part of the lunch we’d have our shoes off under the table as we doubled over laughing about office politics and anecdotes. Unfortunately, Lindsay had told Morgan that “the big guy” wanted to handle this negotiation himself, much to Morgan’s dismay.
“Oscar’s such an odd duck,” she’d told me over the phone. “It’s just going to cast a pall over what could be a fun occasion.”
We’d already suffered through Oscar’s high ick-factor menu of potted suckling pig, sea urchin that reminded me of my ninth-grade biology dissection and foie gras that brought to mind my twenty-month-old’s favorite picture book about a fluffy duckling looking for its mama. (“Mama! Mama!” I would quack, much to his wide-eyed delight. “Are you my Mama?”) Dylan would be crushed to discover his mommy had allowed bad men to keep the fluffy duckling in captivity, then kill it so that she could consume its fatty liver. But here I was, trying to make a book deal, not wanting to offend the lunch host.
In for a penny, in for a pound…or a few pounds, actually. So much for my diet. I could forget about the skinny, sexy black sparkle dress I wanted to wear to my husband’s company Christmas party this month. But Oscar was insistent, and I didn’t want to say no to the man who was going to offer me the big bucks. I fantasized at how high this next advance might be. Six figures? S-s-s-seven? That was crazy talk, an unheard-of advance for a series romance writer like me.
But a girl could dream.
For the past decade I had written approximately three romance novels each year, earning a reasonable income that barely faltered with the birth of my three children. My friends couldn’t imagine how I did it. My mother worried that I’d sold my intellectual soul for steady money. My neighbors didn’t have a clue that I was actually working holed up in the basement room in our bedroom community of Bayside, Queens. And the other moms at school assumed that I couldn’t be doing anything, since I appeared at dismissal each afternoon in jeans and a down jacket, instead of pulling up outside the school door in a huge Suburban wearing a Dior suit and cashmere coat with a cell phone pressed to my ear. They tried to rope me into the PTA, the first-grade show, volunteer playground duty and box-top snipping, but I fended them off, content to hole up with a cup of herbal tea at my computer and click out my five to seven pages a day.
I enjoyed weaving the stories of my near-perfect people, teasing my characters through their crises and wrapping things up with a neat, heartwarming Ruby Dixon ending. But lately, I’d started craving more of a creative stretch, wishing for a chance to write something that actually made a statement. What that statement would be, I wasn’t quite sure, but one night in a fit of inspiration I launched into the proposal for what my agent called “a big book,” a longer, more candid story that pressed beyond the pat romance formula. My new story was about a hot-shot business executive, Janna Pearson, who suddenly gets a flash of the ruthless bitch she’s become. She has a breakdown, which zeros out her career but leads her to rediscover the things that stir her soul…like making chocolates. Add in a dozen of the juiciest sex scenes I’d ever written, scenes that would make my husband wince, and there you have it. Entitled Chocolate in the Morning, the proposal was now being shopped around to various publishers, including Hearts and Flowers Romance, where my editor Lindsay told me she’d read it but had been pressed to keep mum on her response so that Oscar could “handle it.”
Funny, but Oscar hadn’t mentioned Chocolate in the Morning yet.
As Oscar and Morgan chatted about the firing of some publishing giant I didn’t know, I straightened the napkin on my lap and wondered if I could get away with wearing these, my favorite black pants, to Jack’s event. Since I’d turned thirty, I’d decided that black was the new everything. It hid a wealth of stains and it looked pretty good against my gold-brown hair that was now highlighted to cover the gray sprouting around my part. Black ruled, and these pants were the king. The woven black knit was wrinkle-proof and so comfortable and slimming, and the beauty of black pants was that you could dress them up or down. I plucked at a dark thread on the outer seam of my thigh and felt a tickle as the seam gave way slightly.
A hole. I’d just picked my favorite black pants open, revealing pasty thigh underneath.
Fortunately, neither Oscar nor Morgan seemed to notice, however I would need to devise a tactful means of escape once lunch was over. Perhaps I could keep my purse pressed to my thigh as I walked, like a vapid handbag model. Or maybe it would look more natural to throw myself into the arms of one of the smarmy faux-French waiters and ask him to deliver me to the cloak room, s’il vous plait? After all, I was a romance writer; I might as well live up to that slinky satin reputation.
With my palm pressed over the tear near my thigh, I suddenly woke up to the conversation as Morgan made her move.
“Shall we get down to business?” she asked, her almond-shaped, unpolished fingernails gripping the table inches away from the untouched coffee drink placed before her. Morgan is a straight-up java girl, which she would have told Oscar had he bothered to ask before he ordered the cups placed before us, their mounded whipped cream drizzled with caramel sauce. I felt glad that my agent would be negotiating without whipped cream on her upper lip. I, however, wouldn’t mind a dive into decadent dairy splendor.
“It’s time to negotiate Ruby’s new contract,” Morgan said, rubbing her hands together like a gleeful miser. “And I’m so glad you’ve stepped in, since you’ve got the authority to toss us the big bucks. What say you, Oscar?”
“We’re very happy with the way Ruby’s books have been performing for Hearts and Flowers,” he conceded.
Morgan nodded profusely. “Yes, yes, yes. She does very well for you.” I always got a charge out of the way Morgan swung a deal, rubbing her hands together and repeating words for emphasis, fast as a rapid-fire machine gun. “Looking over her last royalty statements, I’d say that upping her advance by ten thousand is a no-brainer. You could even double it and probably still have the books earn out. No problem. Not a problem at all.”
I tried to suppress a grin as my brain made quick calculations. Although I never excelled in math, it was clear that Morgan was pushing for me to get thirty thousand dollars a book. At three books a year, that would be ninety grand, but what if I wrote faster, signed up to write four a year?
Despite Oscar’s dull presence and his sweaty upper lip, I was beginning to feel all hearts and flowers for Hearts and Flowers, Inc.
“Thirty is doable,” Oscar said tentatively.
Thirty. My heart be still. I was tempted to jump up on the table and perform a victory dance, but I didn’t want to spill our caramel coffees.
Oscar paused a moment to drain the white china cup, replace it on the saucer and push it away. “But then there’s the issue of the new manuscript. What’s it called? Cocoa for Breakfast?”
“Chocolate in the Morning,” I supplied, my pulse quickening at the thought of even more money and a shot at something I could sink my teeth into.
“The chocolate book. Thank you.” Oscar nodded. “I think you know the policy of Hearts and Flowers when it comes to sharing our authors with other publishers. We don’t like it. Our feeling is, we’ve put money, promotion, support behind your books and your name, and it’s not fair to allow a competitor to cash in on the Ruby Dixon name, a franchise in which we’ve invested so heavily.”
Morgan was nodding rapidly. “Got it. So we’ll let you have Chocolate.” Her fingertips slipped away from the linen edge of the table as she sat back and grinned. “For a big, fat advance, of course. Lindsay told me she loved it.”
Oscar pressed his lips together and blew his cheeks full of air. Unless he was auditioning to be the Stay-Puft Marshmallow spokesman, the expression didn’t strike me as a good sign. “I hear that it’s quite the read,” he said, “but unfortunately, not for us.”
My heart stopped beating.
Had there been an ambulance available, I believe the paramedic would have pronounced me clinically dead—no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath. Just stunned and blue-lipped.
Fortunately