Summers' Love, A Cute and Funny Cinderella Love Story (LPC Romantic Comedy Series) (5 page)

“Maybe you should read his books. It might change your mind about him. If the guy can write love stories he must know
something
about women.”

“Oh, I’m sure he
thinks
he does.”

Her cell phone vibrated. Kate peeked at the screen and smiled at the text message.

“Good news?” asked Roger.

“It’s from Tasmania’s regional manager. The rep with the most sales just had an order cancel on her. Looks like I’m only ten units away from moving into first place.” She raised her hands and let them dance in the air. “And you know what
that
means?”

“I’m about to get a raise?” Roger said.

“Nassau, here I come.”

Her brother lifted his eyes toward the ceiling and shook his head before returning the attention to her. “So are you going to do it? You going to Ocracoke?”

Roger had such a way of ruining her personal victory party. At the same time, she couldn’t help but remember the scent of Stu’s aftershave, the way his knuckles had brushed across her skin, and the feathery breath near her ear. Maybe he had felt it too. “I don’t know. I guess it couldn’t hurt to try and get off.”

“That-a-girl. You can’t catch the wind if you don’t raise your sails.”

“Did you make that up on your own or read it in a movie script?”

Roger grinned. “It’s on the bottom of that bookmark. I’m not kidding Kate, you should do this. Could be this author can’t wait to see you again. You show up at his beach house … who knows what might happen.”

“Yeah, right. Me and Stu Summers. Now
that’s
good fiction.”

“Miracles happen, sis.”

“Not to me they don’t.” Kate tossed the bookmark onto the cushion beside her. “Not to me.”

Chapter Five

If anyone is due a miracle, thought Kate, it’s me.

She steered her sunburst yellow Miata over the Wright Memorial Bridge and joined the slow parade of vehicles motoring south through Nags Head, North Carolina. With the convertible top down and sun warm on her face, Kate leaned into the sea breeze and inhaled the salty air with the eagerness of a Golden Retriever hanging its head out a window. Overhead a wide swath of Carolina blue sky stretched westward across the Pamlico Sound, prompting Kate to tap her fingers on the steering wheel as she hummed along to a Zac Brown song. Her toes were not in the sand but life was definitely better, if not good. All she needed was a small miracle and fourteen signed copies of
In Heat
.

For most of her drive down from D.C. she had been pondering the idea of divine intervention, bad luck, winning the Powerball lottery, the Wizard’s history of making bad NBA lottery picks, and why some male country recording artists, like Zac Brown, made it big while the rest spent their weekends playing for tips and beer. In fact, ever since she had made the decision to drive to Ocracoke, her mind had been consumed with the haves and what her father had once called, the “half knots.” Near as she could tell, the route to financial success, or even paying the mortgage on a regular basis, remained out of reach for people like her.

She turned on her blinker and guided the Miata into the left-turn lane. While waiting for the light to change, Kate glanced over at her copy of
In Heat
. Four chapters into the novel, and she was still hooked. In fact, she’d stayed up past midnight worrying about how Nan would make it through the chemo treatments and hold her family together now that Mogadishu pirates had kidnapped her fiancé, Navy Captain Brock Cane. A tinge of guilt had swept over Kate that morning when she’d packed the box of tissues. “Stu Summers’ novels are a three-hanky read,” Red had warned.

And so they were.

The light changed. She fell in behind an RV loaded down with beach chairs and joined the line of vehicles moving south into the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. No chance of getting lost now. Just follow the two-lane ribbon of asphalt until there was no more asphalt to follow. Kate wished she’d made a reservation for the Ocracoke ferry but in the stress of packing that morning, she had simply forgotten to make the call. Too many shorts, too few shoes? Enough bug spray? Tanning lotion? Did she need a one-piece, two-piece? No-piece? Right, skip the bathing suit. No way she was letting him get a look at her thighs, no chance at all.

To her left, a ridge of sandy dunes separated Kate from the sparkling, green Atlantic Ocean. To her right, on the other side of a drainage ditch, cattails bowed as the slipstream of traffic sped past. Kate considered her brother’s question regarding men and her opinion of them as insensitive jerks.

For one thing, Kate had found that most men could not be trusted to call or text when running late. In fact, Kate had endured several first dates where the guy had forgotten that
he
had asked
her
on a date. In each instance, Kate had ended up spending money on drinks and food so she could eat alone in an expensive restaurant while at the same time appearing sad and lonely to everyone seated around her.

She continued toward the Bonner Bridge, her list of guy grievances growing.

First, it was all the talk about
their
ex. Next, the way they talked about
her
friends, and, finally, how they expected sex on the first date. Guys were clueless when it came to simple things like table manners (crunching ice, biting their fork, eating with their fingers), personal hygiene (using deodorant, mouthwash, and showering after a workout), and her feelings (like the one who told her to calm down after she’d caught him sleeping with her best friend). Men were cocky (a dead giveaway, in her book, that he would cheat on her), ogled other women, dismissed her job as irrelevant, described some women as fat, other women as skinny, and avoided expressing what they truly felt about the relationship by saying it was “complicated.” Kate had never been able to understand how a guy who’s so picky about the kind of beer he drinks and car he drives could
not know
if he likes her.

To her way of thinking, guys pretty much couldn’t be trusted to love, cherish, and honor, and Kate was willing to bet Stu Summers was no different.

As Kate reached the top of the Bonner Bridge, she looked east where sunlight reflected off the ocean and felt her heart skip. The beach stretched for as far as she could see. Not a chair or umbrella or beach house in sight. Only miles and miles of sand. For a moment Kate wondered why in the world she’d ever left.

Of course she knew why.

Everyone on the island knew.

Question was: would anyone still care?

* * *

Jeb Stuart Summers led the stream of tourists off the Bonner Bridge and south on Highway 12 towards Avon, Rodanthe, and Buxton. The slow parade of vehicles trundled past vacant dunes, gravel parking lots, and miles of mosquito-breeding, federally-protected “wildlife preserves” that, in truth, preserved little more than the jobs of the park rangers assigned to keep fishermen, tourists, and surfers from enjoying the endless miles of unspoiled beaches—beaches that just happened to
also
be the nesting area of the Piping Plover, a small sand-colored, sparrow-sized shorebird that did not pay taxes but did, apparently, have a powerful lobbying group on Capitol Hill. Stu knew all this because he once sat next to a devoted surf-fisherman on a flight to New York who had, for nearly two hours, expressed his dislike for small birds, turtles, and anyone associated with the environmental lobby.

With the convertible top down on his red Jaguar and the sun warm on his face, Stu leaned into the sea breeze and inhaled the salty air with the eagerness of a black lab hanging its head out a window. Overhead a wide swath of Carolina blue sky stretched westward across the Pamlico Sound, prompting Stu to tap his fingers on the steering wheel as he hummed along to a Zac Brown song. His toes were not in the sand but life was definitely better, if not good. First thing he was going to do when he reached Ocracoke was hit the beach.

Make that the second thing. First, pay a visit to his ghostwriter and get her back on board with this manuscript because … in addition to being single, rich, and a best-selling author, Stu was also a first-class fraud. Truth be told, he could not write, not a lick. He could barely put together a decent-sounding paragraph. Not that he hadn’t tried.

At first, Jeb Stuart Summers had attempted to craft novels like all the other authors he’d met in his American Fiction Writers network. He read blogs on writing, participated in social media chats, and even attended a few writers’ conferences in the hopes that an editor or agent would sign him to a contract.

They did not.

He bought stacks of instructional writing books. Even read a few. But still he struggled with POV “head-hopping,” present and past tense shifts, character development and arcs, realistic dialogue (which often wasn’t so realistic at all), and the really big one: plot.

Anxious to see his name on a book cover, he responded to an ad in an email and enrolled in the “Don’t Get Left Behind Writers Program.” Weeks later he flew to Colorado where he enjoyed the mentorship of “industry professionals” whose names he’d never heard of but whose books could be found on Amazon.

And still, after dropping thousands of dollars and spending countless hours schmoozing with John Grisham wannabes, he could not write.

Finally, in desperation, Stu joined a local critique group that was part of an international critique group, full of newsletter writers, bloggers, and Facebook posters. Here he received advice like:

“Your beginning is all wrong.”

“I got lost in the back-story.”

“Your dialog is unbelievable.”

Stu, sensing his work was improving, graciously accepted the compliment.

“Not unbelievable, as in, ‘good’,” the critique leader said after Stu felt himself brighten. “But as in ‘not even close to believable’.”

So Stu hired a writing coach.

His coach quit.

After a particularly traumatic writers’ conference, where an instructor used Stu’s first page to demonstrate how
not
to gain an editor’s attention, he settled on a different strategy. Stu knew from countless rejection letters that literary agents were the gatekeepers of the book-publishing business.

He decided to become one.

He paid a college freshman several hundred dollars to build him a website. Within weeks, search engines picked up the meta-tags and his email account swelled with manuscripts from aspiring writers whose stories were void of action, heavy on description, and had absolutely no chance of ever seeing the inside of a bookstore.

Apparently, he surmised, he couldn’t
write
a book, but he knew good writing when he read it. So, Stu began charging for critiques: a practice forbidden in the bylaws of the literary agent organization. Bylaws Stu had not bothered to read.

He recruited readers to help with the onslaught of proposals. Readers like Ricky, a Vietnam vet living in a refrigerator box near a war museum in downtown Richmond, and Bob, a washroom attendant at a five-star restaurant overlooking the James River. Readers with lots of spare time on their hands, not to mention some questionable hygiene habits.

Stu quickly discovered he also had a talent for stroking the egos of aspiring authors who displayed a profound eagerness to drop large sums of money for his agenting advice. Flush with cash, he quit his job at the Richmond paper mill and moved from his mom’s house to a one-bedroom apartment overlooking commuter tracks in Brooklyn. He cut his hair, shaved his beard and, for the first time since high school, began dating women without studs in their lips, noses, and other body parts.

A month later, agent Stu booked a conference room at a two-star hotel next to the Jersey turnpike, and organized the Get-Published-NOW! Writer’s Conference. He offered cash prizes for the winning entries. And there were a
lot
of winners. Basically, anyone who paid the $495 conference fee won something. A free book (donated by self-published authors), a bookmark (donated by traditionally-published authors), and an outdated copy of
The Insider’s Guide to the Literary Marketplace
. But the real appeal for conference attendees was the gold-embossed award certificate. At Get-Published-NOW! Writer’s Conference everyone left with the “award-winning author” title.

His inbox swelled with manuscripts. Some of them pretty good. Stu began dining out with editors’ assistants from the major publishing houses. He picked up the check, of course, and paid amateur photographers to take photos of him passing manuscripts across the table. These images appeared on blogs and on social media fan pages thanks to Stu’s innate marketing skills. By year’s end, Stu had more business than Ricky and Bob could handle.

And still, not one of his authors had landed a book contract.

Stu doubled his rates.

Business boomed.

Then Stu faced his first labor crisis. On a warm day in May amidst the height of writers’ conference season, Ricky got picked up for bathing naked in the reflection pool at the Virginia War Memorial. The same evening, Bob eloped with an up-and-coming actor starring in a Broadway production of
GREASE
. Soon Stu’s inbox choked under the deluge of unopened attachments. He posted a message on LinkedUp announcing his need for manuscript readers. A pharmacology major addicted to nasal spray applied for the position.