If you enjoyed Unwrapped, you’re going to love this other snowy Reverse Harem Romance from Cassie Cole: Frostbitten. You can click here to buy it, or keep reading for a special sneak peek!
Allison
Hunter navigated from the passenger seat as we drove north out of Asheville and then onto a winding road heading up toward Mt. Mitchell. “Stay on this road for the next ten minutes,” he told me.
“You got it.”
He held his palms up to the heat vents of the car. “I appreciate you being concerned about me freezing to death while waiting for an Uber.”
With a straight face I said, “Well, I don’t want to be known as the woman who killed the great Hunter Paxton with her negligence.”
He laughed and said, “I’m not famous enough that I would be missed.”
He’s modest, too. I added it to my list of things I already liked about him.
“You said this is your first time writing at a cabin. How do you normally write? What’s your process?”
“It starts off with a spark of an idea.” He sounded almost embarrassed to be talking about himself. “I keep an idea notebook and jot down ideas whenever they come to me. When it’s time to write a new book, I pick one of those ideas that I think I can stretch out into a full novel. On writing days, I start off in the morning by reading for pleasure while drinking a cup of coffee. Something totally unrelated to the subject I’m going to write. This helps my mind relax. And then… I jump into it.”
“Do you outline your book ahead of time?” I asked.
Hunter shook his head. “Nope.”
We rounded a switchback on the mountain. “Really? You don’t have any idea what you’re going to write?”
“I will jot down some notes about the protagonist, but other than that? Nope. It’s called being a pantser. As in, I fly by the seat of my pants.” I could feel his grin even though my eyes were on the road. “Then I start writing and see where the story takes me.”
“I can’t imagine being that creative,” I said. “Being able to create stories out of thin air. It’s incredible.”
He shrugged modestly. “I don’t know. I just have an active imagination.”
“But the cabin isn’t helping?” I said.
He sighed. “Not even a little bit. Usually I’m inspired by a blank page, but this time it seems like it’s taunting me. My editor and manager are getting antsy.”
The road wound into a dark forest, narrowing the view from my headlights. Yellow pines and spruce trees stood tall against the slope of the mountain, reminding me how steep of an incline the road was cut into. There were no road signs or other evidence of civilization.
“You’re not taking me back to your cabin to murder me, are you?” I asked.
“You offered to give me a ride. I didn’t ask,” he pointed out.
“Ah, but con artists are experts at convincing people to do things like that.”
He snapped his fingers and let out a dramatic sigh. “Damn. You caught me. I’m taking you to my murder cabin. I call it that because it’s where I do all my murdering.”
“Aptly named,” I said. “It’s a shame I figured it out before we got there.”
“Definitely a shame. Julie will have to send me another victim,” he mused.
Normally I wouldn’t have even joked about a topic like that, not as a young woman driving in the car with someone I had just met. But I felt totally at ease with Hunter. Comfortable around him in a way that surprised me. I was glad that I offered him a ride back, if only because it meant spending more time with him.
“Did you go to school for creative writing?”
He laughed and said, “I took the Michael Crichton career path. I wrote on the side while working my day job, in computer programming.”
“And then you eventually quit to write full-time?”
He nodded. “I wrote five or six books that didn’t sell well, then I released a book that was an instant hit. After that I didn’t have time to do both careers at once, so I made the leap into self-employment.”
“You must be very good,” I said.
“I do alright,” he replied simply. “I’m not a huge bestseller or anything.”
I remembered the Google results showing that his last book hit the New York Times Bestseller List. Rather than boasting about his success and