Page 39 of The Bodyguard's Fall

I opened Elaine's email and began reading.

We need you to throw everything you’ve got at fall romance and cozy vibes. We’re talking pumpkin patches, fall festivals, maple farms, horse rides, apple orchards, even Halloween, if you need it. Whatever you can put in this story, do it. Give us just enough personal depth to not go crazy, but nothing too steep. Light. Happy. Fluff.

Tate pretended to snore.

I kicked him lightly.

“What’s your outline?” he asked.

“It’s about a woman who recently got a divorce and is coming home to reset. She’s going to move into town and get a job at the library, and then she sees her ex-boyfriend. I’m thinking that, in the past, two guys wanted to date her, but she chose the wrong one. Now she’s back, divorced, and just trying to keep her head down. But she keeps running into the other guy—the one she should have picked in the first place.”

This point furrowed Tate’s brow. He didn’t look as impressed as I would have liked.

“This sounds like high school.”

“Um…no. She’s divorced. And coming back home to regret her life choices. That’s legit.”

He waited before saying with an air of uncertainty, “Alright. Now what’s your plot?”

“Huh?”

“The plot.” He looked at me like what he was saying should be obvious.

I mirrored his facial expression. “I just told you.”

“No, you told me the romance stuff. What’s it about? What’s she running from?”

“Her past marriage.”

He paused. “Is her ex after her or something?”

“No. It’s a romance.”

“I get that, but…” He trailed off, gesturing with his hands as though I wasn’t getting something. “What’s the fight? Do they just go pick out pumpkins in the pumpkin patch or something? What gets people’s blood pumping?”

“Wrong genre. The plot is romance. I mean, there will be other things they’ll have to work on together…like saving an inn or something. I still need to figure out how to work that in.”

“Why would they need to save an inn?”

“Because it would be historical and old…” I trailed off, trying to think of what I’d seen done. If it wasn’t broken, I wasn’t going to fix it. “Maybe somebody wants to tear it down to build condos or something,” I rattled off.

“Who?” His voice sounded confused.

I gave him an exasperated look. “The bad guy in the movie. You are so annoying. Go watch a romance. That’s your homework for tonight. And the stuff that gets blood pumping is romantic tension. Like…little touches and stuff.”

“Little touches?” By this point, his face had crumpled in disgust.

“Okay, you’re making this worse,” I said, trying not to laugh. “I don’t need your help.”

He had an incredulous look on his face. “I think you do.”

I sucked in a breath and moved my notebook out of the way while our waitress began to set our food down in front of us. A few minutes later, over a steaming basket of waffle fries and a hamburger almost as big as my head, Tate was right back to it.

“Can you have some mystery? What if your girl is out in the woods, walking through a pile of leaves, and she steps on a body?”

“No bodies.”

“Huh?”