5. Rose
ROSE
Iwoke to Nolan’s massive truck starting up in the driveway. Deciding I’d better take advantage of him not being home, I slipped out of bed and headed to the kitchen to make some tea. Once I had a mug in hand, I settled in at the desk and opened my laptop.
The morning was rough. I’d stared at the blinking cursor for way too long, tapped out too many sentences that went nowhere, and erased more than I added, but somewhere around noon, the words started to loosen up.
It had taken me nearly all day, but I’d finally found a rhythm, and by mid-afternoon, I was actually writing.
At around six, I had three chapters completed and some semblance of an outline started on where to go next with the story.
The plot was moving forward, the dialogue was clicking, and my heroine was finally starting to feel like a real person on the page.
The hero was a different story, though.
No matter what I tried, he still fell flat.
Cardboard flat. I didn’t understand why.
The rest of the book was working. The only problem was him.
I’d made notes about him using the comments feature in my document, highlighted the places where he needed to be fleshed out, and kept plowing ahead with the story, deciding I’d figure him out later.
Right now, everything else was flowing.
The scene was working, and my fingers were moving faster than they had in weeks across my keyboard. My heroine was standing in a kitchen with the hero, and he was about to lean in and say something witty that made her feel all the feels.
A weed eater roared to life outside.
My fingers stopped.
No.
Not now. Not when I was finally in a groove.
I glared out the window, ready to shoot daggers at Nolan for interrupting my flow. The daggers never fired because the man had stepped into my line of view—shirtless.
He carried the weed eater toward the far edge of the property where the grass met the sand, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
His back was to me, allowing me to see his broad shoulders, tanned skin, and the muscles he had while he adjusted his grip on the machine. He wore low-slung jeans and work boots.
Men were not supposed to look this good doing yard work.
Were they?
The weed eater ground along the property line as he walked. He moved in a slow, steady pass, his arms flexing against the vibration, and the evening light caught a thin sheen of sweat glistening across his skin.
I should have torn my eyes away from him and closed the blinds, put my earbuds in, and got back to work.
Instead, I watched him carry the weed eater in the other direction, his biceps flexing the entire time.
His dark hair was damp at the temples, and there were a few grass clippings stuck to his chest that shouldn’t have been attractive but somehow were.
He turned to hit another section, and I got a full view of his front. His broad chest, flat stomach, and near-perfect abs. When he leaned forward into the next pass, the muscles along his sides tightened in a way that made me forget what I was writing altogether.
This was ridiculous.
He was loud, rude, and had made fun of me for wearing reading glasses. Yet, here I was, watching him do yard work, practically drooling.
Still, I didn’t look away.
He made another pass along the edge of the yard, and I tracked the movement.
The way his shoulders tensed when he shifted his weight.
The way his abs flexed. He paused to wipe his forehead with the back of his hand, and for one stupid second, I wondered what those hands would feel like on my skin and what it would be like to have him glistening with sweat above me.
That thought snapped me out of it.
I closed the window—harder than I meant to—flipped the blinds down, and turned back to my laptop. The cursor blinked in the middle of a half-finished sentence. My heroine was in the kitchen. The hero was about to say something witty.
What was he about to say to her?
Crap. Well, whatever it was, it was gone now.
The droning outside continued, muffled now but still there. I put my earbuds in, cranked my ambient playlist up, and forced my eyes to stay on the screen. The words came slow and wrong. Everything I typed sounded stiff and lifeless.
Boring.
Eventually, the noise outside stopped. The sudden quiet was almost jarring. I pulled one earbud out and listened—nothing. No weed eater, no mower, no loud music. Just the waves crashing to the shore in the distance, an occasional seagull, and silence spaced in between.
He must have finished.
The tension in my shoulders eased, and I saved my work, took off my glasses, and rubbed my eyes.
The word count for the day was decent—not as high as it would’ve been without the interruption, but decent.
I should’ve been satisfied, but wasn’t. I should have been finished with screens for the night, but instead, I picked up my phone and opened my social media.
That was a mistake.
The first thing I saw was a post from a book blogger I followed.
It was a photo of my last two books side by side with a caption that read: If you haven’t read this series yet, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Book 3 drops soon and I am not emotionally prepared.
The comments were full of people tagging friends, posting fire emojis, saying they’d already preordered.
I scrolled and saw more of the same.
Readers were tagging me in posts about their excitement. Someone had made fan art of my hero and heroine. Another reader had posted a countdown until release day. My deadline stared back at me through the screen of my phone, dressed up in enthusiasm I couldn’t match.
I closed my eyes and pulled in a deep breath.
These people loved the series. They were counting on me to deliver a book that lived up to the first two, and I was sitting in a rental duplex in a town I’d never heard of, staring at a manuscript that I couldn’t seem to get right.
My stomach dropped, and I set my phone face-down on the desk.
The pressure of my situation settled deep in my bones.
My readers didn’t know that the woman writing their favorite love story had just left a man who’d put bruises on her arms. They didn’t know that every romantic scene I tried to write felt like reaching into an open wound and pouring salt in it.
They just wanted a good book, and I wasn’t sure I could deliver them one.
Not from the headspace I was currently in.
I picked up my glasses and put them back on. Opened the manuscript. Scrolled to the first section I’d tagged to rework—my hero’s physical description. He’d been feeling flat the entire book, like a cardboard cutout instead of a person. If I was going to get him right, I had to start here.
I deleted the existing description and started fresh, letting my fingers move across the keyboard without overthinking it. A description flowed with surprising ease, and when I paused to go back and reread it, what I’d written surprised me.
Tall. Tan. Dark hair. Muscles that flexed and tensed. Hazel eyes that caught the light when he turned his head just right and seemed flecked with gold. Strong hands—the kind that looked like they’d built things, fixed things, and held things together.
That wasn’t my hero.
My hero was supposed to be lean and nerdy. He was a breadmaker and wore aprons and always had flour on his face. He wasn’t supposed to be a hot baker. He was the quiet guy. The guy who was often overlooked.
Delete. Try again.
My fingers flew across the keyboard as I typed. This time what came across the page was that he was built like a man who works with his hands for a living. Broad shoulders, a slight scruff along his jaw. Dark hair that fell across his forehead.
My fingers stopped again.
“Damn it,” I whispered.
I knew exactly where the descriptions had come from—the man weed eating in the backyard twenty minutes ago, shirtless and glistening in sweat, ruining my word count, and apparently my ability to write a fictional man who didn’t look exactly like him.
I closed my laptop.
This was not happening. I was not developing a thing for the loud, obnoxious man on the other side of the wall. I was here to write an amazing book for my readers. I was here to heal. I was here to prove that I could leave Evan for real this time.
Nolan Bridges was not about to derail all of that with his perfect abs and handsome good looks.
I made my way into the kitchen and grabbed the bottle of red wine I’d brought with me to celebrate with once I was finished writing my story. I poured a glass. Took a sip that was closer to a gulp. Then I headed for the back porch to watch the sunset.
The evening air was thick against my skin when I stepped outside.
The ocean stretched out in front of me, the last light of the day turning the water from blue to something darker and deeper in color.
I settled into a chair and pulled my knees up before taking another sip from my wine.
It was cheap and a little too sweet, but it did its job.
The pressure that had been building when I thought of my readers’ expectations had loosened some, and I began to reframe the whole situation in my head.
My readers trusted me based on past books to deliver a story they loved. That meant something. They had faith in me. They believed I could pull this off and that this book would be better than the previous. That all meant something too.
From Nolan’s side of the duplex, I heard a cabinet door slam shut. I took another sip of wine. My gaze remained focused on the sunset, but my mind had dipped back to thoughts of a shirtless Nolan weed eating the yard.
Epic fail.