Page 2 of Angel Eyes

“Nonsense,” Grace said with a wave. “Candles are the unsung heroes of décor. It’s impossible to have too many. By the way, I love the one you bought me for Support Staff Appreciation Day.”

I nodded, forcing a smile even as a trickle of anxiety crept into my chest. I scanned the email, which—yep, there it was—requested an update on the draft agreement beneath a laundry list of other tasks for me to get started on ASAP.

For a deal I’d been assigned to less than twenty-four hours ago.

Awesome.

I buried my face in my hands to mask the misery that had become my constant companion in recent months. Maybe if I hid long enough, Grace and her sunshiny personality would still be able to escape my dungeon of doom unscathed.

“How’s your novella coming?”

I perked up despite myself, peeking at her between my fingers. Leave it to Grace to bring up the one topic guaranteed to pull me out of even the foulest of moods.

“Um, I haven’t had much time to work on it lately. But—” I continued in a rush as Grace’s features collapsed with disappointment. “I have some good ideas brewing.” I had even jotted a few of them down in the margins of a legal pad during our team’s preliminary diligence call the night before.

Grace leaned forward in her seat. “Can you give me a twenty-second teaser? Cal and I have been dying to know what happens next.”

I sank back into my chair, the wail of a police siren outside giving me a brief reprieve to collect myself. “Honestly, I still can’t believe you showed it to him.”

I’d been mortified when I found out Grace’s fiancé, who, as fate would have it, was also an attorney in the corporate group at my firm, had read the first few chapters of my romance novella. It had taken an entire box of Sprinkles Cupcakes and repeated assurances from Grace that Cal had actually liked it before I was willing to risk showing my face in the cafeteria, lest I accidentally run into him.

“I’m sorry.” She winced. “I should have known better than to read it in front of him. I couldn’t stop laughing, and then Cal asked what was so funny and—”

“It’s fine. I’m probably just suffering from some form of shock that there are two people in the world who like my writing enough to ask about it.”

Well, three if I counted Ember, which I never did because she was obligated to love me and all the fanciful ideas in my head.

Grace frowned. “I think you’d be surprised how many people would like it if you were willing to share it with anyone besides your assistant and her secret-romance-aficionado fiancé.”

My shoulders stiffened as my email pinged again.

“Seriously, Juliet,” she continued as I wondered how much time dropping my computer out of my twentieth-floor window would buy me. “I think you’ve really got something here.”

I blinked up at her. My emotions wavered between utter despair over being assigned to what was shaping up to be one of the most aggressive deals our mergers and acquisitions group had ever handled and mild curiosity about her persistence.

“Grace.” My fingers tightened as the ping of death sounded again. “Writing is just something I do for fun. For me.” I didn’t add it was about the only thing I did for myself.

Ever since graduating from Columbia Law and joining Sterling & Bartlit LLP, my life had become a maelstrom. Don’t get me wrong—I was proud of all I had accomplished, proud to be a corporate associate at one of New York’s premier law firms. After all, if you can make it in Big Law in New York City, you can make it anywhere—or at least that’s what people said.

Except I wasn’t sure I was making it. Some days, it felt like I was barely even surviving.

Between eating meals in my office while poring over binders of due diligence documents, knocking back 5-Hour Energy shots before afternoons of endless conference calls, and keeping our clients’ deals moving forward while they checked in from their yachts in the Mediterranean, the days had all started to blend together.

The only time I felt alive, like I still had a living, beating heart somewhere inside the deal-making machinery that had become my body, was when I was wading through fresh ideas and churning out words for my novella.

“Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be something you do just for fun.” Grace placed a neat stack of papers on the edge of the desk, and I leaned forward to read the top of the front sheet.

Request for Admission, American University of Paris—Summer Creative Writing Institute.

I stared at the page.

“Now,” she said, smoothing a wrinkle from her pencil skirt, “before you say no—”

“No.” I shook my head, backing away from the application as if it were an explosive set to detonate. “Absolutely not.”

“I just want you to consider it. It’s only for the summer. Plus, haven’t you been saying you want to visit Paris?”

“On vacation. I can’t just drop everything and go to France.”

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