, 1.00pm.
Travis checked his watch. It was already five minutes past one. He hadn’t even realised it was already the afternoon.
“Michaela, I’m sorry. I forgot all about this.”
“No surprise there,” she replied, her frustrated tone tinged with a hint of amusement. “I know what you’re like when you’re writing. And I knew when I rang your phone and it went straight to your voice mail that you must be writing right now. It took three attempts to get through to you and bypass your phone’s silent mode.”
The technical explanation for the ringing phone now crystallised. As Travis had listed his sister as a close contact in his phone, the device automatically by-passed silent mode if she attempted to call him more than two times in quick succession, a fail-safe way to connect in an emergency situation.
Which, apparently, this was.
“Sorry,” Travis said again. “I lost track of time while I was writing.”
“No surprise there, either,” Michaela replied with a soft chuckle. “Look, I know I twisted your arm into agreeing to speak to the local book club people, but you did say you’d do it…”
“I know.”
“And they’re all really excited to welcome you. They’re a nice bunch of people and they’ll be crushed if you cancel now. When I spoke to the librarian, Ellie, a few minutes ago, she said everyone from the book club was already there and waiting for you to arrive.”
“Now I feel bad.”
“Good. You should feel bad. They’ve even brought home-made cakes to share with you during the Q&A.”
“And now I feel even worse,” he said, and meant it. The last thing he ever wanted to do was disappoint his loyal readers. Without them, he had no author career. Without them, he was just a lunatic hammering away at a keyboard while letting his imagination get the better of him.
“You can still make it over there, Travis,” Michaela said. “The library is only a fifteen-minute walk across town. Ten minutes, if you look lively. I’ll call Ellie back and tell her you’re running late, but you’re on your way.”
Travis glanced at the manuscript on his screen and at the blinking cursor that was waiting for him to keep typing the story. Inside his mind, he could still see Maura Shaw waiting there for him to start writing again, caught in the middle of the scene he was composing. Another thirty or forty minutes at the keyboard and he would finish the chapter.
But he couldn’t disappoint the people who were waiting for him at the library. It wasn’t their fault he’d forgotten all about the commitment he’d made to speak to their book club. Knowing he was already late for the talk made his neck heat with embarrassment.
“Yes, okay,” Travis said. “I’ll leave right now. Tell your friend I’m sorry to keep everyone waiting.”
Michaela gave a half-laugh, half-sigh down the phone. “What are we going to do with you, Travis?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“There is a world out there beyond writing, you know?”
“I think I’d heard something about that.”
With a grunt of laughter, Michaela hung up. Travis saved his work at the computer, then hurried upstairs to the bedroom to hunt around for the smart blazer he liked to wear to writerly events. As he searched fruitlessly through the suitcase on the floor, he wondered if he’d actually packed the blazer in the first place.
When he’d come to stay on Foxglove Street for a few weeks while finishing his current Maura Shaw book, he hadn’t planned on taking part in any book-related events at all. The whole point of decamping to the rural peace and quiet of the South Downs was so he could focus on writing and nothing else. If Michaela hadn’t volunteered him to speak to the local book club at the library, he wouldn’t have been going over there at all.
But Michaela had volunteered him, and he’d said yes after the fact, so now he needed his blazer. Wearing the blazer gave him the boost of confidence he required to appear in front of readers and discuss his writing in a way that made it seem like he actually knew what he was talking about.
Even after eight books published in his Maura Shaw series, not to mention the five other books he’d published before that, Travis still felt like an imposter who’d be uncovered as a clueless hack at any moment. The ‘writer blazer’—as Michaela jokingly called it—smartened him up and gave him the fa?ade of literary authority he needed to face the reading public.
It took him several minutes to locate the jacket, not in either of the suitcases he’d hauled upstairs into the bedroom when he’d arrived, but—inexplicably—folded up inside a small rucksack alongside some spare notebooks, a charging cable he’d been unsuccessfully looking for since he got here, and a review copy of a book written by an author friend which he’d promised to read and provide an encouraging blurb for in advance of publication.
With a stab of panic, he realised he’d forgotten all about that promise, too. He hadn’t even started reading the book yet. What was the deadline to send through a few positive remarks to his friend’s publishing company? Travis couldn’t remember.
But there was no time to worry about it right now. The book club people were waiting for him, and here he was getting distracted with yet another task he’d forgotten about.
Setting the review copy of his friend’s book on the bedside table where he’d hopefully remember to start reading it tonight, Travis pulled on the smart blazer and checked his appearance in the mirror. The black jeans and blue shirt he wore worked just fine with the dark grey blazer, but before he left the house, he’d have to do something about his hair.
Hours spent writing at the keyboard while absently running his hands through his hair as he ruminated about his story and pondered various plot developments had left him looking like a man who’d stuck his fingers in an electrical socket. His dark brown hair stood up in wild tufts all over his head and made him look manic.
Travis grabbed a comb and wrangled his hair into order with some styling product, then slapped on some aftershave. He had the beginnings of a scruffy beard forming, but there was no time to shave, so the aftershave and tamed hair would have to do the heavy lifting in the grooming department.
And, of course, the blazer. Thank God for the blazer. The moment he put it on, he felt ready to do his bit as a ‘writer’.
Travis hurried downstairs and back into the front room, which he’d set up as his temporary office while he stayed here. His leather satchel was leaning against the desk, and he picked it up and shoved a copy of the last Maura Shaw mystery novel inside.
When he’d agreed to appear before the book club at the local library, the chair of the group had asked if he’d mind reading a short excerpt from his latest book before taking questions from the floor. This was usual practice at these sorts of events, and as Travis had given several talks to numerous book festivals and special gatherings as part of the promotion when the previous novel was published, he already had a section in mind which he’d easily find once he got himself over there.
Out in the hallway, he slipped his phone inside his pocket, slung the satchel over his shoulder, and was about to leave when he realised he didn’t know where the house keys were.
For the past four days, he hadn’t left the house. Spring might be bursting into full glory outside, but Travis had limited his enjoyment of the changing season to either looking out the window or stepping into the small back garden. He was here in this house to work, not have a holiday, and he knew from bitter experience that if he ventured out and about, he’d only use it as an excuse to procrastinate.
The last few days, the writing had gone so well that Travis hadn’t wanted to leave the house, anyway. He’d hoped that renting the cosy 1930s house in the quaint town of Hamblehurst for several weeks would give him the comfortable surroundings he needed to make solid progress with his current novel, and so it had proved.
Except he’d become such a hermit while hunched over his keyboard that he now couldn’t remember where the door keys were.
Frowning, he tried to think where he put them the last time he’d gone out. Which was when, exactly?
Last Thursday, he remembered in a flash, when he’d walked to the high street for milk and bread and other essentials. Retracing his movements from memory, he remembered coming home with his bags of shopping, unlocking the door, closing it behind him and dropping the old-fashioned latch into place, carrying the groceries into the kitchen…
…and setting the ring of house keys on the counter while he stored his purchases in the fridge and kitchen cupboards.
He glanced towards the fruit bowl on the granite countertop and saw the keys still lying there where he’d left them, tucked beneath the rim of the bowl and obscured by a bunch of overhanging bananas. Grabbing the keys, he turned again for the front door. Between searching for his blazer, taming his mad hair, and looking for the house keys, he’d taken far longer to get moving than he would’ve liked. As he locked the door behind him, he checked his watch.
It was almost one-fifteen already.
Shaking his head at his terminal disorganisation, Travis hurried out onto Foxglove Street and turned towards the high street.
He was only a few steps into his journey when he realised he had no idea where Hamblehurst library actually was.
Pausing, he pulled out his phone and brought up the map app. With clumsy fingers, he tapped in his desired location and the map plotted a route from where he stood towards a destination about ten minutes away, across the high street and down a lane and into the market square beyond.
Ten minutes was too long to get over there, considering how late he already was. Travis broke into a jog, not wanting to keep the book club people waiting any longer than necessary.
He dashed along Foxglove Street, barely glancing at the gorgeous houses and pretty front gardens he passed because he knew better than to let the wandering eye of his inner creative spirit start peering around for inspiration and attempt to convince him to slow down for a better look.
Although even as he hurried past, Travis could admit to himself that it was an incredibly pretty street and he was lucky to be spending time here… even if he had been holed up indoors for most of the time since he arrived.
And he could also admit to himself that the change of scenery from city to rural town had already worked wonders on his muse, despite staying indoors most of the time while bashing out his new manuscript at the keyboard.
Travis’s home was in east London, where he lived in a spacious second-floor apartment in Spitalfields. He’d never dreamt of being able to afford to own a property in such a popular part of the city, but the success of the Maura Shaw mystery series had given him financial security and propelled him onto the housing ladder in one of his favourite London areas. Travis loved his flat in the old brick-fronted building near Spitalfields Market, and he loved the buzz of London life, with every city attraction either right there in his neighbourhood or quickly accessed with a short bus or tube journey.
Aged only thirty, Travis knew he was fortunate to enjoy an exciting London life, paid for by doing something he loved and which didn’t feel like work at all. Writing was his joy, his escape, his great passion, and the fact that it had bought him a flat in the middle of London still amazed him even now, several years into his commercial success.
There was nothing about his Spitalfields flat he didn’t love. Well, that had been true, for a while, until a neighbour started renovating the flat directly below him and filling the entire building with construction noise from first thing in the morning until late into the afternoon.
Accustomed to the noise of city life, Travis had long ago learned to block out the world beyond his window when he was writing. Traffic, honking horns, shouting and yelling, comings and goings—all this, and more, was just part and parcel of London life. No one looking for a quiet life would ever think they’d find it living anywhere near central London.
But hammering and drilling and sawing taking place just a few feet beneath your floor was another prospect altogether. Add in workmen talking loudly to one another above the racket from their tinny radios, and the endless clatter up and down the shared stairwell as building supplies were brought in, and rubble was sent crashing down through open windows into skips set up on the pavement below, and life soon took became a misery for Travis.
Working from home was no easy matter when there was building work happening all day long and not even his noise cancelling headphones could drown out the sounds. He decamped to other locations to work on his book, such as nearby cafes and the local library, but none of these places were ideal for an introverted author who wrote best while perched at his desk at home.
With a deadline approaching for the completed manuscript of his latest Maura Shaw novel, and with progress constantly interrupted thanks to the endless racket happening inside his building, Travis had decided drastic action was required if he was to have any chance of finishing the book on time.
He’d searched around on various home holiday letting websites and was about to take the leap and just rent something—anything, anywhere—to get him away from the relentless noise at home, when he mentioned his predicament to Michaela one night while they chatted on the phone.
His sister had stunned him by announcing she had the perfect solution for him. A friend of hers had gone travelling with her husband for three months, driving a motorhome across Europe from France to Croatia, and although they’d planned to let their home to holiday makers while they were gone, they’d heard too many stories about guests trashing properties and leaving owners to deal with the mess, and in the end they’d decided they’d rather not spend their once-in-a-lifetime holiday worrying about what was going on inside their house while they were gone.
The couple had arranged with a group of friends to take turns checking in on the place instead, watering plants and making sure all was well. Michaela was one of those friends, it turned out. She’d suggested she contact her friend and ask how she’d feel about a completely reliable person living there for a few weeks, someone who could be trusted to look after the place.
Before Travis could give the idea any thought, his sister had already hung up to make the call to her friends. When she phoned him back thirty minutes later, he could almost hear her grinning down the line.
Her friends loved the idea. The woman had even read some of Travis’s Maura Shaw mysteries, and was thrilled at the prospect of having an author write his new book while living in her home. They apparently required little further persuasion that this brother of Michaela could be trusted, despite never having met him, as they trusted Michaela’s judgement and that’s what mattered to them.
Travis could travel down to Hamblehurst as soon as he wanted and pick up the key from Michaela, who’d take him to the house on Foxglove Street and show him the ropes.
More than a little stunned by the speed with which this arrangement was settled, Travis was about to ask for a moment to think it through, not wanting to just decamp to some stranger’s house without at least seeing a few pictures of the place first. But before he could ask any questions, a piercing drilling sound started in the flat below him, so loud it nearly drowned out the sound of his sister’s voice down the line.
He couldn’t take another minute of the building racket, and nor could his manuscript deadline.
Travis had yelled down the phone to his sister, “Yes! That sounds amazing! I’ll be there later today!”
After some hasty packing, he caught a train to Hamblehurst that same afternoon. Michaela met him at the station in her car and helped him load his luggage into the boot before driving him the short distance to Foxglove Street.
The peace and quiet of the lovely street was matched only by the peace and quiet inside the lovely house. Two days after arriving, Travis had written more than he’d managed in the previous week and a half in London. Relocating to Hamblehurst had worked its magic.
Perhaps it had worked its magic too well, Travis thought as he hurtled down Foxglove Street on his way towards the library. The quiet house and quaint street had allowed him to become completely immersed in his new Maura Shaw mystery, to the exclusion of just about everything else.
That was good for the book. But it was bad for normal and polite human functioning. Immersed inside his story, he’d lost track of other obligations, commitments, and important tasks.
Travis picked up his pace as he crossed the high street. Veering east along the busy shopping route, he paused to check the map again to avoid taking a wrong turn. As he tapped the phone screen, he accidentally hit the wrong icon, pulling up a social media app by mistake.
Before he could shut it down again, he caught sight of a string of notifications popping up. Wincing when they quickly reached three digits, Travis felt a bolt of anxiety flash through him. Why were there so many unopened notifications?
In order to focus on writing his books, Travis paid a freelance assistant to help with the social media aspects of his author marketing. In an ideal world, he’d be able to write his books and also deal with all the marketing tasks himself, but there were only twenty-four hours in each day and he couldn’t do everything.
Since the Maura Shaw series became a commercial success, the interactions on his social media platforms had skyrocketed. While all the posts he made there were written by him and he enjoyed posting regular updates and snippets about his books, which he knew his readers appreciated, it was impossible to respond to all the comments on those posts, many of which ran into the hundreds. Although he’d tried for a long time to do everything himself, it wasn’t sustainable, not if he wanted to keep writing books, which was, after all, what his readers expected him to do.
A year ago, he’d admitted defeat and hired an assistant to help deal with social media content—liking comments posted by readers, responding where necessary, and ensuring Travis saw any relevant comments he might want to respond to himself. His assistant, Ruth, also helped deal with the increasing volumes of email he received from readers, and other important author business tasks.
The arrangement had worked fine so far. There had been a few teething problems, but they’d sorted those out and Ruth had soon proved worth the money he paid her. Freed from having to trawl through social media notification alerts to make sure nothing was missed, Travis was able to focus not just on writing books but on using his limited time to create social media posts he knew his readers would actually enjoy seeing, secure in the knowledge that his assistant would deal with the comments ‘housekeeping’ work.
Travis still dipped into the comments when he had a free moment and interacted directly, and he was upfront with his readers about having help from an assistant to make sure their comments weren’t missed. The readers, a sensible lot for the most part, appreciated not only his honesty but his desire to focus on writing new books for them to devour rather than faffing around on social media for hours each day.
His assistant checked his social media author profiles daily, and the allotted time he paid her for her work meant the notifications should never pile up like apparently had, judging by the app he’d accidentally opened. There were over four hundred unseen notifications, which was a huge number.
Why hadn’t Ruth dealt with at least some of those today already?
Curious and anxious now, Travis tapped on another social media app. When it loaded, the notifications popped up automatically. There were two hundred unseen notifications, and even more flashed up while the app remained opened.
This wasn’t right. What was going on? Was Ruth ill? Had there been some sort of emergency that had stopped her from working as usual?
Travis flicked through to his call log, wondering if he’d missed a call from Ruth while working this morning. Perhaps she’d tried to get in touch to tell him she was having some kind of problem?
But he saw no missed calls from her, nor any messages. When he quickly dipped into his email app and selected the private account he used for communicating with her, there were no unopened emails from her, either.
Travis blinked, realising he was lingering on the street and scrolling on his phone when he was supposed to be hurrying towards the library. Whatever was going on with his assistant’s failure to deal with his social media tasks, he couldn’t think about it right now. The book club people were still waiting for him while he was standing around in bafflement.
Sighing, he brought up the map app and rechecked his route, and then got moving again. Despite telling himself not to think about all those unopened social media notifications that were piling up, he couldn’t help it.
How long had some of those notifications been there for? His readers might be a decent bunch of people in the round, but he knew from bitter experience that some folk got upset if you failed to at least acknowledge or ‘like’ the comments they’d taken the time to write. Keeping fans on side was crucial, which was why he’d hired an assistant in the first place.
Between forgetting about the book club talk he’d agreed to take part in and now realising there was something awfully wrong with his social media upkeep, Travis felt suddenly overwhelmed.
All he wanted to do was write books and tell stories. But there was so much more to being an author than he could have ever realised, and sometimes he wondered if he was up to the job at all. He couldn’t keep up with everything and too often he felt like he was letting his readers down—not writing new books fast enough, not interacting on social media enough, not turning up to enough in-person events…
Travis realised he’d reached the market square where the library was located. Glancing across the sunny tree-lined space, he saw the quaint library on the other side. He checked his watch and saw it was almost one-twenty-five, which made him almost half an hour late.
Self-recriminations rang through his head once more, but he ignored them as he barrelled towards the library, pausing only to catch his breath before hurrying inside. Right now, all that mattered was honouring the commitment he’d made to the local book club and, of course, apologising for being so late.
Concerns about what on earth was going on with his social media content and why his assistant had let all those notifications pile up—well, those would have to wait until later.
He could only put out one fire at a time.
Travis took a deep breath and straightened his blazer, grateful for the boost of confidence the smart jacket gave him. He might feel like a wreck thanks to the morning’s developments, but the readers he was about to meet didn’t need to know what was going on inside his head. They wanted to meet the author of the Maura Shaw series and hear more about his clever and formidable fictional sleuth, so that’s what he’d give them.
He pushed through the library doors and pasted on a smile for the book club folks who were waiting for him.