Page 11 of Accidentally Yours
That caught him off guard and then hit on quite a few insecurities. “Me?” He jabbed a thumb at his chest, hoping she was referring to his stupid tweet. He braced for another round of apologies. At least that was something he could fix, hopefully.
“Before I sign anything . . .” Paige paused, assessing him with sharp scrutiny. “I need to know what I’m getting into.”
Ethan furrowed his brow, scrambling for answers and assurances. “I thought the contract laid it out pretty clearly. Equal work, equal royalties, and—”
She held up a hand, cutting him off. “This isn’t about royalties. It’s about us. If we’re going to do this, I need to know more about you. What you’re like as a writer. How you see this partnership working.” She pushed her phone aside, revealing a notebook filled with scribbled notes and underlines. The entire page. Like she’d been taking notes at a seminar.
“Okay . . .” He blinked. “What do you want to know?”
Paige pursed her lips. She glanced down at her notes, suddenly looking like a detective ready to grill a suspect. “I’m going to give you rapid-fire questions. No overthinking. Just answer.” She glanced back at him, waiting for him to respond.
For a moment, he just stared at her. “This sounds intense.”
“It is.”
“Should I be nervous?”
“Only if you’re going to tell me what I don’t want to hear,” she said.
He suppressed a smirk. Paige Moon had nerve.
A flicker of amusement cut through the tension, momentarily distracting him from the weight of the necklace, the book, and the contract. She was intriguing . . . and a challenge. Like a steaming cup of coffee—small, barely contained, and more than capable of scalding him.
But he liked coffee.
“Fire away, Ms. Moon.”
Paige poised her pen at the top of the page. “Why do you write?”
Ethan set his forearms on the table, clasping his hands in thought. “That’s a big question.”
Paige squinted at him. “Answer quickly. I have a lot of questions.” She moved her pen down the page like a pointer, demonstrating what lay ahead.
“I like the challenge of creating a world and characters,” he replied. “Of piecing together an adventure.”
Paige’s pen scratched across the paper, her face unreadable. She should’ve been an FBI negotiator.
“Plotter or pantser?” she asked, still writing.
“Plotter,” he answered, without hesitation.
Her pen stopped mid-word. She grimaced. So did he.
“You’re a pantser, I take it?” he asked, realizing their writing styles were very different.
She made a succinct note, underlining it. “Yes.” She looked up at him. “Don’t you think that would make it incredibly hard for us to write a book together?”
It would. Ethan liked to plot out his story, chapter by chapter, before he started writing it. Pantsers—as the writing community referred to it—liked to discover the story as they wrote it. The idea of that gave him heart palpitations.
“No,” he lied with a concise shrug. “We could figure it out. It’s just one book.”
Paige tapped the pen against her notebook, not looking convinced. “Outlining kills my creative flow. If I plot out an entire book, my brain thinks I’ve already written the story. Plotting gives me writer’s block.” She stared, waiting for his response.
Ethan fought to keep his face neutral. He was the opposite. Without an outline, his writing stalled. That was part of his problem now and why he couldn’t finish the first chapter of his manuscript. “Maybe we’d complement each other?” he offered, not wanting to linger on this obvious issue.
She raised a brow, skeptically.
“We won’t know until we try?” Ethan meant to say it as a statement, but it came out as a question. Paige looked undecided, but moved on.
