Page 12 of Bear’s True Mate

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.