What The Heart Learns Page 11

  He'd be right.

  "Yeah, but I have all the books in the lobby to go through."

  "Why are you being so stubborn?"

  "About what?"

  "About me," he clarified.

  "Well, look who came to breakfast together!" Maude's voice cheered, way too proud of herself.

  "You," Riley snapped, pointing her fork at the woman who was walking past with a friend.

  "Hey now, it all turned out alright, now didn't it?" she asked, not denying her hand in things. "You two all cozied up over breakfast. I talked to Devon. He said you never made it back to the inn."

  "She was too drunk to move Miss Maude," Liam jumped to Riley's defense.

  "Luckily, you were there to help," she said, giving him a knowing smile. "Well, I will leave you two to your meal."

  "She thinks she succeeded," Liam said at her retreating form.

  "Succeeded in what?"

  "Getting us together."

  "Why would she want us together when I am leaving town?"

  "I imagine she sees you sticking around."

  "I have a life in the city."

  "So did James and Lena."

  "You really buy into this psychic thing?"

  "I think she has an uncanny ability to read people. Whether that is supernatural or not, that is open to interpretation."

  "And you interpret it as..."

  "I think she picks up on subtle cues about things like attraction and interest."

  "And you believe that she picked up on attraction and interest between us?" Riley asked, trying to sound flabbergasted, trying to cover up the fact that she clearly felt more than a little bit of it, her traitorous body refusing to listen to the reason of her mind.

  "I think you can cut the shit now, Riley," he said, lifting a brow. "No," he cut her off when she went to object. "Enough with the evasions and outright lies. You're attracted to me. What do you lose by admitting that?"

  "What would I gain from admitting it?" she shot back.

  His hand moved out suddenly, pressing down on top of hers, strong and wide, hiding hers entirely.

  The contact sent off a sizzle she was starting to expect from his skin brushing hers, but stealing her mind for a moment, making her not even think to snatch it back away.

  "Enough," he demanded softly, head ducking down a bit to catch her eyes. "How about you try to have a conversation with me without sniping."

  "Why are you interested when you know I'm leaving?"

  "I think it is better to have something good temporarily, than never to have it at all."

  "What makes you think that anything between us would be good?"

  "Why haven't you pulled your hand away?" he asked, but there was none of his usual sarcasm. "Why do you shiver when I touch you, have trouble breathing when I get too close, why did you breathe in deep like you were trying to memorize my scent last night? The fact that you can't seem to control your reaction to me no matter how hard you try to dislike me, that's why I think it would be good."

  "And what about you?" she asked, feeling warm, and she was pretty sure it wasn't embarrassment that her body had betrayed her so openly. It had more to do with the fact that he was able to read her when most men - at least the ones she had known - were blind to the subtle signals.

  "I'm having trouble reading," he admitted, pulling his hand away, shaking his head as though it was the vilest of sins.

  "I'm sorry?"

  "I can always read. When I'm stressed or pissed or exhausted, I can always read. I can't fucking read anymore. I pick up a book, and the words blur because what I'm thinking about is your surly ass."

  "My surly ass," she repeated, snorting.

  "Try to deny it," he suggested.

  "You're no Mr. Congeniality either," she shot back.

  "Maybe not, but all popular fiction from the last couple hundred years suggests that surly men are appealing. While surly women, well..."

  "Katniss," Riley shot at him. "From The Hunger Games. "Amy Dunne from Gone Girl. Nora from The Woman Upstairs. If we want to go classic... Scarlett from Gone With the Wind.

  "I'll give you Katniss, Amy, and Nora. But Scarlett is whiny and conceited and entitled, not surly."

  "She's surly toward Rhett at times."

  "It's a stretch."

  Riley took a deep breath while she shoveled in some breakfast potatoes, thinking. "Feyre."

  "Don't," Liam demanded. "Disgrace all the other good candidates by bringing her to the table."

  "Not a fan, huh?" she asked, somewhat amused he'd read it at all.

  "I don't think there's enough time to go into that."

  "I have plenty of food left."

  "I meant in life, Riley. There is not enough time left in our lives to get into that."

  To that, she laughed. "That's like me and Atonement."

  "It was a polarizing read," he allowed.

  Conversation slipped into what was comfortable for the two of them - words from others.

  At some point, they stopped fighting, they stopped trying to hold onto their guards, they laughed, teased, looking very much to all those around them as two people in the beginning stages of something.

  "Am I going to need to roll you out of here?" Liam asked, watching as her hands rubbed her stomach. "Did you finish it just to prove a point?" he added, brow quirked up.

  She'd finished every last bit of food, not even leaving a single hashbrown sliver to be scraped into the garbage.

  "That's pretty much how I eat at every meal."

  "Glutton," he shot at her as he paid the bill, waiting for her to join him to walk her back to the inn.

  "Care to impress me with how much you plan to eat for dinner?" he asked as she eye-banged the dinner menu Meggie had left at the front desk.

  Dinner.

  At the inn.

  Around Dane and Devon and Meggie who would no doubt grill her endlessly about it.

  And, oh, so close to her room just a floor above.

  "Sure."

  "Seven?"

  "Seven," she agreed, watching him walk out the door as Emily clucked her tongue, trying to hide a smile.

  "Hush you," she demanded.

  "Hey, he's a prime piece of real estate, woman. Go get you some land."

  With that, Riley made her way up the stairs, letting herself into her room.

  See, the problem wasn't Liam O'reilly, per se.

  The man himself.

  He was knowledgeable, successful, good-looking.

  The problem was, she as supposed to hate him.

  She was supposed to remember that he was the reason she had been having bad sleep for years, why she second-guessed herself, why she had a knot in her stomach about what was coming soon.

  He was the enemy, damnit.

  She wasn't supposed to sleep with him.

  There was a movie about it and everything.

  Except, she was sure she'd never seen that movie.

  She had no idea if it was a good or bad thing to sleep with the enemy.

  If that was even what the story was about.

  She dropped down on the bed, pulling open her laptop, checking her usual sites and social media, trying to do everything within her power to keep from looking at what she wanted to look at for the millionth time, finding herself much more masochistic than she ever could have known before him.

  Before the profile.

  With the emblem for Stars Books as the picture.

  And a page full of reviews.

  Some short, some long-winded, some raving, some ranting.

  But none, none as eviscerating as the ones he had made on her books.

  Two in a row.

  Her life's work, her babies, her everything.

  And he had held them up before her, stabbing a knife through their bellies, making their insides fall out, raw and dripping, splatting to the floor at her feet, all the while screaming at her for how stupid she was to create something so ugly to begin with, how useless she was if she couldn't get i
t right at least once.

  Bad reviews were part of the job.

  She'd known that from the beginning.

  She'd read article after article about how you'd need to develop a thick skin, try not to let them get to you.

  And, of course, those were all bullshit.

  They always got to you.

  But over time, you learned to let them matter less. Especially when the negative reviews were in the minority.

  In books - as with anything else - the majority ruled.

  She'd taken a few hits to her ego right at the beginning before she learned to take them on her chin and move on.

  Until Stars Books showed up in her notifications.

  Until this invisible person found her books.

  And didn't like them.

  No.

  It was deeper than that.

  Hated.

  This internet person whose face she didn't even know hated the thing in the world she cared the most about.

  And not only did this person hate it, but they told her how much they hated it. In vivid, painstaking detail.

  I don't know who first told R.A. Barry that she should go into writing, but they should make an appointment for inter-maxillary fixation.

  She'd had to look up what inter-maxillary fixation was.

  Having your jaw wired shut.

  Nothing was more humiliating than having to Google words used in a negative review of her debut book.

  And that sentence, quite frankly, was the kindest of all of them in the very, very long review.

  She'd tried to rally, though, keep her head up despite the black eyes and busted lip and bruises.

  Sometimes criticism is a good thing.

  Even if it pisses you off.

  It challenges you.

  It forces you to work harder, try to fix the issues.

  If for no other reason than you feel like you can say Well, I showed them, didn't I? As petty as that may be.

  So she had hunkered down, put her entire life on hold while she outlined and re-outlined and triple outlined the story, making sure there wasn't a single loophole, that there was no way to guess the plot twists, that the red herrings were dropped in the right places to throw the readers off, that the foreshadowing was the right level of vague.

  And then she sat down and wrote.

  It was twelve hour days for three months.

  She put everything she had into her second novel.

  And then she had red-pen-edited it ruthlessly, killing all her babies as she heard King once say. She took out unnecessary internal monologue, added more plot, made sure the entire book hit that perfect formula of up-downs that were the makeups of bestsellers.

  Once she was done with her own edits, she had been ultra careful, wanting to make sure everything was as tight as it could be.

  So she didn't just have the copyedit and proofread she had in the first book. Oh, no. She went all-in and got a structural and a developmental edit on top of that.

  Thousands of dollars in editors that she really couldn't afford.

  Because of this review that gnawed at her, that kept her from sleep at night, that made her question every single word she typed.

  When all was said and done, however, she had been immensely proud. The editors had enjoyed it. Her beta and ARC teams had loved it.

  It was ready.

  Perfect, even.

  And then she released.

  And waited.

  Three days after the release, Stars Books added it to their TBR.

  It sat there for three long, excruciating weeks, making her somewhat frantically refresh their Goodreads profile to see if they had started, if they had made any status updates about it, finished it, reviewed it, anything.

  On the seventh day of that third week, Stars Books marked it as Currently Reading.

  Three hours later - three hours for a four-hundred-and-seventy page book - it was finished.

  The placeholder "Review Coming" was put in the box.

  So she waited again.

  Refreshing again.

  Stomach in knots again.

  It took three days for the review to post.

  And it shredded her once again.

  Worse even.

  She knew from the first sentence that it was going to be ugly.

  Many of us had hoped R.A. Barry had realized writing was not her forte. Alas, we are not so lucky. Grab your whiskey. This is going to be painful, and you're going to need it.

  And it was painful.

  And she had needed a lot of whiskey afterward.

  But it hadn't taken the pain away.

  There had been hundreds and hundreds of positive reviews, raving about her growth as an author.

  But the lone one-star - If I could rate less, I would - one from Stars Books had plagued her day and night, made her slam her laptop closed, and give up. She didn't look at her sales. She didn't check her social media.

  She simply curled up under her covers, fell into her paperback TBR pile - seventy-five deep - and refused to come out of fictional worlds except to sleep.

  It wasn't until her parents and sister showed up at her door a month later - having not been able to get in touch with her in all that time, dragged her out of bed, out of her apartment, forced her to sit there as they read her positive reviews aloud.

  So prove them wrong, Ry, her mother had demanded. Show them how wrong they were about you.

  In the end, spite had been the ultimate motivator for Riley.

  She'd pulled her pieces back together, opened up her laptop, and got back to work.

  It took her six months that time.

  And as she waited for the ARC reviews to come in, she couldn't seem to hold herself back.

  She hit the road to check out Stars Books.

  And here she was, contemplating sleeping with the man whose words had once completely crippled her, had made her question her talent, made her wonder if the only dream she had ever had for her life was one that was simply out of her reach.

  She was mental, right?

  She should have been packing her things and rushing back to the city.

  But, no, she was sitting in her room wondering what she should wear to dinner.

  NINE

  Riley

  "What do you mean you are in Stars Landing?" Ronni, Riley's sister snapped over the phone.

  Riley could hear her walking around the hardwood floors in her apartment, spritzing her houseplants that she never personally remembered to spritz. But Ronni was the more responsible sister, the kind who looked into plant care when she was asked to plant-sit for her sister.

  If she wasn't mistaken, she could hear her niece babbling in the background, the two-year-old who had an adorably almost bald head still, all wispy white-blond hairs that had this tendency to stand on end like she'd just rubbed a balloon over her scalp.

  "Ronni, it's complicated," Riley started, knowing it really wasn't all that complicated.

  "Complicated?" Ronni shot back at her, and in her head, she could see her sister turning halfway around as though she was standing right behind her, hand going to her hip, brows raising. "Taxes are complicated. This is simple. I know you lived it, Ry, but you didn't get to see your depressive episode from the outside. It was scary, okay? You just shut down. You were empty, desperately trying to fill the void with books. I mean... you barely touched food. And we all know how much you like to eat."

  "I know I was a mess, Ron. But I also really shouldn't have let it get to me that much."

  "True. It's part of the job. But, it did get to you. And while we all understand your need to put a face to a review - this is pushing it. This isn't healthy."

  "You don't even know what's happened," Riley insisted, her sister being the only one who was capable of making her feel like a little girl, making her immediately feel on the defensive.

  "Okay," she said, spritzing away again. "What's happened then?"

  "He's actually a pretty nice guy."

  "He" sh
e shot back, the spritzing suddenly stopping. "Oh, God, Ry. Please tell me you're not sleeping with him."

  She wasn't.

  She could say that with confidence.

  After the breakfast had been a dinner.

  After that dinner, she went into the shop the next morning to browse. They'd gotten into a heated debate about Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, and she had stormed out.

  But when he'd showed up with coffee after closing the shop, she went out onto the front porch with him and shared it.

  Watching the sun go down.

  It was practically from a damn movie.

  "I'm not sleeping with him."

  But she was pretty sure it was heading that way. And soon.

  He never even touched her, but her body buzzed when he was near. Her core tightened. Her pulse quickened.

  Everything within her would cry out What are you waiting for? Make a move already!

  "Well thank God for that. Get out of that town. To Kill A Queen comes out in a few days. You don't want to be there when he reads it, right?"

  "I'm really proud of To Kill A Queen," Riley insisted, tone going sharp, chin jutting even though her sister couldn't see her.

  "Of course you are. And you should be. It's your best yet, and I thought The Light that Breaks was amazing, and so was Anais and Me, so that is saying something. But he clearly has bad taste, Ry, if he didn't like that one."

  But he didn't have bad taste.

  Not really.

  Sure, they had disagreed over a few things, but as a whole, he knew what he was talking about.

  But she knew that her next book was something to be proud of. She had faith that it was going to be the one that changed it all.

  Maybe that was naive of her, but she had to believe it.

  "Alright, listen," Ronni said, using her mom-voice, one that was more effective even than the one their own mother used. She was going to be fearsome when her kids tried their hands at rebellion. "We all know you have always been the wild and crazy one, the one who acts first, thinks second. But please would you just... really think about this, please?"

  "I will think about it," Riley assured her.

  "And I really think you should be home before the book comes out. Just my two cents."

  "I will keep it in mind," Riley agreed, though she wasn't sure she was being wholly honest. "How are my plants?"