A Novel Seduction (12 page)

“A little soft-shoe. Jill hardly noticed.”

“Jill!” she cried, disappointed. “I thought it had been Ellery.”

Axel smiled. “Oh, that would have been a treat to explain.”

“Did you get the books?”

“I did.
Kiltlander, Vamp
and a third.” He extracted the bag with the remaining two books from his pack, and when he did, he saw the paper stapled there, which he’d forgotten.

“Only three?”

“Annie, if I can get Ellery to read any one of them, I’ll consider it a major victory.” He unfolded the paper and found a phone number scribbled there and the name, Sierra. He laughed and crumpled it.

“What?” his sister said.

The bartender dropped off the beer, and Axel fished his wallet out of his pocket and handed him a ten. “I don’t get women.”

His sister laughed. “That’s a fact. But how does it relate to what we’re talking about?”

“The clerk at the bookstore today,” he said. “I mean, I was asking her questions about the books when I bought
them, but I swear to you, we were not connecting on any level.”

“So?”

“So she slipped me her phone number. I just found it attached to the bag. I know my charms are irresistible, but this woman was fifteen years younger than me, easily.”

“Axel, Axel, Axel…”

He could almost see her shaking her head. “What?”

“First, women are stupid. Second, they get considerably stupider when a man of any sort engages them in conversation about a romance novel. Which book were you talking about?”

He gazed into the thick white head of the beer, trying to remember. “
Vamp,
for a while. She was definitely not a Team Ynez supporter. But she really lit up when I mentioned
Kiltlander
.”

Annie made a noise somewhere between seeing a basket of puppies and having an orgasm. “See,” she cried. “It’s
magic
! Honest to God, I don’t understand why more men don’t read it. Don’t they understand they could get any woman they wanted into bed if they just acted like Jemmie in
Kiltlander
?”

Before Axel could fully ponder this pronouncement, his phone buzzed with a blocked number. “Hang on. I’ve got another call coming in. I think it’s Ellery.” He pressed the screen and said, “Ellery?”

“Brendan. Sorry to disappoint you, bud. Jeez, are you seeing her again?”

Axel winced. “No. What’s up?”

“I hear you’re in Pittsburgh.”

Axel swallowed a long draft, savoring the up-front
wheat followed by the mid-palate clove. A true Hefeweizen. He thought about what he might do with it if he were in charge. “Word travels fast.”

“I know the bartender there. Axel, the guy upped his bid.”

Axel jumped off the barstool. “What? We have a deal.”

“We got no deal, man. He’s willing to kick in an extra ten grand.”

Axel groaned. He could barely meet the price before. He’d never be able to meet it if it was ten thousand more. “Look, I want the brewery, okay? This is my dream. We’ve gotta be able to work this out. C’mon, man.”

Brendan sighed. “If only the guy weren’t such a jerk.”

“He’s a jerk?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s an investor. No love for beer. He’s planning to sell the brand name to some conglomerate, who will promptly kill it; then the guy’s going to sell the place off piece by piece.”

“You know me,” Axel said after drinking most of what was left in his glass. “I love beer.”

“Oh, I know you love beer. Everyone who knows you knows you love beer. But I need the money.”

“But who’s going to keep your baby alive, eh? Who’s going to invest the brewery with the same love you do?” Axel was dissembling a bit. Hard Hat was great, but Brendan hadn’t taken enough care in years to produce any other beers that rose above the ordinary.

Brendan growled—the unhappy growl of a man about to say good-bye to an extra ten grand—and Axel began to relax.

“If I tell this guy no, I’m going to need something in return, Axel.”

“What?”

“Help, for one.”

“Sure. Anytime.”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight?” Axel looked at his watch. He and Ellery wouldn’t be done here until two or three a.m. The flight to Philly, where they’d catch the flight to London, left the next day at two in the afternoon. It depended on how fluid Brendan’s definition of “tonight” was. “What’s up?”

“Dumping the yeast,” Brendan said, and Axel grimaced. Ninety percent of brewing was cleaning, but dumping the yeast was one of the dirtiest jobs in the brewing world. “Sure, I can help.”

“Help?” Brendan laughed. “I’m cashing in my chips for the night, friend. You’re it.”

Axel agreed, wrapped up the call and returned to Annie. What had she been saying before Brendan called that had peaked Axel’s interest? “Sorry. A beer thing.”

“Are you supposed to be having beer things with the diabetes?”

Axel smacked his forehead. He hadn’t taken his evening injection. He’d only been diagnosed a couple months before, and the routine still got away from him sometimes. “Yes, Mother. I’m allowed to have a couple beers a day. In fact, it’s encouraged. It reduces insulin resistance—in moderation, of course.”

“Moderation, huh?”

“Moderation is my middle name.”

“Only if your first name is ‘im—.’”

Axel’s phone buzzed again. “Another call,” he said. “Hang on.” He hit the
ANSWER
button.

“Brendan, again. Sorry. I forgot to tell you the key is over the door.”

“Got it.” He returned to his sister. “I’m back.”

“Popular guy. That’s okay. I was just calling to razz you.”

“Much appreciated, as always.” His phone buzzed again. “Oh, for God’s
sake
. Gotta run. Love you.” He clicked to the other call. “Jesus, can you possibly get everything you need to say into one call?”

“I’ll try, Mackenzie,” Buhl Martin Black said flatly, “but I pay you enough to listen no matter how many calls it takes.”

Axel felt his heart drop to his shoes. “Oh, God, sir, I’m sorry. I thought it was my friend.”

“Some friend. How’s the article coming?”

“We’ve only just begun.”

“Very catchy. Have you considered putting that to music? Anything else?”

“Well, I’ve given her some books to read—”

“
Vamp
?”

“Yes. That’s the primary one. There are a couple of others. We’re in Pittsburgh now to shoot at the Monkey Bar.”

“What the hell is the Monkey Bar?”

Axel was moderately relieved to hear that Black hadn’t read the book, either.

“Gateway to hell, sir. Very popular with
Vamp
’s female readers.” An
ooga-ooga
siren went off, accompanied by a flashing red light, and Axel turned to see a woman mount the stand at the start of the monkey bars and, cheered on by her friends, twist and turn her way across to the platform at the other end as the patrons parted like the Red Sea
beneath her. There she squirmed her way out of her bra, slipping it out from under her blouse to the hoots and hollers of the crowd, and threw it into the cauldron. The cauldron, which looked to Axel like a hastily repainted garbage can, served as the repository of cast-off souls. It was also the source of the annoying flashing lights. The barkeep immediately filled a mug with Budweiser and slapped it on the starting platform: the woman’s reward for divesting herself of what was undoubtedly a forty-dollar piece of lingerie. She was not able to claim the far more prestigious prize—one of the free Monkey Bar T-shirts pinned on hooks above the cauldron—as that required the blouse to go as well. Nonetheless, the place went nuts. Women whistled, her friends yelled, “Ynez, Ynez!” and the few men in the place gazed at their shoes, unsure whether to cheer or simply hope they weren’t asked to leave.

“What’s going on there, Mackenzie?”

“Another soul thrown in with Team Ynez, sir. Happens every fifteen minutes or so. Very exciting. They love the book here.”

“Glad to hear it. What exactly has Ellery written so far?”

“What’s that? I think I’m losing the call.” Axel held the phone at arm’s length and signaled the bartender for a refill. “We’ll have to try to talk tomorrow. I can’t hear any—” He hit the
END
button and turned his phone off.

He hoped Ellery would start writing something soon. There were only so many times that trick was going to fly.

“Team Ynez?” the bartender asked, dropping another mug in front of him.

“Oh, you know it, pal.”

Airport Marriott, Pittsburgh

Ellery rolled the hotel desk chair back and forth, gazing at the empty page on her laptop screen.

It seemed silly to try to write something in the twenty minutes before she had to dress and head to the Monkey Bar, but she thought if she could produce at least a single, stunning sentence on the subject of romance novels, she’d feel like she had some momentum going.

She held her finger over the keys, waiting as all writers do for that kernel of insight to wriggle itself loose from the recesses of her brain and land with a sizzle on the page, accompanied by a crescendo of harp sweeps marking the prose’s incomparable beauty.

Unfortunately, the only kernel that wriggled loose was the one she’d already known: Romances were drivel. Yes, Ynez could stir something primitive in her, and Harold could send a shiver down her spine, but it was a trick, nothing more than pandering to a sex-hungry reader.

Oh, God, if she were only writing about John Irving…

She loved Irving, loved his muscular prose and the
wrestling and New England characters who filled the pages of his books. She even loved the bizarre tragicomic events that fueled his plots, like Duncan losing an eye in
Garp
and the TV reporter losing his hand to a lion in
The Fourth Hand
. His stories struck her deeply and lived on in her head years after she had finished reading them.

She hit a few keys.

Why do critics wrestle with John Irving?

She loved it. A perfect first line.

Literary critics try to take Irving to the mat for his navel-examining plots, character arcs littered with body parts and scenes approaching slapstick, but Irving always manages an escape.

God, she was on a roll. This was the sort of writing she could do twenty-four hours a day with hardly a conscious thought. Her hands flew over the keyboard until she had a paragraph and then two. She was in the middle of the third, kernels popping like dried Iowa corn in her head, when her eyes came to rest on the copy of
Vamp.
Her fingers slowed as the thought of Harold demanding Ynez’s submission to his care crept sultrily through her mind. It was a trick, yes, but tricks were worthy of some investigation, weren’t they? For example, if she wanted to take a quick look just to find out whether Harold and Ynez ended up having sex, that certainly didn’t mean she had raised the story in her head to the level of, well, literature.

Her fingers had slowed and stopped. She looked at the screen.

In his later novels, Irving does just the opposite, using Harold and other metaphors to demonstrate sex sex sex Ynez on top?

She gasped, looking both ways to see if anyone else had seen this, and pushed the chair slowly away from the desk.

Now,
that
was weird.

She supposed it wouldn’t hurt just to check to see where they’d netted out. She’d have to know the answer in order to write the article, after all, right?

She grabbed the book and stretched out on the bed. Where had she been? The third chapter? She found the page, reread the scene with the struggle and the pill, feeling the same lurch in her belly, then scanned ahead. Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six—bingo!

“Kiss,” “caress,” and the all-important “iron length.” This was the spot!

He laid her out on the velvet-covered bench, heedless of the floor-to-ceiling windows whose diaphanous silk drapes billowed in the cool summer breeze. She would be his at last.

In an instant Ellery was right there with Ynez, laid out on the bench like some Egyptian queen on a palanquin, gazing out the museum windows, feeling the heavy press of Axel between her—

Axel?

Harold, she thought firmly, though the scene certainly called to mind that summer night she and Axel had first succumbed.

Her breasts quivered with the beating of her heart.

“You will be my first,” she said in a small voice.

“My first”?
There’s no way this is Ynez’s first time, Ellery thought. Not a she-devil who can fight her way to victory!
Please
. Ellery scanned the next paragraph and leapt to her feet, horrified.

“This is
Britta
?” she cried. “You’re bedding
Britta
after saving
Ynez’s
life? How did that little upstart worm her way into your bed?”