His dark eyes twinkle. “Yes. J. Hudson Bettencourt.”

  When he gestures for us to follow him to the table, I shoot a look at Hazel like wow. Her eyes pop open, and she mouths oh my god.

  This is unexpected, seeing the reclusive guy himself, but maybe he’s one of those billionaires who likes to show up unannounced, though I don’t actually know what billionaires like to do.

  He’s the first one I’ve met.

  “Here’s your table,” he says, stopping at one full of readers.

  “Thank you so much,” I say.

  Hazel seconds the sentiment.

  Then he joins Amy at a table. Shortly after, she pops up and cups her mouth. “And this morning is our special reader brunch where we dive into readers’ favorite question—where ideas come from. But first, enjoy your breakfast, everyone.”

  JHB seems to be enjoying his meal once Amy joins him at the table in the corner. He’s attentive, focused on her the whole time.

  I catch Hazel’s eyes as we eat, tipping my forehead toward them, asking silently, What do you think is up?

  “Get it, Amy,” Hazel whispers, with a crystal-clear answer.

  “The billionaire and the single mom,” I add.

  “Meant to be.”

  We’re seated again with the Book Besties, Nikon Man, and Redhead College Girl, and once we’ve finished eating, Jackie sets down her coffee cup and declares, “I’m ready for my first question.”

  After a glance to check that I’m ready too, Hazel tells the woman, “Go for it.”

  Jackie holds up her hands as if to show she’s unarmed before she starts in. “Look. I’m one of those people who doesn’t mince words. I don’t hold back. I say what’s on my mind.” Jackie’s normally enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, so this intense side of her is new. “And I want to know if Lacey is ever going to get together with—”

  I brace myself for what’s coming next. Will Lacey and Nate, the rich dude down the hall, ever get it on? Our readers had been shipping the ER doc and the broody suit ever since we pubbed our first co-written romance.

  “With Noah?” Jackie asks.

  I did not see that coming.

  Noah? The doctor Lacey works with? For real?

  Hazel snaps her gaze to Jackie, mirroring my confusion. “Noah?”

  With an emphatic nod, Jackie says, “Yes. I always saw her with the cute-but-surly ER doc. Noah’s sarcastic, but in a way that you could tell he had it bad for her all along.”

  What is she talking about? Noah does not have a thing for Lacey. Noah’s just her annoying work colleague.

  I scratch my chin, confused, looking to Hazel for her thoughts.

  Apparently, this character matchmaking is shocking to her too, since she’s shaking her head. Then she asks, “You think Noah has been into Lacey?”

  Jackie nods, big and long. Maria chimes in next with an oh yes.

  But Alecia tuts her friends, before she says to us, “I’ve got a dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House that says these two are wrong, so could you please, please, pretty please with a well-done ribeye on top write the dang book with Lacey and Nate? So I can say I was right, I was right, I was right.”

  I flash a smile at Hazel, who flings one right back at me. They say in our secret writer code that the readers are wrong but we don’t want to be rude to them. We mastered the signals when we worked together.

  Funny to be using it again.

  Though, funny’s not the right word. More like warm, or even…comforting.

  “Those are the three most satisfying words in the English language,” I say, deflecting for both of us. I’m not going to tell the Book Besties that they’re dead wrong about Lacey’s love interest. We were writing her with Nate, not Noah.

  But Lacey’s fictional guy hardly matters since her book is dead.

  I’m relieved that Steven the Nikon Man has no interest in Ten Park Avenue. He motions me closer once the servers have cleared the table. His wife must have taken off, since he’s alone. “Been dying to ask you something. It’s about the scene in Vienna in A Beautiful Midnight when the hero races through the city center on his Vespa.”

  “Hit me up, Steven,” I say. One table over, the college gals chat with each other, seemingly uninterested in this book dissection.

  “Now, I did a simulation on whether it’s possible to reach all those locations in ten minutes, like in chapter twenty-two.” Steven breaks out his phone and shows me a map of places in my book, then spends several minutes telling me that it’s not possible to pull off the chase scene from my story on a Vespa.

  He’s engaging enough to distract me from Jackie’s far-fetched idea. “That’s all plausible, Steven. But the thing is,” I say, pulling the ace from my sleeve, “his Vespa was souped up.”

  I’m about to tell him where to find the mention of the tricked-out vehicle when the redheaded college gal—Uma is her name—pipes up with, “It says so in chapter fourteen, paragraph four. That’s how he pulls it off.”

  Damn. She has a steel memory and bionic ears. “Uma’s right,” I say.

  Steven’s eyes flicker with you’re kidding me. “No way!”

  “Yessss,” Uma says, then since she’s done correcting him as he reader-splains to me, she returns to her conversation with her friends, whipping her gaze back to them.

  I clap Steven’s shoulder. “Yes. Check it out. It’s a quick mention but it’s there.”

  Scrambling, he flicks through the book on his phone, and when he discovers the little detail, he whistles appreciatively.

  Then, because we’ve talked about me enough, I ask him what he does for a living.

  “I’m a lawyer, but I want to be a writer,” Steven says, a little sheepishly. “That probably sounds ridiculous.”

  “Not in the least,” I say, then I pull my chair closer. “Have you started your first book?”

  “I finished it, actually. It’s, well, it’s a thriller. That’s probably obvious,” he says, and it’s funny to see this side of him—the nervous and worried side. He’s been such a lawyer all along, fast and sharp with questions.

  Now he sounds like a writer.

  “Let’s just say I’m not surprised,” I say.

  “It’s edited too. I hired a professional editor. I’d like to try to find an agent or self-publish it. It’s just…” He stops, winces, scrubs a hand across his chin. “The reviews. How do you deal with them?”

  That’s his worry? He came to the right guy. With a laugh, I say, “Badly, most of the time.”

  His shoulders seem to lose some of their tension. “Really? You seem so…impervious.”

  Glad my facade works. But there are times when I need to let it down. This seems like one of those times. “Some days I have the thick skin of a rhino. Other days, I’m cellophane,” I admit with a shrug.

  “Yeah?” He sounds relieved. “That’s good to know. Well, that it’s hard for someone like you.”

  I flash back to a comment Hazel made during dinner at Menu, that I was obsessed with reviews. That stung, but only because it was true. Also because that obsession was messing with my mind. “It is, but I’m trying to get better. I used to care about them too much—the good and the bad. The bad ones sent me into a tailspin, but I let the good ones go to my head. I had to get a better handle on all of it.”

  “How do you do that now?”

  “My favorite way is to just ignore the bad ones. As for the good ones, well, I like praise. We all do. But my agent made me a deal. He shares a handful of good ones, along with a promise to send me a bottle of the best single malt for my birthday if I don’t Google myself anymore.”

  Steven laughs. “Does that work?”

  “I’ve abstained from review searching for three weeks. Never underestimate the power of scotch.”

  He sighs, seeming relieved, then winds himself up again. “I’d be too worried that I got something wrong in the story. Some detail.”

  Everything about this guy added up. I thought I could write his character bio easily—assertive dude who likes to find flaws, take copious pictures as evidence of said mistakes, and then dissect those errors alone with his wife before she says enough already, just shut up and fuck me.

  But he’s got a vulnerable underbelly. I suppose we all do.

  “Look, you’ll make mistakes. You won’t make everyone happy. But everything you write is a choice. Think about why you want to make that choice, and then when you put your book out there, let it go. Anyone who creates something has to do that—a singer, an actor, a dancer, a poet. Hell, athletes have to deal with this all the time,” I say, thinking of Carter. He has to deal with reporters and sports analysts Monday morning, analyzing him week in, week out. “It’s part of the job. You learn to listen to the people you trust, and you try to filter out the rest. Or put your head in the sand—the ostrich strategy works too.”

  Steven nods, taking that in. Maybe that’s enough for him, because we shift topics and talk about the best and worst parts of the law until we arrive in Barcelona.

  The chat with him keeps Jackie’s questions about Ten Park Avenue on the back burner.

  For now at least.

  Today is my day to shine. Barcelona is my place and Gaudí is my companion. You can’t write about the Spanish city without knowing the architect whose work defines it.

  In Barcelona, I don’t need to play mental tricks like I did in high school, or like I did at the reader expo back in New York. I’ve spent countless hours researching for the novels I’ve set in this city. Here, my knowledge is my trick.

  But as I show the group around Casa Milà detailing how my hero slipped into an apartment in the private residence at night using the physics of the undulating walls of the building itself, an unexpected, new idea taps on my brain.

  It won’t let go. Like at the podium back in high school English class, I’m in two places at once. I’m speaking while I’m picturing something else.

  I’m talking to the group about how my hero climbed up the side of the building while I’m thinking about another guy.

  Someone back in New York.

  Someone I just can’t get out of my head.

  26

  A COMPETITIVE MONSTER

  Axel

  I’m close, so damn close, to putting all the pieces of the puzzle together, but I can’t snag a private moment to tell Hazel as we traipse all over the city with the group. We eventually stop in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi neighborhood for dinner, eating charred artichokes and drinking wine at a sidewalk café.

  Hazel lifts a glass of her rioja red. “Because it’s Wineday.”

  “May every day be Wineday,” I second, then take a hearty swallow of a wine that tastes like plums. I sit across from her, but there’s no chance to talk at the table. We aren’t boarding the train until late in the evening, but maybe I’ll grab some quiet time with her on the way back to the station.

  At the end of the meal, Amy clinks her fork against her wine glass, then says, “We have a surprise for Axel and Hazel.”

  I tense.

  A surprise is usually something that blindsides you. Like your dad saying Surprise, we're going to Atlantic City for the weekend so you can work on some short cons.

  Or, when you discover your love is cheating thanks to a social media post, like what happened to Hazel with Max. She mentioned it this morning, and I wince over that too, and my role in it. That’s another reason I need time alone with her. I have to tell her.

  “Since our train ride to Paris is a short one,” Amy continues at the head of the table, “I put together a scavenger hunt for you two.”

  Well, shit.

  Welcome to my Hunger Games.

  I don’t actually mind scavenger hunts. Carter dragged me on one when he visited me in Vienna in the off-season. My brother loves escape rooms, riddles, treasure hunts, and all that stuff. “Don’t care if I win,” he’d said. “Okay, that’s a lie. I love winning, but this is no-pressure winning, unlike, say, my Sundays.”

  Made perfect sense. On Sundays, he plays pro football.

  Scavenger hunts are fun for him because they aren’t part of his job.

  But they feel like part of mine. Like I’m supposed to be good at them. That’s why they aren’t my thing. At least, not like this. With a group.

  As we leave the restaurant, heading toward a nearby square, I try to develop a game plan for clues I don’t even yet know. That’s how badly I feel pressured to win.

  Looking concerned, Hazel tugs on my shirt, pulls me aside on the street.

  “You okay?”

  Her concern feels good. “Was it obvious?”

  She points at my face. “The sour look gave you away.”

  I go blank, stony. “Better?”

  “That’s good. But seriously, what’s wrong? You hate scavenger hunts?”

  I sigh, dragging a hand through my hair. “Yeah.”

  “Any reason?”

  I hate that she’s so caring, but I love that she’s so caring. “There’s no way to say this without sounding like a dick,” I mutter.

  “It’s okay,” she says, gently, a little playfully. “I know you're a jerk, and I don’t mind.”

  I love that too. That she knows me, all of me. That she’s not afraid to call me a jerk, because it’s different to call your friend a jerk than it is your enemy. I can hear the softness in her tone. I welcome it.

  And maybe today is one for confessions. I told Steven about the reviews. I can say this to Hazel. “I hate doing them in front of people. Because everyone expects me to be the best,” I admit with a sneer. The sneer is for me—I do sound like a big dick.

  She nods. “Because you’re a former lawyer, because you’re a thriller writer, because you plot for a living.” Of course she gets it.

  “Yep.”

  She pats my arm with affection. “Want me to let you in on a little secret?”

  All your secrets, especially if they’re about me. “Yes,” I say.

  “It’s okay if you don’t win. Other people like to win too. Just play for fun. You’ll be on my team.”

  “Where’s my competitive monster?” I ask, pretending to hunt around for her.

  An impish shrug is Hazel’s only answer. “Sometimes my competitive monster likes to have a glass of rioja and take the night off. Yours can join her at the café drinking wine while you and I scavenge.” She drapes an arm around my shoulder, squeezes. “Hey! That reminds me of sweet raccoon wine.”

  As we head along the street toward the nearby square, I arch a dubious brow. “That sounds like a clue in a scavenger hunt, or something the chief forager was peddling.”

  “Or,” she says, holding up a finger, “a new type of wine.”

  She goes on to tell me about the research she did with the New York sommelier about grape harvests. “I was dying to disprove the restaurateur,” she says.

  “Ah, that’s the malcontent I know,” I say. “I’m so proud of you for wanting to prove someone wrong.”

  With a laugh she asks, “And you want to hear the wildest thing of all?”

  We’re ten feet from the group, so there’s just enough time. “Always.”

  She stops at a street cart, where a vendor peddles fresh fruit. She’s using the cart for protection, so we can talk freely before we’re with the crowd again. Her face is soft, her eyes tender as she says, “When I found out, I wanted to tell you about the raccoons and the bird and the grape harvest. Isn’t that weird?”

  My heart squeezes. “That’s the weirdest.”

  “Later that day, I found out about the trip. But even before the trip news, I still thought of you,” she says, then knits her brow, like she’s sorting her impulse to talk to me then on the timeline of us.

  Before the airplane apology.

  Before the fountain confessions.

  Even before we started stitching our friendship back together, she still wanted to talk to me.

  I was a jerk then.

  Hell, that barely covers it. I was a world-class prick, yet she wanted to share the idea of sweet raccoon wine with me.

  That confession doesn’t slow the train of my new, unexpected thoughts. It speeds it up. Soon, I’ll need to talk to her about them, or explode.

  But first, it’s time for a scavenger hunt.

  Hazel was right. Other people do enjoy winning, and focusing on that—and them—takes all the pressure off me.

  I’m having—gasp—fun. Steven kills it at solving clues leading to locations from my books. No surprise there. He’s in first place with his teammate, Alecia, collecting photos at all the locations in the hunt.

  While we gather outside a tapas bar with flickering white lights, Amy sends the final clue to our phones.

  Beside me, Hazel reads out loud from her device. “Here, the metal glistened,” she says, then cuts herself off, shouting, “The Hotel Reyes!”

  I laugh as she immediately claps her hand over her mouth, eyes popping like she can’t believe she just spoiled the name of the hotel that hosts a glittery gala in A Beautiful Midnight.

  “Sorry!” she says to the group, but the Book Besties are already laughing, and Redheaded College Girl is too. “It’s just my favorite scene in that book.”

  Amy laughs as well. “No biggie. And we need to catch the train anyway, so maybe it all works out.”

  A smooth baritone cuts through the crowd. “I can hold the train if you need a little more time for the photo.”

  That’s Bettencourt, who’s materialized by Amy’s side. Perhaps that’s another thing billionaires do. Materialize.

  “That would be great,” she says. “We can get a shot of the tour group outside the hotel.” The Book Besties lose their minds at the suggestion.

  As we walk, Hazel explains more to the group again. “I just love when Francesca dances the tango at the gala with the knife in her garter,” she says, unapologetic in her apology.

  I love that she loves that scene.

  When we make it back to the train—held by Bettencourt, as promised—I put my language lessons to use, ordering drinks in the bar car for the crew.