Page 7 of The Bodyguard's Fall

But as blundering as he’d seemed at the wedding and on our date, he was a good stalker. Always careful to be where there were no cameras to catch him. We still didn’t even have his real name. Will had checked the Vermont database for Leroys, and they had all come back middle-aged and not our guy.

The clock on the wall ticked loudly. Focus became a joke. My brain felt like a spinning hamster wheel, with me unable to jump off. I went on the hunt for my shoes piled by the door before I remembered I needed to grab the makeup bag off my counter. Doing that reminded me that I hadn’t packed the sweatshirt I had hanging in the back of my closet. I stopped, hands trembling, and took in a deep breath. I had five minutes before Will arrived. I needed to pull it together and finish packing.

I would never dare to write a heroine with such nervous tendencies. It was too human. Too weak. When we all wanted to imagine ourselves as something different.

That was the irony of it all. I wrote storylines just like this. Throwing in a stalker who so casually disrupted the lives of my characters was a specialty of mine. They were a great dose of tension for crime dramas on TV. Along with stalkers, I also loved an assassin—the good kind, where they were morally gray throughout the entire show before they saved the day at the end. People went crazy for that stuff. A good old-fashioned whodunit (almost always the spouse) kind of tension never got old.

At least, that was what I used to write.

Six months ago, my production company, Plot Twist, Inc., went through a severe change. One too many high-profile scandals from their actors and directors resulted in plunging ratings and complete public mistrust of the entire company. As a last-ditch effort to save their brand, the owners decided to do a complete one-eighty, going in a “new direction” and moving from crime dramas to one of the fastest rising genres in the game…family-friendly romance.

Whipped cream.

Airy and light.

Low calories.

Zero substance.

Some of my colleagues promptly got jobs at other production companies where they could continue to write what they wanted, while others of us (ahem…me) couldn’t afford the luxury of a job hunt or (even briefly) forgoing a steady income. Having the funds to pack up and move when necessary was an important attribute when being stalked.

So I stayed.

Which did have its perks. Since I was one of the few writers kept on staff, I was promoted to a senior writer position. I’d already helped write dozens of screenplays, but now, I’d finally get to write my own. This move alone advanced my career by at least seven years.

So I signed the over-the-top contracts and morality clauses with this newly formed company. The kind of clauses that basically meant that my company owned me—at least, where I lived and how I slept. I’d heard of morality clauses before, but I’d never signed one.

But hey, a girl’s got to eat.

So I put away the double-homicide screenplay I’d been working on for two months and agreed to pen a sweet romance set in the fall in New England.

Because…of course.

Obviously, no other setting could come close to providing the correct fall backdrop for a couple falling in love. My home state of Vermont and I had this in the bag.

I’d spent the last couple of months working on a romance outline painfully inspired by all the cheesy romance films on TV. I made notes of popular plot points, what four-letter words could or couldn’t be said, and made myself familiar with the beats—the push and pull of a romance. The outline had been laughably easy. I’d been so proud of my efforts, so sure this genre shift would be a breeze.

After all, it’s just…fake.

Crime dramas had believability. Good guys, bad guys. The hunt for justice. A jail sentence. There were too many romances where I didn’t believe that the couple could make it all the way. There were too many variables in life affecting a happy outcome. It was that happily ever after that romance always insisted on that lost me.

And then…Leroy.

Since his presence in my life, I’d gone from being someone with an active social existence to a first-class hermit. The kind of hermit that gets toilet paper, milk, and fingernail clippers delivered to my apartment.

Years ago, I could have used some of this personal experience with stalkers to layer more depth into my stories. I could have learned something useful from all of this. But now, I was trapped in a cave, hiding from a madman while attempting to conjure up a screenplay full of enough romance to make a person swoon.

Swoon.

That was the word my boss, Elaine, told me to hit on the head with a hammer in my screenplay. The story must be full of enough swoon to charm someone’s socks off. (Just their socks.) But it was difficult to imagine the naive and the excessively sweet while cowering behind locked doors and bolted windows. Sunshine was what yielded creativity, and that had been tough to find these days.

The bedside lamp in my darkened room was the only light source I allotted myself at four in the morning. It was unlikely that Leroy was watching my apartment at this time of night, but there had been a lot of things I’d been wrong about regarding him, so I took extra precautions. But that didn’t keep my heart from lurching out of my chest anytime the long shadows stretching out across my room from the yellow lamp took me by surprise.

My phone buzzed against the table.

“I’m here. You ready?” Will’s baritone voice barreled through the speaker as I threw a pair of tennis shoes into my duffel bag.

I couldn’t relay my fears to him, because he’d only worry more. So I often went into annoyed-little-sister mode, which, naturally, wasn’t hard to pull off.