Cheating at Solitaire

"Nina, that's ridiculous," Caroline said.



"I told you," Nina said, as if she was holding a surefire answer to their prayers and Caroline was refusing to listen. "Lance can help."



"Whoa," Lance said. "I'm not committing any felonies until I see for myself exactly why the world will end if I don't help you three."



Caroline disappeared. When she came back, she was carrying a handful of worn paperbacks. "Here." She handed a book to Lance, and he took it. "That's the first one. That's the one Myrtle's got."



Lance looked at the small block of paper in his hands. It had a bright cover with a half-naked man and a bosomy woman in a tight embrace. He read the title: "Tomorrow's Temptation by Veronica White." Then he, looked down at the straight laced woman he'd come to know. "Hello, Veronica," he teased.



"Hey, category romance is big business" she said defensively. "I wasn't going into the slush pile. I was going to get published and get paid." She crossed her arms over her chest and raised her chin. "It was all about the math."



"Sure," Lance said, not trying to hide his doubts. "This looks very mathematical."



"I'll have you know that the majority of all popular fiction sales are in the romance genre, not to mention more than half of all the paperbacks," Julia stated. "There are over fifty million readers in North America alone!"



"Okay," Lance shot back. "So it's big business and you were good at it. Then what's the big deal?" he asked.



"The 'big deal,'" Julia said, "is that Veronica White sold something that Julia James tells women they don't need. This"—she snatched the book from his hands—"plus you"— she used the book to hit his shoulder—"equals hypocrite," she gestured to herself. Then she dropped into a chair and laid one arm dramatically over her eyes. Lance thought she looked like Juliet right after she swallowed the poison.



Lance walked to the remaining pile of books and selected one. He studied the paperback novel in his hands and said, "Veronica White. You made that up?"



"Yes," Caroline answered.



He turned to the back cover of the book and studied the black-and-white photograph of a timeless, ageless woman wearing a black turtleneck with stark black hair pulled tightly away from a classic face. If she hadn't been on the back of a book, he might have expected to find her on an ancient coin. "Who's the babe?"



"The babe"—Caroline laughed—"is Ro-Ro."



"No," he said, disbelieving.



Caroline took the paperback from him and studied it like a person staring at a family heirloom. "It's an old picture, taken when she was between husbands and going through a Bohemian phase."



Lance looked between the book and the woman who had written it. He saw the same strong features, the same graceful presence; the picture might have been of Ro-Ro, but the image, Lance decided, was all Julia. Then he remembered the dour old woman the graceful girl in the photo had become. What a waste.



Caroline went on. "We didn't think anyone would ever figure it out. When we found the picture, it looked so modern and she was so beautiful in it that we didn't even know it was her until she told us."



"So does she know?" Lance asked.



"Good gracious, no," Caroline said. "I can just see Miss Sycamore Hills putting her face on the back of a book. There'd be hell to pay."



"Are you kidding?" Nina asked. "She would love it."



"Deep down maybe," Caroline conceded.



"Deep down definitely," Nina said.



"No deep down about it," Julia said, sounding more confident than her sister and best friend combined. "She'd love it, and she'd Waft."



They sat in silence for a long time, each of them trying to find a magic solution, a time machine, an error-proof plan. After a while, Julia straightened and said, "Why am I panicking? I'll just go ask for it back. I'll offer to pay her if that's what it takes." She stood and began looking for her purse. "I don't know how much cash I've got, but—"



"Julia, that won't work," Caroline said, sounding grim.



Julia looked at her sister. "Do you have a better idea?"



"No, but I can promise you that knocking on the door isn't the way to go. Steve tried talking to her, remember? The woman is a few dishes shy of a load. Right now, she thinks it's just our trash. I can't imagine what she'd do if she knew it was something we really wanted."



Silence came again. Lance tried to remember his life before crawling into that cab with Julia, but he couldn't. His apartment, his friends, they all seemed like a long-forgotten dream. He looked at Julia, the woman who had made a name and a life for herself by telling the world that romance wasn't the requisite for happiness, and he remembered that it had taken lust one scandalous lie to throw her whole world out of balance. Lance didn't want to imagine the power of a juicy piece of truth.



Nina said, "We could break in," as if, in the silence, her idea would fall on more favorable ears.



"No," Lance said, and Nina let it drop.



"I've got it," Caroline said, a light bulb shining brightly above her head. "We could say it's a book you brought home to edit, and it got mixed in with some of your stuff. Doesn't mean you wrote it. It's a mistake," she finished.



Julia was shaking her head. "It's going to have my name and address at the top of the cover sheet and my handwritten notes all over the text. It's covered with my fingerprints—literally and figuratively." She took a deep breath and added, "That's the bad news. The good news is that the Veronica is at the bottom of the box. With any luck, we've got some time."



Do you ever get too old or successful to hide in the bathroom? Julia wondered as she sat on the toilet lid of what Caroline liked to call "the pool bath." Of course, Steve and Caroline didn't have a pool, but they had the bathroom for one—just in case—a fact that had seemed ridiculous to Julia until she went searching for someplace far away from the noise of the vacuum cleaner and the Dora the Explorer videos.



Staring at her reflection in the mirror, Julia saw past and future collide. She got up and leaned into the light, wanting to make sure her eyes weren't playing tricks on her, but nope, there it was, a zit right next to a wrinkle.



This is officially the worst day of my life.



Julia's cell phone lay beside the sink, but it felt a hundred miles away. She stared at it longingly, daring herself to pick it up and dial. She knew the number by heart. She had free long distance. She wasn't in roam. Really, there wasn't a reason in the world to keep putting it off, but the phone lay on the counter like nuclear waste, and Julia stared at it, as if expecting it to sprout legs and scamper off and make her decision for her.



She leaned closer to the mirror, tilted her head, and practiced what she'd say. "Hi, Abby, it's Julia James. ..."



No good, Julia thought. She straightened her back and tried again, this time aiming for "time-crunched-career-gal."



"Abby, Julia James here."



No, I have to sound nice, she reminded herself, so she smiled, turned up her accent, and did her best version of "everyone's favorite girl from Oklahoma."



"Hi, Ms. Warner, this is Julia James. Could I have a minute of your time?"



Still, the greeting didn't convey the sense of urgency that Julia felt. She gripped the stone countertop, squinted her eyes, and sunk into "desperate, almost-middle-aged has-been."



"Candon Jeffries screwed me over. Wanna make him pay?"



Julia stopped for a second to ponder whether or not she was doing the right thing. It might be easier on her mind and her ego just to jump ship, take her future books to any of Eli-Winter's rivals. But, like it or not, her first three books already belonged to them, and she didn't feel like leaving her firstborn behind. Still, she knew the only way she could bring herself to stay with Eli-Winter was if Abby Warner was on her side. Abby was the grande dame of nonfiction, the woman with nine of the top ten bestsellers of all time to her credit, the person with the power to crush Candon like a bug—assuming she wanted to. No one gets as successful as Abby Warner without knowing the power of a buck, and Julia knew that however much it pained her, the "Lance Collins situation" had been very good for business.



So she took a deep breath, picked up her cellular phone, eased herself down on the closed lid of the toilet, and dialed her publisher's main phone number. A switchboard operator came on the line, and Julia asked to speak to Abby Warner.



"I'm sorry," a well-trained male secretary said once she'd been transferred. "Ms. Warner isn't available at the moment." Julia was fluent in the language of the publishing industry, and knew this translated to "Go away, loser, we don't accept unsolicited trash."



It's now or never, Julia thought, holding her breath. "Will you see if she's available for Julia James?"



A pause from New York City. Then the man asked, " Miss James?"



"Yes," Julia said. "I'll hold."



It seemed like a lifetime as she waited. A dozen horrific scenarios ran through her mind, the worst of which consisted of her being transferred to Candon and told that she shouldn't forget whose author she really was. What if Abby Warner hated her books? What if Abby Warner hated her? What if the most influential woman in modern publishing thought she was a hack, a wash-up, a dud?



Then Abby came on the line. "Sweetheart, are you okay?" The woman gave her no time to answer before she jumped in again. "Everybody's talking about it. Now why don't you tell me what's really going on?"



"It's not true, Abby. None of it."



"Oh, honey. I can't tell you what a relief that is."



"It is?" Julia asked, amazed that Abby was seeing her side of it. "Candon was thrilled. Sales are through the roof—"



"Candon wouldn't know integrity if it bit him on his ass. So I guess you want to come over to me," Abby said, but before Julia could answer, the editor blew right past her. "Of course I want you! Consider it done. And what's this I hear about a baby?"



"Completely untrue."



"Listen, Jules," Abby said. Very few people called Julia "Jules," but she made the split-second decision that if Abby Warner wanted to be one of them, all the better. "What's this agent's name, the one whose face is in front of all the cameras?"



"Richard Stone."



"Don't worry about this jerk. We've got people who dispose of men like him for a living."



Julia didn't want to think what "dispose of" might mean to the woman who'd edited an international bestseller on the top secrets of the Mob.



"Oh, Abby, that sounds great. But I'm afraid the blood's already in the water. I've got photographers camped outside my house. They're not going to give up just because Richard Stone goes away."



"Sure they are," Abby said. "I have it on good authority there's a supermodel with a bun in the oven even though her billionaire sugar daddy had a vasectomy six years ago. You're ,about to be old news."



Julia breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh, Abby, that's wonderful."