by Tawny Weber
"Your name will become a household word," her publicist added.
Bliss glanced between the two women, one standing in front of her and the other at her side before settling on the publicist. "Which name?"
The publicist rolled her eyes. Her agent slung an arm around her shoulders and gave her a reassuring hug as they answered simultaneously, "Both names."
Somehow, neither the answer nor the hug comforted Bliss. She shook her head. "I'm still having second thoughts. It doesn't seem honest."
"Honest!" the publicist all but shrieked. "Are you not the author Bliss O'Hara?"
"Yes, but—"
"Do you not also write as J.B. Cooper?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then you are both of them. There is no dishonesty in that," her publicist said.
Bliss sighed. "The hype for this interview has been about the two authors meeting, suggesting that we would duke it out about Bliss O'Hara's latest romantic suspense novel having a plot too similar to J.B. Cooper's debut action novel."
"And you'd have me do what instead?" the publicist asked. "Post a little notice in Publishers' Weekly that Bliss O'Hara and J.B. Cooper are one and the same?"
"It would put an end to the accusations of—" Bliss winced, hating to even speak the word aloud, "—plagiarism."
The publicist flapped her hand in front of her mouth. "Yawn. Boring."
"But Sisi Sherwood is expecting two authors to show up on her stage today, as is her audience and millions of viewers," Bliss argued. "What if they're disappointed to find out the latest rising star in the action-adventure category is a female romance writer? What if they feel cheated by this charade? What if they turn on me and I lose all my readers, even my romance following?"
The publicist planted her hands on her hips. "Your romance fans are going to become J.B. Cooper fans boosting sales even further. The audience is going to be thrilled to witness you coming out as Cooper. And the country's number one day-time talk show host gets mega ratings." The publicist leaned in, her nose almost touching Bliss'. "That's what she wants and that's what we're giving her."
The agent gave Bliss' shoulder another reassuring hug. "Sisi is going to love being the one to reveal the dirt behind the biggest literary feud of the decade, and we'll be there to cover you if the audience starts throwing rotten tomatoes."
"Love-love-love it!" sang the publicist, arms arcing yet again toward the heavens.
Before Bliss could voice further reluctance, the green room door opened and a woman wearing a headset poked her face inside. "You're on in two."
The moment Jake St. John saw the poster at the Chicago airport advertising J.B. Cooper's appearance on a Chicago-based talk show later this morning, he knew he wouldn't be catching his connecting flight to Green Bay. That damn writer's action-adventure book had endangered his life and those of anyone working for him, and this book was being promoted as the first in a series. This was his chance to face down the man and stop him before he wrote any more of his life-endangering books…and find out how this Cooper guy knew so much about his business.
Jake took a taxi into the city to Sherwood Studios, a squat, cement building that covered most of the city block. It didn't look much like any of the warehouse-sized sound stages his actor brother Dane worked in. But Dane worked out of mega warehouses on sets built for green screen action shots. This was Chicago and this studio housed a talk show.
He strode toward the entrance where double glass doors were etched with the address he'd been given for the studios. Inside, he approached the reception desk where he got no further than, "I'm Jake—" when the receptionist all but leapt over her desk and grabbed him by the upper arm, steering him toward a pair of security guards, jabbering, "Mr. Cooper, you're late. The show is already on air." To the guards she ordered, "Get him back to make-up ASAP."
"But—" he began, only to be flanked by the manhandling guards, both of which he could have taken out with one arm tied behind his back. But letting them steer him deeper into the studio because they thought he was J.B. Cooper made it all the easier to get to the writer. Except this Cooper character obviously wasn't here yet.
Fine. He'd wait for him.
The guards handed him off to a trio of people, the first a spindly female who tugged off his jacket as they strode deeper into the belly of the studio, her voice brittle as she queried, "Is this what you're planning to wear?"
"I—"
"You didn't bring anything else?" asked the male member of the trio, running his hands through Jake's hair as they steered him into a brightly lit room and deposited him in a hydraulic chair in front of a mirror.
"No time for a wardrobe change anyway," said the third member of the trio, another female tall as the first but a bit meatier. "Sisi's already stretched things as far as she can with the first author and her entourage."
Oh yeah. He'd caught enough of the hype to know this Cooper guy was going to confront some romance novelist on national television about copying his plot. But Jake's attention was focused on Cooper and the source of his plots, present and future. All he had to do was wait for the guy to show up.
"No time to deal with the bad cut of his hair," the male said, tsking. "I can use spray sheen to hide the dryness."
Jake glared at the man. "I don't think so."
"Take it easy, honey," the curvier woman said, tucking tissues into the collar of his black tee while the spindly female caught his chin between her fingers and turned his face side-to-side.
"We don't have time to shave him, either," the thinner woman said.
"It'll work," Ms. Curvy said. "Gives him a rugged attraction the women will love and the men will relate to. Also goes well with the fatigues he's wearing."
His relatability farthest from his mind, Jake listened for any commotion that would tell him the real Cooper had entered the building as they spritzed his hair and powdered his brow. He balked when they came at him with what appeared to be lipstick.
Pushing away the hand holding the tube, he growled, "No."
"It's more of a lip balm," said the meaty woman. "Almost no coloring."
"No," he repeated with a lethal glare.
A door opened behind him, his attention snapping to the mirror in front of him. But the head appearing in that doorway wasn't a man's. Not Cooper. Just another woman, this one wearing headgear and asking if anybody had wired him yet.
Someone swiped a brush across his lips before he could issue another protest. Another of the team tore the tissues from his collar while the third ran a lint roller over his body as they ushered him out of the brightly lit make-up room. The woman with the headgear guided him through a dim space the size of a small warehouse while trying to thread a wire up from the small of his back where she'd anchored the base unit under his tee.
He tore the contraption from her and finished the job for her. He knew how to wear a wire, though this one was hardly the inconspicuous sort he was accustomed to. Hell, he'd gone wireless years ago. And what the hell was he doing clipping a mic onto his shirt? All he wanted was to get his hands on J.B. Cooper and find out how the hell the man knew the inner workings of his security business. This charade had gone too far.
He reached to remove the mic just as they came up to a dark drape manned by yet another woman wearing headgear. One of the lint-rolling pair pulled his arm straight as she rollered him one last time before the pair left. The first headgear woman caught him by the arm as he reached once more for the mic.
"No time for a sound check," she whispered. "We'll check you when we cut to commercial which will happen right after Sisi greets you."
The headgear woman with a hand on the drape, her attention on whoever was speaking to her through her earpiece, held up a full complement of fingers to him, beginning a silent countdown. How many times had he watched that same kind of countdown or given it himself on a mission, whether back in his Navy SEAL days or now leading his own security team?
But he wasn't in the field now. He was on the brink of a
ppearing on a television show, and that wasn't in his plans. He'd come here to pin down this Cooper guy and find out how was it the plots of the guy's bestselling action-suspense novels mimicked Jake's real life.
Just as he reached a third time for the mic, the woman in front of him pulled back the curtain. When Jake hesitated, the one who'd been holding his arm gave him a shove and propelled him out onto a small stage surrounded on three sides by a roaring audience. Center stage stood a vaguely familiar woman, polished to perfection, beckoning him forward. On her far side, in three chairs identical to the empty one on the hostess' near side, sat three women, each with her mouth hanging open.
Bliss blinked at the man striding across the stage toward them. This couldn't be J.B. Cooper. She was J.B. Cooper.
But damned if this guy didn't fit the very image of her hero in her action-adventure series. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and black tee, his dark hair curling down his neck and five o'clock stubble defining his square set jaw, he was Savage personified, the man she dreamed life into with every keystroke of a Cooper book.
"Did you hire someone to play Cooper?" she heard her agent ask her publicist beneath the thunder of the clapping audience.
"No," Lu replied, adding, "And careful what you say. We're wired. They can hear everything we say in the control room."
"But who is he?" Vi demanded, her hand covering her mic.
Bliss turned her head, wanting to know the answer herself.
Her publicist, eyes gleaming, covered her own mic. "I don't know. But let's see how this plays out."
Bliss rolled her eyes, wondering how it was even possible this could turn out well.
The hostess greeted him, a full-bodied woman with mahogany skin and a headful of black curls, while thunderous applause assaulted his senses. Jake gave the audience a scan, noting the position of each crewman and exit.
A SEAL always checked the lay of the land—knew where his escape routes were. A SEAL also kept a low profile. So how the hell had he wound up on the stage of a live television show?
Okay, so he was technically a retired SEAL. But once a SEAL… Hooyah.
"J.B. Cooper," Sisi whatever her name said to an audience he noted was predominantly female…and eyeing him like he was a prime cut of meat. Some even hooted.
"Please have a seat, Mr. Cooper," Sisi said, motioning to the vacant chair opposite the three women to her far side before turning to a camera. "We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors."
Immediately, one of the headsetted women was at his side telling him to say something. He blinked at her. "What?"
"We need a sound check. Just speak in your normal voice."
"I'm not—"
The make-up woman touching up the hostess stepped away and he met the gaze of the woman in the chair closest to Sisi's far side. Sitting back in her seat, her feet barely touching the floor and her fingertips pinching at the crisp crease ironed into the front of her white linen slacks, she stared at him with round-eyed confusion. Why? She knew why she was here. To face J.B. Cooper, according to the posters at the airport.
A man nobody seemed to know upon sight.
That was it. She looked at him as if she knew what Cooper looked like—like she knew he wasn't him.
"Say something, Mr. Cooper," the sound-girl pressed.
He'd been about to say he wasn't Cooper when the woman in the white slacks pressed a hand to her stomach, the supple fabric of her blouse pulling across compact breasts as she swallowed hard. She looked like she was about to be sick. Definitely on the defense.
Curious about the woman in white shrinking into the white upholstery who seemed to know he wasn't Cooper, he amended his intended, "I'm not Cooper" to "I'm not used to this stuff."
The sound-girl listened a couple seconds to whoever spoke to her through her headset, then nodded. "We're all set."
Then, silent as a SEAL team on task, she was gone along with all the others that had descended upon the stage during the commercial break, and Sisi Sherwood was talking to one of the cameras again.
"We're back with romantic suspense novelist, Bliss O'Hara," the talk show host said, "and have finally been joined by the mysterious J.B. Cooper, adventure novelist whose debut novel's plot seems to have influenced Ms. O'Hara's latest romantic suspense plot."
While Sisi spoke, he assessed the women seated beside the perplexed Bliss O'Hara. A flashy redhead perched on the edge of her seat, her energy barely contained as she assessed him with hungry anticipation. Next to her, a middle-aged brunette in a tidy business suit sat slightly at an angle, her forearms supported by the arms of the chair as she studied him, only the tension in the curl of her fingers suggesting she was holding herself back from revealing he was an imposter. Yeah. That's what he was reading off this trio of women, that every one of them knew he wasn't Cooper but were waiting to see where this charade led.
Okay ladies. You want to play, I'll play.
"So Mr. Cooper, what have you to say about the accusation that Bliss O'Hara plagiarized the plot of your book?"
He took his time before answering, noting that the woman seated closest to Sherwood, Bliss O'Hara no doubt, winced at the word plagiarized. She should. Plagiarizing was a big deal, whether it be one author stealing another's words or a writer stealing a man's life stories. That last made him clench his jaw.
"I don't condone stealing of any sort. As for Ms. O'Hara's plots, I wouldn't know anything about them. I've got better things to do than read romance trash."
A blush climbed O'Hara's throat and she leaned forward, a spark igniting in her iridescent green eyes. "I don't write trash. Romance books are just as legitimate as—as male action-adventure."
So the shrinking violet had fight…and full lips a man wouldn't mind sampling. He liked those lips…and her fight. He gave her a conciliatory nod.
"My apologies, Ms. O'Hara. What I should have said was I don't read books written for women."
She raised her chin at him, the movement making her shoulder-length brown hair slip back from her face as she retorted, "I have a number of male fans. In fact, I have a couple of male friends who write romances."
Now that she wasn't shrinking into the furniture or hiding behind her hair, she had a rather pleasant face that suited her fire. He liked that spirit and he wanted to see more.
"Yeah?" he replied. "My sister made me sit through one of those sappy romance movies adapted from some guy's book. I didn't care for it."
The luscious lips tightened. "Did that sappy romance end happily?"
He blinked, thrown by her question, and answered slowly, "Actually, the girl died in the end."
"Then what you called sappy wasn't a romance. It was a love story. Romances always promise a happy ending."
He frowned, confused. "But aren't romances love stories?"
"Romances are re-la-tion-ship stories." She enunciated each syllable as if she were speaking to an idiot, something he most definitely was not. "They require happily ever after while love stories can have tragic endings. If you're going to dabble in the literary world, get your genres straight."
He shifted forward in his seat, barely containing himself as he snarled, "Dabble?"
"You're the one who came here to confront me," she countered. "You're the one accusing me of plagiarism."
Now he was the one thumping himself on the chest. "I never accused you of anything."
"That's correct," Sherwood said, taking back control of the interview. "Your accuser, Bliss, was a reviewer."
"He's the guy you should be confronting," Jake shot back, immediately aware of the absurdity of an argument he had no real part in. All he wanted was to confront J.B. Cooper…who Bliss O'Hara and her entourage seemed to know wasn't him. Why hadn't they called him on it yet? Why was this O'Hara broad even entertaining a debate with him? And what the hell was this debate about anyway?
"Why would you assume the reviewer was male?" she asked him, her pose having escalated to arms aggressively crossed over her chest and a ju
tting chin.
He shrugged.
She snorted. "You automatically thought the reviewer a man because what woman is qualified to review a J.B. Cooper book."
"I never—"
"Did you stop and think that the same reviewer had to have read my trashy little romances to even know whether the plot of even one of them was similar to the Cooper book?"
"I didn't—"
"No, you didn't think. You just assumed. Like all chauvinistic men, you assume women write women's fiction and men write men's fiction and never the twain shall crossover."
Chauvinistic. There was a word he hadn't heard in a long time.
Gripping the arms of her chair and puffing up her chest, Bliss O'Hara fired a volley that would have sent a lessor man shrinking back in his seat. "And you're an imposter!"
"Imposter?" Sisi piped in, leaning forward, clearly on high alert.
The animated redhead to the romance author's right placed a hand on her knee as if holding her back from…what? Exposing him as not being J.B. Cooper. Why didn't the redhead want that fact revealed?
Eyes sparkling with glee, Sisi pressed, "Bliss, what do you mean, 'he's an imposter'?"
The Bliss woman looked at the talk show host, blinking as if she'd just realized she and he weren't alone on the stage. Then she met the redhead's gaze and sank back in her chair. "I just mean I read all sorts of genres." She gave him a meaningful glare. "Even men's action-adventure. And I believe, to be a good writer, you need a well-rounded background in all literature."
That was it? That's all she had to say after all but gutting him?
As they took one more commercial break, Jake tried to figure out how he'd let a woman make him lose his composure the way she had. SEALs were trained to distance themselves from their emotions. What was it about this woman that pushed him over the edge—that made him lose control?
Whatever it was, by the time they were back on air, he had a grip on his emotions. Apparently, so did Bliss O'Hara as the energy that had flown between them didn't reappear. Sherwood even tried to draw it out with a question to Bliss.