The elegant blonde pushes away from her desk and stomps across the room. Each time a foot strikes the ground, several lines of frost fan out in a delicate spiderweb pattern. Her mouth forms a thin line as she rubs her hands together.

“What do you mean there’s another overly muscled jackass running around in a ridiculous get-up and saving people?” She directs her attention to the blonde who is currently edging toward the door.

Sue swallows and gauges how quickly she can slide out the door. “I don’t know who he is or where he came from, but it was him, not Dillion who was there in the park. He’s the one who saved Maxie from the runaway hot dog stand.”

“What did this new guy look like?” the Frost Queen demands.

Sue shrugs. “I don’t know. He was dressed up in the typical superhero costume. You know, tight leather and spandex, long cape. The outfit was black and silver with little orange flames on it.”

“Heat Flare.” The Frost Queen spits out the word. “What the hell is he doing here?”

The Frost Queen turns to Sue and raises a single brow. She reaches up and twists a lock of curly blond hair around her forefinger, the movement shaking a hundred tiny bits of frost free from the strands. They float down around her shoulder, catching the light so that they look like tiny pieces of glitter. “Maxie Reynolds? She was there?”

Sue nods vigorously. “Yeah. She’s always there. Dillion is usually the guy who shows up to save her from whatever crisis she’s dealing with, but this time it was a different guy.”

“Interesting.” The Frost Queen chews on her thumbnail and studies Sue’s expression. “Both Dillion and this newcomer are interested in Maxie. How fortuitous for me.”

Sue frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that Maxie Reynolds is the key to bringing down two superheroes with a single stone.” Smirking, the Frost Queen crosses her arms and leans against the wall. A thin sheet of ice coats the plasterboard. “Bring her to me.”

When I started writing a superhero romance, it was partly because I love the genre and partly because I needed a way to cope with Suzie’s increasingly ridiculous demands.

Sue, the character based on Suzie, was going to be the thing that kept Maxie and Dillion from consummating their love, but as I wrote the story, it became apparent that she wasn’t a strong enough character to serve as a main villain. She was more…a minion.

That realization led to the creation of the Frost Queen, a woman with a frosty personality who can lower the temperature with just the flick of her fingers. A cross between Narnia’s White Witch and Superman’s Lex Luthor.

The problem was that while Suzie served as inspiration for Sue, I wasn’t able to find anyone that made a good prototype for my Frost Queen, and as a result, I’d been unable to write any scenes with her. That problem immediately changes as the elevator doors open, and reveal the real life face of a perfect frost queen.

It’s the first thing I see as the elevator doors slide open on the eighth-floor landing.

She’s leaning against the hallway wall, her arms crossed over her chest, and her long, perfectly manicured, French-tipped nails tap an impatient rhythm against her upper arm.

“Ryan, so nice of you to show up,” she says by way of greeting. She glances at the delicate gold Rolex strapped to her wrist. “And you’ve only kept me waiting for twenty-five minutes.”

Ryan rolls his eyes and chuckles as he steps out of the elevator. “Lucy, this is my brilliant manager, Margo Sharpiro. She’s one in a million. She always has this strange spooky habit of knowing exactly when I’m going to walk through a door and is always waiting for me. Sometimes I think she’s bugged my phone, and other times I think she just has some scary good psychic skills. She refuses to admit to either.”

Margo ignores him as her gaze rakes up and down my body. “Oh good, you’ve brought a friend along.” She transfers her gaze to Ryan and floats a brow. “Another old friend from school?”

A door a short distance down the hallway bangs open and another woman, one with the same head of wildly curly blond hair as Margo, steps into view and lets the door bang closed behind her.

“No.” Ryan loops an arm around my shoulders and draws me in close to his side. I don’t think I like how good it feels. “This is Lucy. My new girlfriend.”

“What?” The blonde who just stepped into the hallway squeals and hurries toward us. “You’ve got a girlfriend and never said anything? Bastard!” She hurls the last word at Ryan even as she wraps her arms around him.

“Hey, Jenna.” He kisses the curls on the top of her head before his eyes meet mine. “Luce, this is Jenna. Margo’s little sister and one of my best friends.”

She springs out of his arms and I realize that, despite her youthfully slender body, she’s older than me, probably Ryan’s age, making her a few years younger than Margo. “Hi.” She digs her elbow into Ryan’s gut. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell us about you before now.” She glares up at him. “I didn’t think we kept secrets from one another.”

“I didn’t tell you about her,” Ryan says, his voice calm, “because until about an hour ago, I hadn’t met her.”

Jenna lets out a low whistle. “Damn, you move fast.”

Margo’s eyes narrow and the toe of her burgundy pump taps against the floor. “An hour, Ryan, seriously? You’ve been in the business long enough to know that you can’t trust everyone you meet on the street. She could be taking advantage of you.”

Ryan shakes his head. “Nope. The only one taking advantage is me. And I’m just doing exactly what you told me to do.” He glances up and down the long hallway, making sure there’s no one around, and lowers his voice until it’s barely a whisper. “Lucy agreed to play my pseudo girlfriend for as long as I’m in town.”

Both Margo and Jenna open their mouthes to protest, but before they can get any words out, Ryan quickly fills them in on our plan to pretend to be a couple while he’s in town as he leads them to the room where the meeting is supposed to take place.

He times it so that Margo doesn’t have time to respond to his story before he steps into the room.

A large man who looks like he should be playing professional football rather than working in a hospital looks up and grins at Ryan.

“Ryan, you old dog. Still can’t get anywhere on time.”

For the first time since I’ve met him, Ryan’s wide smile actually lights up his stunning blue eyes. It’s an image that almost takes my breath away. I have to shake my head to rid the sight from my mind – lest everyone see my gawping face.

“Christian.” He hurries across the room and wraps the man in a bear hug. “It’s been way too long.”

Christian slaps Ryan on the back. “Could be because you keep pretending this place doesn’t exist.”

Ryan chuckles and pulls away from the manly embrace. “Possibly.” He reaches behind him and finds my hand, pulling me front and center. “I want you to meet Lucy. My new girlfriend.”

Surprise brightens Christian’s face. “The two of you know one another? You’re dating?”

Ryan rocks back on his heels and his gaze racks over both of us. His elbow brushes against the side of my breast and a charge of sudden, breathtaking electricity ricochets through me, so powerful I gasp.

Stunned, my gaze flies upward, landing on his gorgeous face, looking for the smallest sign that he experienced the same jolt, but his eyes are looking past me, his mind firmly focused on my relationship with Christian.

“You know each other?”

“Yeah,” Christian says. “She manages Doc Collin’s office, and I’ve referred several patients to him. She’s done an amazing job bringing that place into the twenty-first century.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you know Christian?” Ryan asks.

“You didn’t ask,” I point out. “Or tell me who you were meeting. It never occurred to me that you’d know each other.” Though I should have expected that I knew the person he was supposed to meet. Before Suzie got engaged and I somehow became her personal wedding minion, I spent the bulk of my time running a medical facility. I’ve met with most of the Fletcher nurses and doctors.

“What are the two of you meeting about, anyway?” I ask.

When Ryan said he had an appointment at the hospital, I’d assumed that he was doing some sort of promo thing, a concept that the presence of his agent seemed to drive home. But Christian’s a transplant surgeon, not the kind of doctor that’s typically involved with promotions. And if they were just a pair of friends getting together, they wouldn’t be meeting at a hospital.

“The number of people donating organs and other types of tissues keeps decreasing, which is costing lives. It took some finagling, but I managed to talk the hospital board into doing some local promotional work to increase awareness of how important donated organs are, and after some fast talking, I managed to convince Ryan to become the face of the campaign. I can’t think of anyone better qualified, can you?”

My eyebrows dance upward. I thought he was kidding about the organ donation thing.

Before I can begin to shift through the subtext in the statement, Ryan speaks up. “So what exactly do you have in mind?”

“Right.” Christian spins his computer around so that they can both see the monitor. “Here’s what I have planned.”

I try to listen to what’s being said, but before I can pick up the threads of the conversation, Margo and Jenna flank me and slowly ease me away from the men.

Margo chews on her thumbnail, exactly the way I’ve always imagined the Frost Queen in my story would do, and considers me – her eyes raking up and down my body.

“I’ll admit, you’re not exactly what I pictured when I told Ryan that if he wanted to start landing bigger roles, he needed to work on his romantic private life.”

A familiar sense of self-consciousness winds its way through me. I should tell Margo that I don’t give two cents about what she thinks—that’s what Maxie would do—but I don’t. Instead I wrap my arms around my middle and shrink into myself. Trying to hide.

“I was fully prepared to set him up with one of his co-stars or an up-and-coming actress,” Margo continues. “But since Ryan is already introducing you as his girlfriend, I suppose there’s no going back.” She reaches out and flicks a strand of my hair, so straight and boring in comparison to hers and Jenna’s halo of bright curls.

Jenna leans close, and speaks in a stage whisper. “Don’t feel bad,” she whispers. “She spent the whole flight here considering potential dates for Ryan, and rejected all of them. Ryan’s her golden boy, the one who managed to put her on the map as an agent, and she’s really protective. In her mind, no one is good enough for him.”

Margo ignores her and blows out a heavy sigh. “Lucy. I’m sure you’re a lovely woman, but it’s not enough for the studio execs to see that Ryan is in a relationship. Fake or real, in order to boost his career, he needs to be seen with the right kind of woman.”

The more she talks the more I dislike Margo. “And I’m not what they want to see.”

Jenna hugs me. She’s as warm and sweet as her sister is cold. “Don’t think that way. Margo is just blunt to the point of rudeness. Granted, right now you’re not all sleek and put together, but you’re beautiful. And in just the few minutes I’ve watched you and Ryan together, I can tell there’s something between you. You’ve got the kind of chemistry the tabloids and fans are going to eat up. We just need to polish you up a little bit, that’s all. Then you’ll be absolutely perfect.”

Even though she’s smiling as she says it, for some reason, her tone makes me think of a cheap piece of silver that’s been stuffed in the back of a cupboard. A piece that has been recently pulled out, which the owner is desperately trying to make look as good as possible before a sale so that the buyer doesn’t realize it’s little more than a piece of cheap tin.

I really should tell both of them to go to hell.