“Will that be okay?” Ramona asks with genuine concern.

  A concern that tells me I can’t say no.

  Yes, I do understand why the publishers are sending Axel, but I don’t understand why they’d pair us, knowing we’ve split. An hour-long Q and A at an expo is one thing. A seven-day, close-quarters train trip is entirely another.

  Still, it’s not my place to say, It’s not okay because I can’t stand his smug face, and I also can’t stand how much he’s not smug.

  “Totally okay,” I say, faking it once again.

  Cady cheers. “I knew it! You two are just so fun together. Since the expo, everyone’s been talking about how well you two get along. It’s all the rage.”

  “People are talking about us?” I ask.

  Ramona nods, clearly enthused. “Readers kind of went wild over your…chemistry,” she says. “We surveyed them online, and the overwhelming consensus was they wanted the three of you together on a book tour. And since all three of you are with the same parent company, it seems like a fantastic mix.”

  Great. Just great. Axel and I faked liking each other so well we’re now stuck together for seven stinking days on a train.

  In Europe.

  Can this day get any worse?

  7

  A HORROR VALENTINE

  Axel

  I. Freeze.

  There’s no way my editor just said Hazel’s name.

  I’m holding my cup of coffee at Doctor Insomnia’s Tea and Coffee Emporium, midair, imitating a statue. Am I fucking living in an alternate reality?

  I stare at Linus like he’s not making any sense. Because he’s not. “Hazel…Valentine, as in the romance author?” I choke out, like there could be any other Hazel Valentine. Like there’s a sci-fi Hazel. A horror Valentine.

  My editor nods in that serious way he always has. “The tacos. The subway ride. Readers dig it, Axel.”

  That was a survival game so we wouldn’t spew vitriol onstage. But instead, we won a prize of hosting a VIP reader trip together?

  Talk about being careful what you wish for. “Are you sure?” I ask, hoping he can read between the lines of my question.

  As in…

  Hello? We abandoned our last book like a patient left on the operating table, so why would you pair the two of us?

  But they don’t entirely know what went wrong.

  Hell, she doesn’t entirely know what went wrong.

  We played nice then too. We didn’t let on. We didn’t tell anyone.

  “You don’t want someone from Dunbar and Loraine instead? Like Saanvi,” I offer, thinking on my feet as if I’m in court. “Wouldn’t that make more sense to send me with someone from the same imprint?”

  That’s a damn good argument. Linus has to be swayed by my logic.

  “Dunbar and Loraine and Lancaster Abel are all owned by the same parent company,” he says, and that’s publishing for you. Hazel and I might be with different houses, but we have the same corporate big media parent, so we’re riding the choo-choo together in Europe.

  Fun. Just fucking fun.

  But I’ve never met an argument I won’t turn inside out as I hunt for holes. “I’m not that great with public appearances,” I say, but it sounds like a feeble protest even to my ears.

  Linus shakes his head in a firm, clear you’ve got that wrong style. “I beg to differ. You’re actually quite good at them, Axel. You’re smooth, sharp, and just the right kind of sarcastic. It works great in front of a crowd,” he says, and damn him for the compliment. Damn him too for catching me in my attempt to slither away from the tour. Damn him most of all for saying something nice.

  “Thanks,” I say, though it’s more like a grumble. I’m busy searching for another tactic. “It’s just I worry readers are going to ask about our unfinished book.”

  I offer that nugget like I’m trying to be helpful when I’m really trying to save my own ass.

  I cannot travel with Hazel Valentine and play nice for a week. I just can’t. Besides, she can’t stand me, and neither one of us is an actor, last time I checked.

  No, we’re over-actors, since that performance at the expo got us into this stupid predicament.

  “You handled it so well at the expo,” Linus points out. “And it makes good business sense to send you and Kennedy and Hazel. All of your recent books are set in Europe. And as for you and Hazel, you two get along so well. Tacos. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, tacos,” I say, leadenly.

  Fucking tacos.

  At least there’s Kennedy as a buffer.

  I cling to that as he tells me the rest of the details about how I’m supposed to spend a week with Hazel. The woman is still too hard for me to be around.

  I’ve got a long list of regrets that I update regularly.

  I don’t want to forget all the shit I need to fix in my life, so I write each misdemeanor on a digital Post-it note tucked away in a folder on my laptop labeled Naked Photos of Mom. Just another alligator in the security moat, after my ninety-five-character password.

  The list includes but is not limited to: Taking mock trial in high school, asking out the sexy brunette in tight black pants at the bar that night a few years ago even though tight black pants are my weakness and wow, did Sarah ever turn out to be a heartbreaker or what, and helping my dad with any of his cons, not that I had much of a choice at age seven.

  Now, at T-minus-three days before the Trip to the Bottomless Pit of Torment begins, I click open the file on a Monday afternoon. I’m in my apartment, my brother’s newest playlist blasting in my earbuds, draining an afternoon coffee as I add another regret.

  Taking Spanish in college.

  I close the laptop, turn off the music from my phone, and finish the last dregs of fuel.

  Here I go again.

  Four weeks of twice-weekly language lessons end today. I’ve learned how to say in Danish and Italian: please, thank you, nice to meet you, plus why yes, that’s where my hero Jett raced against the clock to solve the crime like the rock star he is, and no, you can’t run through the Trevi Fountain, unless you’re vanquishing the worst kind of bad guys and then it’s totally okay. But we’ve spent the last two weeks on French, since we’ll be in France half the time. If only I’d taken that language in school, I wouldn’t have had to spend these extra days with Hazel. Kennedy, too, but Kennedy doesn’t shoot death rays from her eyeballs into the center of my heart.

  Or at my dick.

  Though honestly, I’m not sure Hazel even looks my way anymore, but still I’ve got my emotional Kevlar on whenever I see her, so I fasten it tighter before I go.

  I take off to meet the French tutor, dropping on my shades once I leave my building. I still don’t have a survival plan for this train trip, and I need one badly. I really should ask Carter how he handles cornerbacks barreling at him on the field every Sunday when he plays football before millions. Surely that’s similar to the kind of hard defense I’m up against now.

  As I walk, I fire off a text to that effect. He answers immediately.

  Carter: Fleet feet. Nerves of steel. Also, pads. Those football pads fucking work!

  I laugh as I reply.

  Axel: Noted. I’ll invest in shoulder pads for the trip.

  Carter: Consider a cup too.

  I wince in sympathy, then text goodbye as I bound down the steps to the subway, hopping on. As the train slaloms through the tunnels, I survey the passengers. A college-age dude with huge headphones and a goatee is bopping his head. Bet he likes craft beer and playing guitar with his buds. The harried mom with one kid in her lap, and two hermetically sealed to her death grip hands, probably needs a stiff drink, but not a stiff anything else.

  I write some more character bios in my head, feeding possible supporting characters in my current book. When I reach West Seventy-Second, I’ve got a headful of backstories for the museum guards, Interpol agents, and crooks that Brooks Dean will face.

  Damn, I admire that guy. That steely-eyed bounty hunter of stolen goods who’s got a sharp sense of humor, a chip on his shoulder, all the moves with the ladies, and a dead-set determination to right the wrongs in the world. He uses his law degree for good. To help him solve puzzles.

  Maybe he’ll be my shoulder pads. Maybe I’ll pretend I’m one of my heroes on the trip and that’s how I’ll handle Hazel.

  Then I laugh at that ridiculous idea.

  I suck at pretending.

  Although, maybe I want to relocate Brooks’s upcoming story to Antarctica. Just in case. Pretty sure Hazel, even though she’s a helluva word wizard, couldn’t pull off a sexy romantic comedy in the tundra.

  Eh, who am I kidding? She’d write hot igloo sex and then melt all the penguins’ hearts and cocks.

  With no game plan in hand, I head into Big Cup where Angeline, the French tutor our publishers hired, likes to meet. These twice-weekly sessions have helped me learn some basics. I do understand the value of knowing some key phrases since I write stories mostly set in Europe. It’s just fucking polite to try to speak the language when you’re abroad, at least when you order a meal or buy a train ticket. I speak Spanish and that knowledge came in handy when I researched and wrote my last book hunkered down in Barcelona, stuffing myself with Gaudí and paella.

  I survey the shop for the stern, silver-haired, no-nonsense French woman at the sea of tables. Angeline’s not here, but my pulse shoots higher when I spot a woman with waves of red hair piled high on her head, her supple neck exposed. Hazel’s tucked into a corner booth, tapping away on her laptop, lost in the world in her mind. Her gaze is fixed on the screen, her fingers flying, nothing else happening but her imagination.

  It’s just how she looked when we’d work together, and I’d find her in the back of a coffee shop, having started early. She’d apologize, saying, “I just had this idea…”

  Then she’d share it with me, and invariably, it was a good idea. I’d build on it, and together we’d make something…electric.

  A persistent part of me wishes I could go back in time to that day in Chelsea when we blew up and find her like this again. I could say something different. Say a lot of things different.

  But you can’t go back. You can only go forward and learn to live with your regrets.

  I gird myself for the knives she’ll deservedly throw at me as I grab the chair across from her. She doesn’t look up for a few seconds, then she startles when she does. “Oh. Shit. I didn’t see you.”

  I hide a smile as best I can. That’s familiar too. Her reaction. Then I wipe the grin all the fucking way off. “That’s clear,” I say.

  With an eye roll, she looks at her screen. “I guess this is a good stopping point anyway. And Angeline should be here in a few minutes.”

  “But she’s always late,” I say.

  “True. She is,” Hazel says, sighing, then tapping on her keyboard. She’s emailing her work to herself, making sure it’s stored in Dropbox too. She shuts the silver laptop.

  “And what shenanigans are Hudson and Laini up to today?” I ask because I’m a jackass poking at a bruise. “Wait. Don’t tell me. He answered the door with only a towel on right after he showered. That clean, masculine scent drifted into her nostrils, lighting her up. Then her eyes popped wide open as she salivated over his six-pack, then she dropped the—hold on, give me a second—the cupcakes she’d baked to give him. To welcome him to the building. He’s her new next-door neighbor.” I take a beat, savoring the annoyed look in her eyes, since, well, I’m still a jackass. It’s easier, this Kevlar. “Am I right?”

  The death rays she shoots from her stunning green eyes tunnel into the center of my heart. Possibly, she’s charred that organ to a crisp.

  She lifts a brow. Takes her sweet time. “Axel,” she says, then laughs. “He has an eight-pack.”

  And I laugh too. Occupational hazard with her. “Touché.”

  “And of course he smells freshly showered. He just got out of the shower.”

  “Either freshly showered or woodsy or spicy,” I say. Those are the three main scents for romance heroes. We made a list one day, while we googled the sexiest scents for men and women.

  “Just like you write ’em too.”

  “Double touché.”

  Then, we’re both laughing, and that feels deceptively good. So good, I lower my guard. “And in all fairness, this morning Brooks sewed up the laceration in his shoulder all by himself using only fishing wire he found on the dock in the dark and numbing the pain with whiskey.”

  “That’s what whiskey’s for. It numbs the pain,” she says dryly, and it’s like we’re right back to the boom-boom rhythm we once had. But there’s a note of wistfulness in her tone that’s new, that almost feels like she’s talking about something else. Something beyond the power of whiskey. Something about pain, but maybe I’m reading something into nothing. Wouldn’t be the first time. She’s tucked the same rogue red strand into her bun three times between hopeful glances at the door. “Kennedy’s usually early. It’s weird that she’s not here.”

  Hazel’s probably eager for our buffer too. Maybe Kennedy should get hazard pay for this trip. “She’ll be here any minute,” I say, hopeful Kennedy shows soon. At least, I think that’s what I’m hoping for. But I shove any uncertainty away, choosing wit perhaps for this round. “If she arrives before the tutor, maybe we can form a united front and ask Angeline to teach us the most important French phrases today? Like, how to say, Can the bar car stay open late?”

  The corner of her lips twitches in a smile. “And how to order the best wine?”

  I relax into the chair more, stretch my arm across the back of it. For a second, her eyes flicker down my chest, then up. Like she’s taking a lightning-fast tour of my body.

  Wouldn’t that be fun if she were?

  But nope. I’m not her type. She likes slick guys in tailored suits, with expensive watches, and silk ties. Whatever. I’m over it. “Look, here’s the thing. I figure as long as you can say please, thanks, where’s the john, and can you give me something strong to drink you’re good to go.”

  With that smile staying intact, she nods. “Words to live by.” Then her eyes light up. “I should make a cheat sheet. I can’t believe I haven’t done that yet.”

  “Yeah, I can’t either. You’re the queen of prep,” I say.

  “I can’t help it. I have to prep. I hate surprises,” she says, and I know that. I definitely know that.

  “Including when guys with eight-packs answer the door unexpectedly wearing only a towel?” I tease.

  She taps her chin, like she’s seriously weighing that one. “That has yet to happen in real life, but I might be okay with that unexpected delight,” she says, a hint of a smile on her lips.

  The conversation is interrupted when her phone buzzes on the table. Mine vibrates in my pocket.

  “Twin buzzes,” I say.

  “Probably Angeline,” she says.

  I take my phone out. She swipes hers open.

  A message from Kennedy blinks up at me. But it’s to both of us. Before I even read the message, the mood at the table shifts and turns heavy. A photo of Kennedy's leg in a blue fiberglass cast stares up at me.

  I groan as I read the text.

  Kennedy: Rats are my enemy! There was a rat chasing me down the stoop of my building. Chasing me, I swear. It’s like they’ve become even more powerful and evil. I tripped and fell and THIS is what happened. Is there anything worse than rats?

  Another message lands.

  Kennedy: Oh, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m drowning my sorrows over not being able to go to Europe in hospital Jell-O.

  Then one more.

  Kennedy: Also, hospital Jell-O is the worst. I think it was made by rats.

  For a few long, shocked seconds, I try to picture seven days with just Hazel and me, on a luxury train, hosting a VIP reader tour.

  But I can’t picture it. It’s the great and terrifying unknown.

  With a heavy sigh, I set the phone down. So much for the buffer. I meet Hazel’s green irises, trying to read her emotions. But she’s blank. Maybe from the surprise. She must really hate this one.

  She’s quiet longer than I’d expect. What is there to say though? Except the obvious. So I fall on the obvious sword, saying, “I guess it’s you and me, sweetheart.”

  She looks like she’s about to answer when a flurry of flouncy skirt and jangly bracelets rushes through the coffee shop. Angeline hurries over to us, checking her watch. “Je suis désolée,” she says when she arrives. “I am late. I apologize.”

  “No worries,” Hazel says to our tutor. “But if you could teach us to say, Can you open the bar car at midnight? that would be great.”

  We’re definitely going to need that translation.

  8

  UNDER-EXAGGERATING

  Hazel

  As I zip up my suitcase on Thursday morning, I sniffle. Then, I sniffle a few more times for emphasis.

  “Did you hear that? I think I’m coming down with something,” I call out to TJ, who’s toasting bagels in my kitchen. Since bagels are good any time of day, we’re having a send-off lunch before my trip. The flight’s at seven, but I’m leaving for the airport a little after three, just in case.