Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Farley
The screech cut through the mountain silence like a knife through butter—high-pitched, feral, absolutely blood-curdling. I dropped my wineglass, which thankfully was empty, and dove away from the window like I was in an action movie and someone had just opened fire.
Mountain lion. That was definitely a mountain lion.
I’d read about them before coming here. Virginia had a small population, mostly in the western mountains. They were elusive, rarely seen, and—according to the helpful Wikipedia article I’d consumed at 2 AM while spiraling about Ollie—capable of taking down a full-grown deer.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I crawled back to the window, keeping low like that would somehow help if a two-hundred-pound apex predator decided my cabin looked delicious. I lifted the edge of the curtain with one trembling finger and peered out into the twilight.
Through the trees, I could just make out the cabin next door—the one Gladys had mentioned belonged to my only neighbor. A man stood on the back deck, arms raised toward the sky in what appeared to be some kind of yoga pose.
“Get inside,” I hissed at him through the glass. “There’s a mountain lion, you idiot!”
The man, of course, couldn’t hear me and continued whatever wellness bullshit he was doing while certain death prowled the woods.
I waited, barely breathing, scanning the tree line for any sign of tawny fur or glowing eyes. My hands were sweating despite the cold. Should I call someone? Did 911 even work up here? Should I run outside and warn him?
But then he moved, gathering up what looked like a yoga mat, and headed back inside his cabin.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and dropped the curtain. The mountain lion probably wasn’t even interested in humans anyway. Everything was fine.
Except nothing was fine.
I walked to the kitchen on shaky legs and poured myself three fingers of bourbon. Then I added another finger because mountain lions and Ollie’s betrayal apparently required equal parts alcohol.
The cabin was exactly as Gladys had left it yesterday: cozy, rustic, and utterly indifferent to my emotional devastation.
Exposed log walls. Stone fireplace with a fire I’d somehow managed not to kill.
Comfortable furniture that probably cost less than my monthly coffee budget in New York.
It should have been peaceful. Restorative. The perfect place to lick my wounds.
Instead, it felt like exile.
I’d spent last night unpacking with a manic precision that comes from trying not to think about your life falling apart.
Everything was organized. My clothes hung in the closet by color, and my toiletries lined the bathroom counter in order of morning routine usage.
The books were stacked on the coffee table for priority reading.
And my laptop sat on the dining table, open to the document I’d promised myself I wouldn’t touch.
But Margaret had said, no work. No manuscripts, no editorial letters, no emails to authors. She hadn’t said anything about personal projects.
I sat down at the table with my bourbon and stared at the screen.
LADY ISOLDE’S LOVER A Novel by Farley M. Davenport
I’d been working on this book for three years. Three years of stolen hours after midnight, of weekends spent writing instead of socializing, of pouring my secret conviction into pages that no one had ever read.
The truth was, I thought I could write a better romance than half the authors on my list. I’d edited enough of them—fixed their sagging middles, tightened their prose, told them where their emotional beats were landing wrong.
I understood story structure, character arcs, and basically everything about how romance novels worked.
Surely that meant I could write one.
I pulled up the blurb I’d been revising for the past six months and read it with fresh eyes:
In the candlelit salons of Regency England, Lady Isolde finds herself ensnared not merely by the sinews of Lord Thaddeus’s arms, but by the labyrinthine metaphors of his soul.
Each flex of his biceps is a text to be interpreted, each sigh a semiotic rupture.
Their passion is not simply physical—it is a dissertation in desire, a thesis bound in velvet and sweat.
As the manor’s walls echo with whispers of scandal, Isolde must decide: will she surrender to the embrace of a man whose body is both symbol and substance, or resist the dialectics of longing that threaten to dismantle her carefully footnoted existence?
A romance of theory and throbbing, Lady Isolde’s Lover is the novel that proves love is the most rigorous critique of all.
I took a long drink of bourbon.
It was terrible.
Not just bad—aggressively, pretentiously, almost satirically terrible. The kind of terrible that would make my authors laugh until they cried. “Semiotic rupture”? “Dialectics of longing”? What the hell had I been thinking?
I’d been thinking I was smarter than romance. That I could elevate the genre with my literary sensibilities and editorial expertise. That I could prove something to Ollie and Roger and everyone in publishing who’d ever dismissed romance as lesser fiction.
Instead, I’d written the fictional equivalent of a philosophy dissertation having sex with a thesaurus.
I highlighted the entire blurb and pressed delete.
Then I stared at the blank page and felt the weight of my inadequacy pressing down like a physical thing. I couldn’t even write a decent blurb. How had I thought I could write an entire novel?
My phone buzzed on the table—another text from someone I was ignoring.
The count was up to one hundred and forty-seven messages since I’d left New York.
Savannah checking in. My assistant editor asked about manuscripts.
Friends expressing concern. And seventeen texts from Ollie that I’d deleted without reading.
I was three paragraphs into revising Lady Isolde’s opening chapter—where she attends a ball and engages in “a hermeneutic exchange of glances” with Lord Thaddeus—when I heard it.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I froze, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
The sound was coming from the front door. Rhythmic, insistent, like something was trying to get in.
Mice. Oh God, please don’t let it be mice. I could handle heartbreak and professional humiliation, but I drew the line at rodents.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
I stood up slowly, bourbon in hand, and approached the door like it might explode. The scratching continued, patient and determined.
Then I heard it: a small, plaintive “Meow.”
I yanked open the door, ready to lecture whatever animal was disturbing my spiral into self-pity, and found myself staring at the most beautiful cat I’d ever seen.
It was pure white, long-haired, and absolutely enormous. Its fur looked freshly groomed despite the fact that it was apparently a stray. And its eyes—one blue, one green—fixed on me with an expression of supreme entitlement.
“Oh no,” I said. “No, no, no. Gladys told me about you. You’re the stray. I’m not supposed to feed you.”
The cat walked past me into the cabin like I’d just invited it to a cocktail party.
“Hey! I didn’t—you can’t just—”
But the cat was already making its way to the kitchen with the confidence of someone who’d done this before. It sat down in front of the refrigerator, wrapped its tail around its paws, and stared at me.
“I’m not feeding you,” I said firmly, closing the door against the cold. “Gladys was very clear. No feeding the stray cat.”
The cat blinked slowly.
“I mean it. You need to leave.”
The cat’s expression didn’t change. Just kept staring with those unsettling heterochromatic eyes that seemed to see straight through all my carefully constructed defenses.
“This is manipulation,” I pointed at it. “I’m an editor, and I know manipulation when I see it.” The cat continued to stare at me. “For God’s sake, I edit romance novels. I’ve seen every emotional manipulation tactic in the book.”
The cat meowed—a small, polite sound that told me I was being unreasonable.
I lasted approximately forty-five seconds.
“Fine,” I muttered, opening the refrigerator. “But this is a one-time thing. Don’t get used to it.”
I’d stopped at the Boar’s Head Inn on my way up the mountain yesterday—a fancy resort where people who weren’t nursing broken hearts probably had lovely romantic getaways.
I’d bought entirely too much expensive cheese, some prosciutto that cost more than my monthly gym membership, and a container of smoked salmon I’d planned to eat while feeling sorry for myself.
The cat could have the salmon.
I dumped it onto a plate—one of the cabin’s mismatched dishes that probably came from a thrift store—and set it on the floor. The cat approached with dignity, sniffed delicately, and began eating as if it were at a five-star restaurant.
I poured myself another bourbon and watched the cat eat, feeling the familiar ache of loneliness settle into my bones.
Ollie was probably with Roger right now.
Probably in our—his—apartment in Chelsea, the one we’d decorated together with the throw pillows I’d obsessed over and the coffee table we’d found at that flea market in Brooklyn.
They were probably laughing about me. About how uptight I was, how controlling, how I couldn’t just let things be spontaneous and fun.
He’s probably happier without me, I thought, and took another drink.
The cat finished eating and looked up at me with what might have been gratitude or might have been judgment. With cats, it was hard to tell.
Then it walked over and rubbed against my legs, purring loud enough to be heard over the crackling fire.
“Don’t get attached,” I told it, but my voice cracked on the last word. “I’m not keeping you. This isn’t... I can’t...”
The cat continued purring, weaving between my legs in figure-eights, leaving white fur on my black pants.