Chapter 20
“I can’t fail at this,” I said from my seat at the coffee shop we went to after driving away from the office, leaving Rob standing in the parking lot. For all I knew he was still standing there, still confused.
“You want to stick it to him now, don’t you? Become the biggest success ever so you can rub it in his face,” Sloane said. “I’m not mad at that motivation.”
Oliver hadn’t joined us yet. It hadn’t taken as long at the office as I thought it would, even with the interruption from Rob. “Yes, that is one of the reasons I want to succeed now. But it’s way down the list. And I have a few thousand steps to take before success.”
“You’re right. We need a plan of action. How do you feel about ethics?” she asked.
“What about them?”
“Are you for or against?”
“I mean, I was sleeping with my boss, so…”
“That says more about his ethics than yours, but sure. With that answer, I’m going to assume that your ethics are questionable.”
“Okay. Thank you. Are you kicking me while I’m down or is there a point to this?”
“How would you feel about stealing potential clients?”
I choked on the sip of chai I’d just taken. “What do you mean?” I said through the coughing fit that followed.
“You know what I mean. Go through the queries authors send to Rob and poach some of his potential clients.”
“He’s going to disable my access. That’s why I gave Kari my personal email.”
“Then sign into his email from home. You have his passwords, right? Because you literally did everything for him.”
“I have his passwords.”
She shrugged. “It’s a good plan.”
“I can’t steal his potential clients. Did you see Rob’s face when he saw those books you took? How do you think he’d feel if I took his clients?”
“I don’t care about Rob’s feelings,” she said.
“I can’t do that…”
“But…” she prompted, obviously seeing my mind working.
“But maybe I can reach out to the ones from the past that I thought had potential but he ended up rejecting and see if they’ve found agents yet.
And… what about our shared clients? I did all the work for them anyway and they love me.
The commission on their past projects is lost to me, stays with the agency, but what if I convinced them to come with me for their next projects? ”
“Yes!” she said.
This could be the jump start I needed. But before I could even think about approaching clients, I needed to take the proper steps: make a Publishers Weekly announcement, change my online profiles, make a website, contact editors.
“I need to get a business license, don’t I?
This is going to take time. I don’t have time.
I already feel the clock ticking on my savings. ”
“Can your parents loan you some money in the future if it takes you longer than you think?”
I cringed. I didn’t want to have to do that.
“I haven’t even told my parents what’s really going on yet.
I’ll call them today. And my sister… I need to tell her that I have no choice but to start my own agency because I quit after not getting a promotion…
” I really should also tell her why I had to quit, what had led me down that path.
But the thought of her face after learning I’d slept with Rob sent icy shivers through me.
I was moving on with my life, leaving him behind; it was a nonissue now. I didn’t need to tell her that part.
“What’s worse? Facing Rob today or having to call your sister?”
“It’s a draw,” I said with a laugh. “My sister is just—”
“Perfect?”
“Yes. And Rob is maddening.”
“Yes, he is, but you look hot, and the fact that Rob had to see what he is missing one last time is making me happy right here.” She placed a hand over her heart.
I let out a breathy laugh.
“But we all know who you really dressed up for.” Her gaze was over my right shoulder and I turned to see Oliver come through the door. All wavy-haired, chocolate-eyed, chiseled-jawed, six-foot-something of him.
Even though my cheeks were now warm, back to her, I said, “I wouldn’t call jeans and a button-down shirt dressed up .” I wiped my palms against said jeans.
“We both know what your normal Sunday coffee outfits consist of and it’s not a shirt with buttons.”
I ignored her and stood when I realized he hadn’t seen us in the back corner yet. My movement caught his eye and he had the nerve to smile at me. His smile made my insides squishy. It really was going to be hard to ignore the physical connection we had.
“Hi,” he said. “You two look like you are fully functional today.” He slid onto the bench seat next to me. I picked up my tote that was between us and put it on my opposite side. His scent immediately clouded my senses.
Sloane was in a chair across from us. “ Fully is up for debate,” she said.
“Shhh!” A guy at the next table over hissed in our direction. He was on his computer typing away.
“This isn’t a library, dude,” Sloane said.
“Are you a writer?” I asked, disregarding his annoyed face. “I’m a literary agent if you’re looking. Tell your friends.”
“I’m taking a test,” he said, like we should’ve known that.
“Again,” Sloane said. “A library would’ve been the better choice. Or noise-canceling headphones. Do you have a pair of those?”
His bushy brows went down and he turned his attention back to his computer screen.
I tried not to laugh, but I did lower my voice when I said, “I need business cards.”
“So you can hand them to anyone typing on a computer? You need to learn the talent of discernment. You want clients, but not just any clients.” She nodded disgustingly toward the test taker. “Good ones.”
She wasn’t wrong. “I need a website,” I said. “And online posts. Lots of posts. Do I need TikTok? I’m not good at TikTok.”
“Stay off TikTok,” Sloane said. “You’d be addicted to that in hours and become completely useless.”
“Rude,” I said.
“I know someone who can help you with a website,” Oliver said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Someone who designs things on computers for a living,” he prompted.
“Oh! You? You’d help me?”
“We’re friends, right?” he asked in that sincere voice of his.
“Yes, you’re friends ,” Sloane said, emphasizing the word way more than one should emphasize any word.
When I’d told her our decision the night before to slow things down, get to know each other a little better, become friends first, she’d given me the most perplexed look and said, “Friends with benefits?” I had responded with, “I wish.”
“You’re a terrible person,” I said to her now. To Oliver, I said, “Thank you. I’m just desperate enough to take you up on the website thing. Wait, how much do you charge?”
He laughed a warm throaty laugh that made my heart gallop. “Only the friend rate.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“A coffee.”
“Sold,” I said, and stood, ready to march to the register that second.
He stood as well, after me, as if he had just remembered we were sitting in a coffee shop and I could pay my half of the bargain that second. “Not now,” he said. “After the work is finished and you decide if it’s worth a coffee or not.”
“If it’s not worth a coffee, we’re both in trouble,” I said, and stepped around the table.
He cut me off, his fingers brushing down my left arm as he did, hovering just short of my hand. “Just wait. I don’t want to… I can’t… Just wait.”
I raised my hands in surrender and said, “Fine, I will not buy you coffee today. But if you don’t let me buy it after you complete the work, due to however those half sentences you just uttered ended, we will have beef.”
“Beef?” he asked.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what that means.”
He smiled that killer smile of his at me again, then whispered, close to my ear, “Don’t pretend anyone still uses that word.” With those words, he left me standing there, the back of my neck prickling to life, as he went to order the coffee he refused to let me buy.
“Oh,” Sloane said as I sat down again. “I see now.”
“What?”
“You two have a lot of chemistry.”
I laughed. “I know. But do we have anything else?”
Her eyebrows popped up. “If you ever want to find out, you have to actually let him in. I know Rob hurt you, made you wary, made you think you only had one thing to offer, but—”
A lump sprung to my throat. “This has nothing to do with Rob.”
She pursed her lips and stopped talking.
Oliver came back to the table a few minutes later carrying an iced coffee with some sort of drizzle—caramel? Brown sugar? He sat down, then let his shoulder bump into mine, as if greeting me again.
I smiled up at him.
“Did you bring a book?” He nodded toward my book at the corner of the table. I had pulled it out earlier when digging through my tote for my wallet.
“It’s her emotional support book,” Sloane said.
I shoved it back into my bag. “Downtime is a real thing.”
“It’s true,” Sloane said. “I carry scripts around. I once read an entire screenplay while stuck in standstill traffic.”
“What do you carry around, Oliver?” I asked.
“The entire internet,” he said, patting his phone in his pocket.
“Boring,” I said with a smirk.
“Speaking of boring,” Sloane said. “Time to brainstorm Margot’s new business venture. Have you thought of a name for your agency yet?”
“Rude transition,” I said.
“I thought it was brilliant.”
“And yes. I have thought of a name. Love Lit.” My last name was Hart. It seemed like the perfect fit.
“You’re going to pigeonhole yourself into only representing romance authors?” she asked.
“It’s what I’m passionate about.”
“I saw some pretty insane passion when you were talking about Kari’s thriller/horror the other day.”
“Thriller/horror?” Oliver asked.
“Yes,” I said. “One of my ex-boss’s client’s works in progress. And speaking of, Kari sent me the next fifty pages.” I held up my phone, the notification I’d gotten for the waiting email earlier still up on my screen.
“For someone who rejected you so handily today,” Sloane said, “she sure didn’t waste any time sending those.”
“She didn’t reject me,” I said. “I wasn’t asking her to be my client.”
“Pages? Work in progress?” Oliver asked.
“Yes, she’s writing this book about an AI-run city.
In the last installment I read, the AI is starting to give questionable rules to a woman named Ana and her husband, Alan, but they have to follow them if they want to stay.
And so far, the town has proven to be basically heaven on Earth, so they are desperate to stay. ”
“So they are following the AI’s questionable rules, then?” Sloane asked.
“The reader sees them as more questionable than the characters. They’ve all but shut off their decision-making skills, the whole town has.”
“Sounds unrealistic,” Sloane said.
“ You would totally let an AI dictate your love life,” I said.
She shrugged. “If it had a high success rate.”
“Might be more reliable than a human programmer,” Oliver said.
“Yes, we all know how shady those people are,” I said, smirking in his direction.
“The shadiest,” he agreed. “Also, an AI making decisions for me sounds way easier than the apps.”
“Apparently you would also let an AI dictate your love life,” I said. “No computer is going to figure out love for me.”
“It could be romantic,” he said. “Have you ever read about AI-generated dates? The bots have been trained and they learn way faster than the average man.”
I laughed. “Maybe we could implant a chip at the base of your neck and you could be fed romantic ideas all day long. Because what you just said is not romantic. At all.” The words gave me an excuse to reach out and touch his neck, and when I did, a zap of electricity shot through my body as if I were the one being touched.
“Is this book coming out soon?” Oliver asked, goose bumps forming under my fingers despite the fact that he otherwise seemed unaffected. “It sounds good.”
I put my hands on my knees. I needed to keep them to myself. “It hasn’t even sold yet.”
“Hello,” Sloane said. “Less about a book you don’t even represent and back to the business you’re actually trying to start. Still not sure Love Lit is the right choice.”
“Hart Lit? HEA Literary?” I asked.
“I like Hart Lit better,” she said. “It makes more sense.”
“Maybe.” I shook my head. “I need time to think.” The idea of having to come up with the permanent name of my agency was making my palms sweat. This would be on business cards and in website announcements. “It needs to be right, perfect, because it’s going to be forever.”
“Commitment issues,” Sloane coughed.
“You’re the one who said you didn’t like Love Lit.”
“I changed my mind,” she said. “Because we’re allowed to do that.” She looked between me and Oliver like she was making a point. “Love Lit. It’s perfect.”