Page 16 of First Comes Revenge

I run my tongue across my teeth. I don’t want to be in that man’s debt, but she’s probably right. Who better to help me with something like this than Jameson?

She pulls out her phone and her fingers fly over the screen for a few moments. She holds up the phone so I can see. “Look, you can contact his secretary here.”

I chew my nails a little longer, thinking it over. I’m hardly able to string a thought together, though. My brain is buzzing with so many emotions. I can’t believe he’d do this.Whywould he do this? Why would some random woman agree to pretend to be the author of my story? How does he even think he’ll get away with something so brazen and obvious?

And maybe the biggest question I have ishow? How the hell would he steal my story?

I take the phone from Dani and dial the number for Jameson’s secretary.Here goes nothing.

7

JAMESON

I’m actually stunned. I’m sitting in my office on a Tuesday and Charli McBride is on the phone. She just finished telling me what Vaughn did, andfuck.I knew the Vanderlesh’s were scum, but this is low, even for them.

“Alright,” I say. “So you need my help?”

“Do I?” Charli sounds on the verge of hysterics. She’s been speaking a mile a minute and her voice is shaky. I feel for her. I remember the look of panic on her face at the convention when she couldn’t even figure out how to work a door. Something like this probably has her on the cusp of spontaneous combustion.

“You do. You need my help so badly I’m not even going to make you apologize for running off on me.”

There’s a pause. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I got nervous about letting you have so much control over me and my book.”

“I didn’t want control. I wanted a partnership.”

“Can we talk about it another time?” she asks.

“Yeah, sure. You dated Vaughn and he lives in Manhattan. I’m assuming you do, too?”

“I do,” she says slowly.

I give her the address of my building, which is also in Manhattan. “How far are you from here?”

“Like half an hour, maybe, if I call a ride.”

“Tell me your address. I’ll call one for you. We can talk about this in my office.”

It’s a little more than half an hour before my secretary buzzes her in.

I’m at my desk, so I stand and come to greet her. I wrap her in a tight hug because the look on her face calls for tight hugs. “You came to the right person,” I say, resting my chin on top of her head. She squeezes her arms around me a little tighter and nods into my chest.

Once she lets go, I motion for her to sit on the couch beside my desk. I pull up a rolling chair and sit in it backwards, facing her. “So Vaughn is trying to steal your book. Before we figure out what we’re going to do, let’s clear up how he did it. Is there any way he could’ve had access to the manuscript?”

Normally, I’d have to exercise a little self control to stay focused on the problem at hand in a moment like this. My attraction to Charli goes beyond what I would consider normal, easily controlled limits. I was honestly crushed when I found out she ran off on me over the weekend, and the thought of never seeing her again was something I was still wrestling with. But her situation has me temporarily worried only about her. I can celebrate her coming back to me some other time. I can also worry about what this new wrinkle means for me and my grand plans to publish her book later.

Charli swallows hard and stares at the ground, eyebrows creasing with thought. She deflates a few moments later. “The app,” she says.

“The app?”

She’s nodding, as if the pieces are clicking together in her head. “He made this stupid app for me. I thought it was sweet, but it’s like a word processor that lets you change the background color and text color.”

I squint. “Don’t they all do that?”

“Not exactly?” She doesn’t sound very sure.

“Hemadean app?”

“Well, he paid someone to do it, I think. He made it out to be this big grand gesture. At the time, he said he was going to keep adding new features with my input. But he never really did that part. I wrote the whole book in the app, though.”

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