Page 11 of The Attraction File

When it came to men, my mother and I were total opposites. She loved to date, whereas I loved to not be taken advantage of and be a fool to love.

Picking up her spoon and making a swirling pattern in her soup, she sighed. “I felt terrible when I had to turn him down.”

“Turn him down?”

Her smile was warm but didn’t reach her eyes. “He asked me to move to Italy with him. I never told you because I know you would have told me to go. But, I could never be that far from you, Evaleen.”

I was surprised but understood. Sometimes I imagined what would happen when I did finally meet a guy and we got to the point where we lived together. My mom and I have been a team for so long, I wouldn’t want to leave her.

“You could have gone, Mom. I don’t want—”

She waved her hands at me. “Hush. It’s in the past. Anyway, speaking of men, how is that new book of yours coming?”

“I’m about half way through. They are stuck at his Scottish castle during a bad storm. So, you know—”

“Sex.”

I nodded and we both laughed. When I wasn’t working at Mimir or eating my mom’s fabulous food, I wrote romance novels under a pen name. I had been doing it for seven years now and have developed a bit of a following in the romance community. My last three books had been bestsellers.

“What’s the hero’s name?”

“Edgann.”

“Hmm.” She pushed the bowl away.

“It’s not about him, Mom.”

Her eyes focused on the floor as she stood and moved into the living room only a few steps away. “I never said it was. It’s just . . .”

She took her favorite spot on the smoky gray couch, the end near the simple beech-topped end table. I stood from the stool and followed her into the living room.

“It’s just, what?”

I waited on the other side of the oval coffee table with my hands on my hips for her to finish, but she never did. My mother picked up a home decorating magazine with a flower-filled window box on the cover and began to thumb through it.

Her head lifted and she appeared surprised, as if she didn’t expect me to be in the same room as her. “What?”

I folded my arms. She had her signals of warning and I had mine.

“You know what I am asking.”

Throwing the magazine back onto the table, she shook her head. “Fine. It’s just that you always give your male heroes similar names. They all begin with E or have an E sounding name. And while we are on the subject, why Scotland? Why do all of your heroes come from Scotland?”

I shook my head. That’s not true. Some of my heroes have names that don’t begin with E. I couldn’t think of any at that moment, but surely I must. I’ve written over twenty books, there had to be a K or D or M named character in there.

“But what about The Tartan Fire. That guy was from London.”

“His name was Eugene who happened to be adopted by a London couple. His real Scottish mother came to find him and take him back to Scotland.”

I reached up to my head and pulled out the hairpins that held my hair in place, tossing them onto the coffee table. Digging my fingers into my locks and messaging my scalp didn’t do much to clear my head. Mentally, I went through my entire back stock of books and realized my mother was right.

Throwing myself on the couch, I placed my head in her lap. “You’re right. It is him. Maybe subconsciously, and perhaps sometimes consciously, I make every hero of my books about Edgar.”

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