Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,68

pathetic or detached from reality. First of all, he didn’t have my number. Not that that would stop him if he wanted to call me, of course. But he wouldn’t want to call me. Because that wasn’t us. Wasn’t him. I didn’t think there even was an us. But if there were, and if he did want to get in contact with me, he would likely just melt out of the woods and that would be that.

So, it wasn’t Saint.

It was Gianna, my agent. Whose calls I’d been screening for the past two weeks, since my book was due two weeks ago. I hadn’t opened emails or texts. Living in uncomfortable denial was not at all my preferred state. I had never been late on a deadline in my writing career, so this was a horrible first. I walked around with a vague feeling of nausea and an overall sense of impending doom.

But I had a whisky in my hand and not much other choices, so I picked up the phone.

“Gianna. If you’re calling to swear at me, save it,” I greeted.

Dead air for a beat. “Oh, I called to swear at you two weeks ago,” she said. Sounding calm. Much too calm. “I called to scream at you the day after that. Then abuse you, threaten your shoe collection. Threats got more inventive as the days went on. But now I’ve run out of threats and patience.” She paused. “I’ve managed to hold off your publishers by promising that this is your best book ever. That this will be worth the wait, the lost money, the missed appointments. Are you going to make me into a liar?”

I finished my drink. Considered the question. Considered the current state of my manuscript. It was a mess, to say the least.

“No, I don’t think I am,” I said finally.

Deacon refilled my drink and I nodded in thank you. His gaze was no longer hostile. It seemed he wasn’t a man to hold a grudge. Good thing too, because the last thing you wanted was the only bartender in town being mad at you.

“Okay, well, at least we have that,” she replied. “Are you going to give me an ETA?”

I sipped my drink. “No. I can’t do that. I don’t know when I’m going to finish. If I’m going to finish.”

“If?” she all but shrieked into the phone. Gianna was Italian. Hot-tempered. She liked to yell and loved to swear. I’d never heard her pump this much into a two-letter word before.

“There is no if,” she spanned. “You’re meant to be writing stories. Giving people escapes into elegantly written nightmares. You create something. Something tangible. Something very important.”

“Beyond your fifteen percent?” I asked dryly.

“That’s an important part, sure,” she returned.

One of the things I liked about her, why she had been my agent this entire time, despite the fact her more experienced contemporaries had tried to seduce me with money and deals to get away from her. They all pretended they had my best interests at heart, wanted to be my friend.

Gianna didn’t want to be my friend. She didn’t have my best interests at heart. She had my books, and then hers. In that order. She never lied about that, about the fact she didn’t really like me as a person, but tolerated that because she loved me as an author.

“But you’re not a person to be traipsing around fucking Washington, almost dying,” she continued.

I was surprised she even knew that. Katy wouldn’t have told her, since that would’ve required her to make any kind of conversation that wasn’t essential. And as far as I knew, Gianna didn’t have any of Katy’s contact details.

Then again, Gianna was an impressive human being. If she wanted something, she got it. And she’d been likely scouring my very sparse social circle, trying to figure out how to get a hold of me. I wouldn’t have put it past her to harass Katy at work and for Katy to get quickly frustrated enough about the waste of her time to betray my secrets.

“How selfish can you be? How stupid?” Gianna continued, not feeling the need to ask me how I was holding up or express any form of concern. I liked that about her. “If you hadn’t been found, you would’ve robbed the world of your talent. And me of my fifteen percent. I get you’re going through shit. You’re processing by being semi fucking suicidal, but not all the way, since I know you’re too