END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the end of book shit, bitches. This where I get to say anything I want about the book and even though I wrote an EOBS for all the original Company books (Come, Come Back, and Coming for You) I decided it’s been three years since that first novella came out, and it required an update in how things shook out after the publication of The Bend Anthology.
Let’s revisit December 2013, shall we? I was just starting to make a name for myself in this crazy world of self-publishing when CD Reiss and I became friends. She is such a talented author and when she approached me about doing an anthology of original erotica stories I gave her a big thumbs up. So she and I wrangled some people together and we collectively became The Erotica Consortium. This was back when “multi-author box sets” were a pretty new thing. Some authors were doing box sets filled with previously published books, but we wanted to do something completely original. We weren’t the first group to do this, but we were definitely in the first wave of that particular trend.
There was no theme to The Bend Anthology other than push-the-limits dirty sex (and boy, did we do that! BEND was banned on Amazon four days after publication), so that’s not where The Company came from. We all just came up with whatever we wanted, and went for it. When I look back at all the success I’ve had in the past three years since Come released, it becomes very clear where it all started. The BEND Anthology ended up being my very first USA Today Bestseller. So my little novella, Come, was the start of something very beautiful for me.
When the time came to think up a story for BEND, I had just finished writing GUNS, the “last” book in the whole Rook and Ronin series, and there was one interesting character who I felt needed a little more attention. He wasn’t called James in that book. He was just some mysterious guy who showed up on Veronica’s porch and facilitated the entire epic end of the twisted little story about Ronin, Ford, and Spencer.
But I liked him. And if I wasn’t trying my best to bend Guns into a romance and not write a thriller, I’d have made different decisions on where that story went and given him more action. So when it was over, I knew my novella for The Bend Anthology was going to introduce the fans to the real James Fenici.
It started out as a sexy little stalker book and quickly turned into a multi-faceted introduction to Company Kids. I admit, I had no idea where this story was going when I finished Come. I left Harper hanging, James was missing, and I had this damn kid called Sasha Cherlin on my mind. So when I sat down to write Come Back, it was Sasha who ended up driving the whole story forward. I invented her in Slack: A Day in the Life of Ford Aston, as a cute little distraction. But I could not get this kid out of my mind. She was a little Wyoming-bred Nikita and she needed a story.
I have always been intrigued by bad-ass girls. Especially assassins. I loved that movie Point of No Return with Bridget Fonda. It always intrigued me because when you think of bad-ass assassin, you think of men like Merc. Or James. You don’t think of Harper Tate, or Sasha Cherlin, or Sydney Channing. And that’s what makes them so interesting. You never see them coming. When Ford walked into that antique mall in Cheyenne in Slack and chatted up twelve-year-old Sasha while he waited for Merc to make an illegal arms deal with her father, you weren’t supposed to picture her with a gun, facing down dangerous men. Or the only girl in the world with the ability to bring down a global shadow organization. But she was that girl from the minute I decided she was wearing tactical pants as she sat quietly in her chair reading Little House in the Big Woods.
Add in the fact that I set Slack up for a Merc story and included a “present” to Ford from Sasha at the end, and well… yeah. This shit was happening. I just didn’t know it yet.
Sasha is my favorite female character so far. And she’s had that title since Slack published in December 2013. Her role in Come Back is what makes this whole Company story sing. Just a little girl. Maybe scared. Maybe alone. But definitely not done fighting.
And I loved every interaction she had with James. He’s the big brother and the missing father all wrapped up into one insane package. Sasha made James into the guy you all fell in love with, not Harper. It was Sasha who tamed him. It was Sasha who tugged on his heart strings. It was Sasha who put the sane back in sanity for James Fenici. She rolls with the punches, but she hits back too. How could you not fall in love with this kid?
And I always knew, ever since the end of Slack when her father was killed, that Ford was her forever father. But after all the gut-wrenching scenes she had with James in this Company story, it was really hard for me to make James do the right thing give her up. I imagined an entire scene when he and Harper left the Aston house after dropping her off. And there were tears in James Fenici’s murderous eyes. Sasha was his moral compass, even if she never knew it.
I have so many favorite scenes in this Company story, it’s ridiculous. And every single one of them are with James and Sasha. The pick-up on the prairie. Sasha pulling a gun out on James when she catches him talking to Merc in Palm Springs. The roof-top scene when she’s missing her father and James gives her his gun to cheer her up. Sasha eating sticky gummy worms in the desert while James and Harper have sex in the visitor center bathroom. The “dinosaur talk” out at Cabazon where James explains what it really means to be a Company kid. And of course, the end of the book when James takes her out to Bighorn National Park and they become spokes in the wheel.
I love this story. And I am so thankful that Podium Publishing picked it up for audio and gave it new life.
But there’s even more to this story than you realize. Because when Podium picked it up for audio I asked Greg (Podium’s CEO) to ask Tad Branson to be the voice of James. Tad was already the voice of Jax in Wasted Lust and Nolan Delaney in Mr. Romantic, and since then he’s gone on to lend me his voice for Case Reider in the Anarchy Series and Quin Foster in the Turning Series. Tad is basically my favorite audio narrator ever. So Greg did me this favor, Tad said yes, and it was fantastic.
Hold on, there’s one more thing you need to know about Tad. That’s not his real name. His real name is Johnathan McClain and he’s an actor. A damn good actor. He was just using this Tad name for the more sexy books he’d been narrating. I knew he was Johnathan McClain from the beginning because I asked for him specifically for the Wasted Lust book back in 2016. But after finishing the Company he sent me an email. We’d been chatting a little on Twitter and in email since the release of Mr. Romantic… so he sent me this email telling me his loved this Company story and would I like to collaborate with him and write a TV pilot about the Company?
Um. Yeah. Not just because I love this story and pretty much every writer dreams of seeing their books come to life, but also because Johnathan and I just… click. He gets me. I get him. And he’s a very talented fucking writer.
So that’s what we did. We wrote a TV pilot and it’s done. We’re already working on other projects together as we shop that thing around Hollywood. We made a video about it and released it on my website and our social media last week. So if you’d like to hear the whole story about how we became partners, be sure to check that out on my website, .
I am thankful to Johnathan for lending his voice to James and Ava Erickson for being the perfect Harper/Sasha. And I’d just like you to know… I’m not done with these people. Not at all. I love them way too much to let them fade into obscurity.
Thank you for taking a chance on this Company stuff. For sure, it’s not your typical romance. But it’s very romantic. And if you’d like to continue reading about James, Merc, Sasha, and Harper (as well as meet Sydney Channing), then be sure to check out Meet Me in the Dark next and get all your final questions answered in Sasha’s grown-up book, Wasted Lust. (Both of which are available on audio.)
Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.
Julie
JA Huss