Prologue
Prologue
“I know you’re in there, Hugh, so do us both a favor and open the bloody door, would you?
The motorway was hellish and I’m a woman of a certain age in need of the bathroom and a G readers loved his easygoing style at public events, Eleanor always by his side adding star power.
They’d been the gilded couple, the handsome writer and the luminous theater actress.
And then she was gone, wiped off the earth by an abrupt and tragic riding accident, and it was as if someone had turned Hugh’s sun off.
Fi rose to settle a blanket over him and was about to turn in herself when an email alert illuminated the screen of the computer on his desk in the bay window.
Instinctively, she wandered across to dim it so it didn’t disturb Hugh.
Not that it was likely to—he was sleeping the sleep of the dead, one arm flung above his head, the other trailing toward the oak floorboards.
She’d taken his half-empty glass from his hand awhile back, remembering how much Eleanor had prized the huge Turkish rug beneath the coffee table.
Clicking a random key on Hugh’s keyboard, Fi squinted at the suddenly glaring brightness, raising her glasses with a quiet jangle of chain.
She wasn’t planning to look, especially, or to not look, especially, but she couldn’t hold back her agent instinct when she noticed the flashing cursor on an open manuscript.
“What have you been writing, Hugh?” she whispered, leaning closer to the screen. Within a couple of minutes she’d abandoned her plan to allow her client his privacy and settled down in his leather desk chair, unable to tear her eyes away from the screen.
—
“Morning,” Hugh said, bleary-eyed and sheepish. “Did I pass out?”
Fi handed him a coffee, careful not to pounce too soon.
“Mexican eggs,” she said, laying him a place at the table she’d scrubbed.
“You really didn’t need to cook for me,” he said, scraping his chair back on the flagstones. “But thank you anyway, smells good.”
In the same way a mother might roast a chicken for incoming teenagers on a particularly cold Sunday, Fiona Fox had mastered a small but reliable menu of dishes for occasions exactly such as this, comfort food designed to engender trust and lower raised guards.
She sipped her coffee and sat opposite him as he ate, safe in the knowledge that the food was restaurant standard.
“I read your manuscript,” she said.
His body stilled, then he lowered his cutlery and raised his gaze.
“I haven’t written one.”
She looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Yes, you have.”
“You had no right.”
“It was just there, Hugh, and I’m your agent.”
“It’s not for sale.”
She nodded, knowing everything has its price.
“Your publisher has been incredibly fair with you,” she said, pitching her voice low and neutral. “They haven’t applied pressure, but we all know you need to deliver a book, and believe me when I say I get it, Hugh, your mind isn’t in the right place to write another DI Rivers yet.”
“Bear with me, that’s all I’m asking,” he said. “A couple more months.”
“You know that’s not realistic,” she said.
He banged his cutlery down with a clatter. “I can’t, Fi. Don’t ask me to share that manuscript, because I just cannot.”
She held his gaze steadily across the table, warming up.
She was Fiona Fox, and she never failed at the negotiation table, whether in a London boardroom or a Cotswolds kitchen.
“It’s easily the most beautiful love story I’ve ever read, and you know how many have crossed my desk over the years.
Or maybe you don’t. Think of a big number and times it by fifty. ”
“I don’t write love stories.”
“And yet you have.”
Hugh looked away and shook his head, exasperated.
“But I don’t want to. There won’t be any more where that came from—Christ, I don’t even know where it came from.
I just…I felt this thing stuck inside me, this physical block.
This fucking deadweight, Fi. It eased things to get some of it out onto paper. I could breathe around it, at least.”
“Grief, Hugh,” Fiona said. “It’s called grief.”
“Yeah, well it’s my grief, and it’s private. You’re asking me to share Eleanor with the world, and I won’t do it.”
Fi chose her line of attack in accordance with his.
“She dances across those pages like Ginger Rogers, Hugh. I felt her twirl and breathless spin around every word you’ve written, heard her laughter slide between the fragile lines, saw the blur of her tears through my own.
It’s jubilant and magical and it’s tragic on the spin of a dime, because that’s what she was, wasn’t she?
You’ve somehow captured her essence in a way that only a man in love could, distilled her into words in a way only you possibly could, because by God did that woman adore you. ”
“And now you want me to share that intimate part of me, of us, with every Tom, Dick, and Harry on their sun loungers around the pool at some godforsaken two-star hotel in Spain? Have her hang around next to disgraced politicians’ autobiographies on the reduced stand in the bookstore?
Can’t you see how impossible that would be, how utterly fucking disrespectful to her memory? ”
“I see the exact opposite,” Fi reasoned.
“Eleanor lived for the performance, for the audience, for the spotlight. What more magnificent thing could you do for her now than let her take center stage one last, unexpected time? You’ve immortalized her with your words, given her a new role to play, first-night glory every time someone opens the book. ”
Hugh eyeballed his agent across the table, and she stared right back, knowing her words had landed on a tender, exposed place.
“But all the questions, Fi. The bandwagon, the interviews, the publicity.” He shrank into himself like a kicked dog. “I can’t face it.”
Hugh didn’t know it, but Fiona had spent a sleepless night working out counterpoints for all of his potential arguments. She wanted that knockout manuscript almost more than she wanted Hugh Hudson as her client.
“A sweetener like this could buy you another six months. Nine even, to write the next DI Rivers. Space to think, get away maybe.”
“Except there’d be no space, would there, with edits and publicity. You can’t fool me with empty promises, I’m too long in the tooth for that.”
She steepled her fingers over her coffee cup, blood-red fingernails resting against one another. “Unless it’s put out under a different author’s name.”
He blinked, uncomprehending. “A pseudonym?”
She clicked her tongue, as if making up the meticulously thought-out plan on the hoof. “Not exactly. If it does well, which it will, a pseudonym without a face could easily track back to you, given how adored Eleanor was. Is.”
He sat back in his chair, scowling. “Then what are you suggesting?”
She paused, just long enough to be convincing.
“We splash a completely unconnected author’s name across the cover.
A woman, even. I could find an unknown actor to act as the public face, someone to deal with any publicity.
Eleanor would have rather enjoyed that, don’t you think?
Reaching a hand back to help the next girl up the ladder? ”
Hugh dropped his gaze to his coffee cup and Fiona waited, never one to overplay her hand. She knew she had him when he sighed, bone deep and weary.
“A year, Fi. Twelve clear months to write the next DI Rivers book without any pressure, and your cast-iron guarantee that my name will never be publicly linked to this manuscript.”
“Have I ever let you down?”
Hugh Hudson had spent the last twenty years honing his craft, and it had all come together in this once-in-a-lifetime manuscript poured straight from his tender, lovesick heart onto the page. It had made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
She’d have bought him two years if he’d asked for it, because that unicorn manuscript had bestseller written all over it.