Well…” The woman tilts her head to one side, the movement causing a little avalanche of glittery snowflakes to cascade from her frozen curls to her shoulders. “You’re the woman who has managed to capture the eye of the Manipulator and the heart of Heat Flare.” She narrows her eyes. “I believe I was told that your name is … Maxie?

Stubbornly ignoring the potentially crippling terror pooling in her belly, Maxie juts out her chin. “I’m Maxie. And I don’t have to ask who you are. You’re the icy bitch who destroyed my apartment before freezing half the city.”

The Frost Queen laughs. It sounds like icicles being knocked off eaves. “Yes. Yes, I am. And that was only a small preview of what I’m capable of.”

I push the stall door open, letting it bang against the neighboring stall, make a beeline for the sink, and start washing my hands.

Behind me, a toilet flushes and a second later a stall door swings open and I spot Jenna’s curly blond hair out of the corner of my eye.

“One of these days,” I tell her as I fill my palm with soft soap, “someone will tell me why public bathrooms never seem to have any hot water.”

“Hot water costs money, and hospitals don’t have much.”

Something about Jenna’s tone sends a chill through me. I glance up at the mirror and my blood runs through me.

Jenna’s standing behind and a little to the side of me. Both hand are raised and wrapped around the grip of a black pistol that she has pointed directly at the back of my head.

“Jenna.” I spin around and gape at her. “What are you doing?”

Her mouth flattens into a grim sneer. “What does it look like?”

I stare at the gun in her hand, not liking the way the large black hole is pointing at my forehead – or the way that Jenna’s hands are shaking.

Please, I silently pray, let that be a very realistic movie prop.

I wrestle my nerves into submission, and repeat myself. “Jenna, what are you doing?”

“I had it all worked out. Ryan and me, we got drunk together after we finished working on a movie one night and I asked him why he and I hadn’t fallen in love.” Tears stream down Jenna’s face, leaving thick mascara tracks on her cheeks. “Do you know what he told me? That he didn’t think he could ever fall for an actress. Especially not one that he worked with on a regular basis.”

“But you’d already fallen for him,” I guess.

Jenna nods. “Can you imagine how much it hurt? Hearing Ryan, the sweetest guy in the world, the guy I’d fallen in love with, who I knew was my one and only, telling me that he could never want me because of my career.”

“I imagine it was pretty bad.” My mind whirls, trying to think of a way out of this situation.

If this was happening in my book, it’d be no problem. Dillion would use his powers of mind control and have her release the weapon. And Heat Flare, he’d use his powers to melt the revolver right out of her hand. Messy, but effective.

But I don’t have any superpowers. I don’t even have any regular powers. The best I can do is hope to make her see reason, or at least relax her guard enough so that she lowers the gun long enough for me to figure out a way to take it from her. And I don’t have the faintest idea how the hell I’m going to accomplish that.

“Pretty bad!” Hysterical laughter rips through Jenna, but the gun doesn’t waiver. “Pretty bad doesn’t even begin to cover it. Had Ryan ripped my still beating heart from my chest with his bare hands, it would have been less painful.”

If I’ve learned one thing from the movies, it’s that the key to not getting shot is keeping the bad guy, or in this case, hysterical woman, talking. But it’s not like Jenna is giving me much to go on.

“So, what did you do?” Even as the words tumble past my lips, I wince. Talk about lame.

Luckily, Jenna is beyond the point of caring what I think.

“And you know what?” She sniffs. “Up until that point, I believed in love. I thought that as long as I had love, the world would be all sunshine and glitter parades. I was sure that Ryan was going to be my knight in shining armor. That he’d slay all my dragons and treat me like a princess. And in a single drunken moment, it was ripped away from me. Because of my career, which was the same damned thing as his.”

“He’s a hypocritical bastard.” The words seem disloyal, but I figure that agreeing with her instead of trying to defend my lover will decrease the odds of her shooting me.

Keeping one eye on Jenna, I slowly shuffle my right foot across the floor, toward the door. After sliding it about two inches, I shift my weight over top of it, and bring my left foot to rest beside it.

Since Jenna misses the entire process, she fails to adjust the gun. Now, instead of pointing at the dead center of my forehead, it’s aimed at the left side of my skull. Not good, yet slightly less scary. But still about as deadly, assuming she can shoot even halfway straight.

“He really is.” Jenna tips her head to one side and stares at me with sad eyes. “How come you get it and no one else does?”

“I’ve been there, with my old boyfriend. He wasn’t mean, but he had a knack for saying things and twisting situations and words so that he got his own way. It took me a long time before I realized what he’d done. It made me decide that all men are jackasses.”

“But Ryan isn’t supposed to be.” Jenna unwraps one hand from the gun and wipes the back of her hand under her eyes, smearing mascara across her cheeks. It looks like a sad Halloween mask. “I thought he was one of the good ones. He made me believe he was, and then he rejected me.”

He is, my mind screams.

My heart aches with the knowledge that I haven’t told him that I loved him. I know more than most people just how precious love is, how quickly things can go wrong and it slips away forever. How could I have been so careless?

The thought of Ryan going through the rest of his life thinking I didn’t return his love makes my heart bleed for him.

“I quit my job for him,” Jenna wails. “A job I loved. I left it without a second thought. It made me sad, but I thought that if that’s what it took for me Ryan to fall in love with me, it would all be worthwhile, that with him by my side, I’d be happy as an agent.” She sniffs as the tears start to fall faster.

“I gave him some time to get used to the idea of Jenna the agent, to stop thinking of me as an actress. And then, I set part two of my plan into action. I convinced Margo that the studios would take more of an interest in him, give him a crack at leading roles, if he had a girlfriend. I let him think that a pseudo girlfriend was the perfect solution. I was sure he was going to pick me.”

“And he picked me instead.” It’s scary, but I can kind of understand how that pushed her over the edge.

“Exactly,” Jenna shrieked. “The two of you even used the phrase I created, pseudo relationship. How could you do that?”

I decide that there’s no point in telling her that Ryan was the first one to use it.

“And just like that, you got everything I ever wanted. The kisses, the adoring looks, the pictures all over social media. It’s not fair. It wasn’t right. You’re living my life.” Another sniff and more tears.

An idea starts to form. It’s risky, but it’s all I’ve got. I just need to get the timing just right.

“I wanted you gone. I thought if you got scared, you’d end things and, I don’t know, lock yourself in your house for a few weeks, and Ryan would come running back to me.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You didn’t.” Jenna raised her hand to swipe at her eyes again. Seeing my chance, I lower my head and charge.