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“You make that sound so romantic. Clearly you are not the romance writer in the family. Please feel free to come to me for tips.”
“So you’re writing again?”
Gemma made a noncommittal noise. “So what’s next? Oh, the tour. Right. You have the penultimate signing tonight. Are you all ready?”
Chris sat cross-legged on the bed. “So about that…”
He told Gemma about the threat to expose Zane, paused to enjoy her profanity-laden outrage, and then told her about the calls from Milner, which escalated the outrage and the cursing to new levels. As a college English instructor, Gemma had a truly impressive vocabulary.
“This Milner guy is full of shit,” she said. “Admittedly, I know next to nothing about publishing, but it’s still a corporation. They won’t tank a megaselling book. Or drop a megaselling author.”
“Yep, it’s all smoke and mirrors. One aging dinosaur roaring against his inevitable extinction.”
“And Daphne knows that, right?”
Chris paused. Had he said that to her? He couldn’t remember. He must have.
“So what’s the plan?” Gemma said. “Please tell me she’s going to stick it to the man, in the most spectacular way possible.”
“I hope so.”
A pause. Three seconds dragged by. “You are with her, right?” Gemma said.
“Not exactly.” He told her about the letter.
“I’m sorry,” she said when he finished. “Could you repeat that? You cannot possibly have said what you just seemed to say. You did not—not—abandon Daphne in a crisis.”
A spark of anxiety ignited his worry, but he snuffed it out. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “I gracefully bowed out and let her take center stage.”
“By letter? Not by conversation and a mutually agreed-upon plan where you’d pretend to storm off and she’d be ‘forced’ to reveal herself, thereby avoiding any repercussions from sticking it to the man.”
“I…” He took a deep breath to calm his racing heart. “Daphne’s scared, understandably. But I know she can do it, so I gave her a nudge.”
“She’s an adult, Chris. Not a child who needs nudging.”
He winced at Gemma’s tone, which seemed to be getting sharper by the word. “I—”
“Also, you didn’t nudge. You threw her off the damned deep end and told her to swim. You knew she was scared, and you threw her in.”
The worry ignited again, only for him to stamp it out. Gemma was misinterpreting the situation.
Only she wasn’t. Because that was exactly the right analogy.
Daphne was afraid of swimming. Would he throw her off the deep end? Absolutely not. Daphne was afraid of standing up in front of readers and admitting she had written the book they loved. And he hadn’t just thrown her in. He’d thrown her in… then turned and walked away.
Sink or swim.
Holy shit.
“Where are you?” Gemma snapped.
“In a hotel. A, uh, few blocks from where we were staying.”
“Does she know that? Tell me she doesn’t think you came back to Vancouver. Tell me the note was clear that you were close by, and if she wanted to discuss this, she could.”
“I…”
“Tell me you at least made it clear you weren’t actually walking away. Leaving her for good.”
