Plotting to Win (18 page)

He heard the sound of breathing from the oxygen mask on her face. Whoosh in, whoosh out.

“Anyway, she thinks we all deserve happy-ever-afters. What do you think about that?”

The hand beneath his moved — or was it just his imagination?

“Mama?” he choked out.

Whoosh in. Whoosh out.

“I wish you’d had a happy ending,” he whispered. “I so badly wanted to give you one. You mean the world to me, Mama.”

Was that a tightening around his fingers? He glanced down at their joined hands, hope flaring in his chest.

Whoosh.

A high-pitched alarm sounded, causing Victor to jump in shock. The screen to the left of his mother’s bed showed a flat line.

There were no more whooshes.

Not until Felicity was settled in an armchair in the loft did it dawn on her that she had no clue how the work was to be judged. She’d been so surprised by the challenge, she hadn’t thought to ask important questions. Were they looking for anything in particular? Did they want it as edited as possible or was a rough draft permitted? How she was going to write and edit that amount of wordage in just a week was beyond her.

And most of all, she pondered whether the judges had managed to remain unbiased enough to judge these fairly.

She tapped her pen against her lips and massaged her temple with her other hand as she mused on what to write. All new material — newly written, that is, but nobody said you couldn’t use an idea that had been brewing in the back of her mind for a while now. Her notebook was open in front of her. She grimaced at the page.

She’s a horse whisperer. He’s a vet…

Can’t use that one
.

She flipped to the next page. What she wanted to write could be misconstrued, considered too easy. She’d have to save that story.

A glance up at the clock informed her she’d already wasted an hour, just sitting here staring at her notebook. Panic rose to clasp her throat. Her mouth went dry. She couldn’t waste a single second. She needed to start writing … now.

In her haste to flip the page, she ripped part of it off.

Second chance love
was scribbled at the top of the newly revealed page.

A vision of Victor the first day she saw him distracted her.
I love sleeping with women
. That cocky grin. The way he’d sat on her bed and patiently explained head-hopping.
She looks like an angry bird
. A chuckle escaped the knot welling in her throat.
The other woman is my mother
.

The feel of his lips on hers …

I need a second chance, Victor
.

Felicity wiped a tear from her cheek, gritted her teeth, and put pen to paper.

“Man, this is hard. What’s your wordage?” Dez asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

Felicity sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I was up until four typing away. My wrist is killing me, my neck aches, but I’m at seventeen thousand. You?” She shoved aside her bowl of half-eaten cereal and pulled her open laptop toward her until it was in a position to be typed on. She was moving around from cave to loft, table to table, trying not to get too bored in one spot.

“Almost fourteen,” he replied, sitting next to her at the table. “Got some frozen peas in the freezer if you need to ice that wrist.”

She chuckled, but there was no heart in it. “I don’t think that helps with carpal tunnel. Three days down, four to go. We’re way behind.”

“Roy ain’t talking. I’ve no idea where he is on his.” Dez shook his head and took a sip of coffee.

“We just have to worry about ourselves.” Felicity rubbed her wrist and winced at the sharp pain. “On that note, I’m off to —”

Before she could finish her sentence, Dez’s coffee mug slipped out of his hand and onto the table in front of them.

Hot brown liquid spread across her keyboard. There was a sizzle and a spark, and her screen went black.

“Dez! My story!” Felicity cried out and jumped from the table, reaching pointlessly for her drowned laptop.

“Oops. My bad. Hope you have some of it saved elsewhere.” There was no sincerity in his tone, only cruel satisfaction.

“You did that on purpose.”
I will not cry. I will not cry
.

“Lack of sleep has you imagining shit.” He looked at her as though he were disappointed in her, as though she were overacting. Then he casually stood to pour himself another cup.

Okay, okay. I can stand here and waste time arguing with him, or I can buck up, dig out my thumb drive — which thank the Lord I’ve been using — and ask for another laptop
.

As quick as her internal pep talk lifted her spirits, they fell again. She had four days left, and though she had been using her thumb drive, she hadn’t saved the manuscript since chapter three — the ten-thousand-word mark. Could she do this?

She had no choice.

It was now ten thousand words a day or bust.

“Welcome back. It is now 12:17 p.m. and one week to the day since you were given your last assignment, to write a fifty-thousand-word novel in one week, all new material. Who did not reach the required word count?”

Silence was Ophelia’s only reply.

The talk show host’s gaze landed on Felicity. “Felicity, you had a minor setback with your laptop. The show provided you a new one with a clean drive. Were you able to salvage your story?”

Next to her, Dez shifted and put his hands in his pockets, staring straight ahead. “I did, and what I rewrote came out better. I have Dez to thank for that.”

A smile curved Ophelia’s lips. “Interesting. Glad that worked out.” She stepped back then, away from them, and said in a louder tone, “I suppose you’d like to know how we’re going to be judging these pieces.”

Roy and Felicity both nodded in unison.

“Today is your last test. I’d like you to meet Rachel Snyder.” A sweeping arm gesture preceded the entrance of a young woman — very young — with spiked black hair, frosted red at the tips, holes in places of earring holes, torn tights, a skimpy skirt, and black lip-sticked lips.

Dez’s jaw dropped, and Felicity just stared on in confusion. What did this woman have to do with the literary industry?

The young girl stood next to Ophelia and scanned their faces just as curiously as they were staring at her.

“Rachel is a book reviewer. She’s been reading books since first grade, officially reviewing them for six years. By the time she was fourteen she was reading full-length adult novels with adult content. She has a degree in journalism, and she is number five in Amazon’s top reviewers.” Ophelia paused, giving them time to let this sink in.

Felicity didn’t know what to think. Was this girl going to be judging their stories?

“Rachel, do you have anything you’d like to say?” Ophelia asked.

“Yes. I’m a voracious reviewer. I read about four books a week. I love to get lost in a story. I read everything, horror, paranormal, romance, erotica, and memoirs. I don’t discriminate. And I have a blog with 10,000 followers where I post reviews for these books. I’m known for my frankness and honesty.”

“What’s the name of your blog?”

“Readin’ ‘n’ bitchin’. ‘Cause I read about ‘em, then I bitch about ‘em.” Rachel shrugged. “Unless it’s super good. Then I may have something nice to say.”

Oh my God
. Felicity wanted to melt into the floor. She’d heard about these reviewers. They were nightmares. They thought it was funny to tear apart people’s work and make horrid comments.

“And Rachel is going to be reviewing your work from last week. Each day she’s going to pour over one MS and post her thoughts about it on her blog for the world to see. She has no idea who has written what. Your names will not be on the manuscripts. She has not been allowed to watch any of this show before coming here. Your work will be solely based on her opinion as a reviewer.”

Rachel nodded. “You better be able to handle a bad review. I’m not going easy on anyone.”

“Three days, and you’ll have your answer,” Ophelia said. “Now head on back to the loft and relax.”

“Relax? Relax for three days while some snarky Amazon reviewer reads my book and prepares to bitch about it?”

Felicity only gave a noncommittal grunt. She was long done trying to be friends with Dez, had been since that coffee fiasco.

“It’s a good test, really. We’re all going to get bad reviews. Comes with fame. Can’t handle it, don’t release your writing to the public.”

This was a lot of words from Roy. Felicity nodded her agreement and took a sip of her pop.

“But whose will be the worst?”

“We just have to wait and find out.” Roy reached for the television remote. Apparently, the conversation was over as far as he was concerned.

Dez smacked the sofa cushion next to him. “Three days of waiting? Three days? Shit! I want that money now!”

Cocky bastard
. Felicity bit the edge of her can. She was feeling some anxiety too, but she was really just glad she’d accomplished it. She’d put her best into the story. It was all she could do. The problem with waiting three days for the results was that was three more days she was stuck in this loft … without Victor.

A pang hit her heart. Was he okay?

Felicity stared at the camera, waiting for the question. Bags and shadows were under her eyes. Her hair was more rumpled than sleek. Her clothes looked slept in.

“So … a top reviewer is going to be judging the final round of the competition. How do you feel about this turn of events?” the cameraman asked.

A wavery smile touched her lips. “I think we’re all screwed.”

Felicity’s heart pounded so hard she feared an ambulance would need to be called. She faced the large desk and willed herself to breathe.
In and out. In and out
. On either side of her stood her fellow contestants, the men she’d been living with, competing with, tolerating for weeks.

She didn’t mind Roy so much. He kept to himself, but Dez had gotten on her last nerve.

She was ready to go home — with that money in her purse.

“This is your last time in front of this desk,” Ophelia spoke from her perch, looking down on them. “Today you will see what Rachel the reviewer had to say about your fifty-thousand-word pieces. Her opinion will determine who leaves here with a hundred grand and a publishing contract from Bright House and who will leave here with … nothing.”

Breath in. Breath out
.

“Roy, you’re up first,” Ms. Roberts said.

“Ma’am.” Roy immediately stood in his military position.

The screen behind the romance novelist transformed from the television show’s logo to a page on a blog or website. Readin’ ‘N’ Bitchin’ was displayed at the top along with a sassy-looking cartoon character that bore an eerie resemblance to the reviewer herself.

“This contestant’s writing is just slightly above eleventh-grade level,” Nicole began to read.

Felicity closed her eyes as a pang of sympathy washed over her.
Poor Roy
. She wished she could shut out the hurtful words she knew was coming, but she had to brace herself for her own.

Nicole continued, “The language was really simple and full of the same words and phrases over and over. His dialogue was awful. Every single time his hero spoke, he added the word
see
at the end of his sentence, see?

“I also felt like the balance between telling and showing was way off. Some explaining is a necessary evil, but perhaps find a more entertaining way of informing the reader of a character’s backstory than just nattering about it for three pages. And by the way, I don’t need to know every freaking detail about every freaking character that’s introduced. If so-and-so appears in the tale for only one page, why, oh why, do I need to know what school he went to, what he ate for breakfast, etcetera?

“That being said, despite it all, the story itself was interesting. I don’t believe I’d read this particular tale again, but I would read whatever he puts out next, just out of pure curiosity, with the hopes he had a good editor.”

Ms. Roberts glanced up from the page in front of her. “You’ve been given three stars. Anything you’d like to say in your defense?”

Roy’s face was flaming. “Regarding the simple prose, it was because of my first critique on this show, over the big words and well, I-I was trying to meet the required word count in a certain amount of time. Perhaps I added some unnecessary stuff to meet that requirement,” he confessed.

“You’ve got talent, Roy, but you seem to have missed the mark here slightly.” Mr. Brown arched a brow. “Let’s see who else did. Who’s up next?” He turned to Ophelia.

The talk show host glanced down at her page. “Felicity.”

This is it
. And after hearing Roy’s review, she wasn’t looking forward to hearing this.

She stepped forward and gulped, unable to get a word around the knot in her throat.

The screen behind the judges changed, and Ophelia began to read. “I dig the romance genre, so I was looking forward to this one, but there is nothing I hate more than a too-stupid-to-live heroine, and in the beginning, this chick is so dumb I wanted to jump in and slap her! She whines incessantly and does nothing to fix her situation. She just sits there and waits for a man to rescue her, and this is a contemporary, not an old Viking romance.

“I’m lucky I put this document on my Kindle. The fact of possibly having to buy a new device is the only thing that prevented me from throwing it against my wall.”

Felicity placed a hand over her mouth as tears welled behind her eyes. This was worse than she’d expected. She was doomed. She had no place in the writing industry.

It’s just one person’s opinion. Buck up
.

Ophelia continued reading, “However, I got a whopper of a surprise thirty percent into the story. I did not see it coming. The clues were there, but the author managed to place them just so that I didn’t piece them together. Was this done on purpose? No idea, but it worked.

“In the end, the heroine’s TSTL behavior made sense, and the ending of the book showed us a new, stronger heroine because of it. And the best part is she didn’t need a man to save her, but rather, the hero showed her how she could save herself.

“The setting takes place on a lovely cruise ship with exotic destinations. I could picture each stop vividly in my mind as the author uses a perfect balance of describing and also leaving just enough for me to use my imagination. It’s a second-chance romance with a sweet ending.