Chapter Twenty-Five
Not in love, huh?
Jove
I’ve never seen someone look so adorable while sick, and Mars was a seriously adorable little kid. Lyra though? She’s just so…
“Two thousand words,” I mutter. “And all she had to do was snore in my vicinity.”
It’s actual magic. Actual, literal, magic.
“I don’t snore,” Lyra groans from my bed. “I’m a lady.”
I straighten, abandoning my author’s hunch so that I can slide my chair over to where she lays, pretty as any lady ever was in a tangle of my blankets, the dark green of them making her clammy skin seem pale, despite the fever.
“You were,” I tell her. “And you are. How are you feeling?”
My hand hits her forehead, and I frown. She feels no cooler than she was an hour and a half ago when I came back with ice and a plate of carrot cake to her snoozing, mouth open and the world’s cutest little sickly honk-shoos pouring forth.
“Like you should shoot me,” she croaks. “In the head, please, so there’s no risk of me surviving.”
“No one is shooting you. Can you sit up?”
She groans, but manages to scoot herself up on my pillows, blinking weakly at me.
“Good job,” I praise. “Now you can have your carrot cake.”
A sparkle, small but true, lights in her eyes. “Carrot cake?”
I grab her plate from my nightstand, offering it to her. “I’ll have to go get your drink. It was getting warm in here.”
She doesn’t appear to hear me, eyes locked on her cake. “Delicious,” she whispers, cutting into it with a vigor. “You’re going to be delicious .”
My eyes crinkle. She’s not wrong.
I leave her to her deliciousness, fetching her cold soda and a cup of ice before reaching above our fridge and pulling down the basket where we keep medicines and first aid supplies.
I grab a bottle of neon orange liquid for her, hoping she doesn’t mind that we don’t have pills.
I never could stomach swallowing them whole. Talk about uncomfortable.
“Breaking rule one yet?” Mars walks into the kitchen, approaching the sink with a plate of crumbs as I set the medicine next to Lyra’s drink on the counter.
“Rule one?” I ask.
“Not falling in love,” he reminds me. “You’ve had two dates now. I read a book where it happened in one, and they weren’t even lifelong friends.”
My brows furrow. “They managed to not fall in love in one date?”
“No, they did fall in love. Breaking rule one is the entire point.”
I wince. “I am not qualified to write our genre at all.”
“You’re qualified to write whatever you want, Jovey. Your stories are beautiful. Funny. They make you feel something, even before I throw in the romance. ”
“The romance being the cornerstone of our marketing,” I reply. “And thus the most important part.”
He arches a brow as he pops his dish in the dishwasher. “The most important part is making a product. You do that, then I refine the product to fit the tastes of the people who will buy it. That doesn’t make your work any less amazing. It is, in a very real sense, just business.”
Just the business of me sucking, he means.
“Self-esteem issues aside, how’s rule one holding up? Poorly, I hope. If we’re having a sick day episode, she might fall first if you aren’t careful. And then where will we be? With several hundred fewer Amazon searches a month, that’s where. Think of the visibility you’re squandering.”
Did he just sweep aside my self-loathing and professional doubts as unimportant in the face of the possibility of true love? How very romance-author of him.
I shall follow suit.
“I’m not in love,” I say. “I’m sorry to disappoint you.
” And I am, really. Lyra would be an excellent woman to fall in love with.
I’m sure some day she’ll find a man capable of romantic thought to woo her into a whirlwind love story.
And when that day comes, I will absolutely not kill the undeserving mere mortal pretending to be good enough for my angel Lyra.
“You said rule one is always broken?” I ask.
Mars fetches a cube of dishwasher soap from beneath the sink. “Yep.”
Hm. “She’ll probably fall for me then,” I mutter, soothing the sour in my gut at the thought of her with someone who does not know the fullness of her wonder.
“Then I can take care of her and not have to worry about some moron trying to love her and doing it wrong. She can have someone who knows her inside and out. Someone who prioritizes her above anything else. Someone who can afford anything she’d ever want and is willing to get it for her. Someone like me.”
Mars regards me, dryly, as he presses the start button and clicks the machine closed. “I wonder if the readers will know the difference if I market things as he falls first anyway. Since you’re absolutely acting in love.”
I frown. “Not in love, but the love I have for her is definitely better than what some random schmuck could give her. All she has to do is follow trope conventions.” I straighten.
“And why wouldn’t she? Like I told her, I’m tall, rich, and handsome.
And I give great gifts. She loved the butterfly I made her.
” I grab Mars’ shoulders, ignoring the way he flinches at the contact.
“You’d fall in love with me, wouldn’t you? I’m a catch, right?”
Tension twists in the muscles beneath my grip, and when he can’t seem to stand it anymore, he removes my hands from his person. “Definitely a catch. Definitely not my type.” He frees a breath and smooths out his leather jacket. “On account of this not being Alabama and all.”
My heart falls.
“However, since Lyra isn’t your brother, and this is the sick day episode, I’d say the odds are pretty good that she’ll fall for you, which is devastating for me.” Reaching, he pats my head. “Try to fall in love even a fraction of a second before she does. For our poor book’s visibility.”
“I think I’m more of a she-falls-first, he-falls-never kind of guy,” I reply, poking him on the nose. “How’s that doing visibility wise?”
“Abysmal,” he answers, unamused as he scrubs his nose. “Do you hate me or something?”
Accused of hatred, again and again, when I have only love in my heart. How mean of my loved ones.
“About as much as you hate me. ”
Mars smiles. “Glad to hear it. Now, please get back to your wife before she dies of dehydration.”
My heart lurches, a bolt of lightning firing through my veins.
My wife .
What glorious book fodder.