by bow, frankie
“What?”
“Quit staring at those book covers and help me find the ice bucket.”
“Nice, huh?” Gertie said.
“I wasn’t staring. I was just…thinking.”
“Sure you were,” Ida Belle snorted.
I took another look at the ripped male torsos adorning the covers. There was a muscular biker with full-body tattoos, a brooding cowboy with freakishly articulated abdominal muscles, and a guy who was supposed to be a Navy SEAL, flexing on the beach and wearing only his dog tags.
I sighed.
“Fortune,” Gertie asked gently, “is something wrong?”
“Look, this is kind of embarrassing to admit and you can't tell anyone. Just between us. I see all these sexy guys on these book covers and every one of them makes me think of Carter LeBlanc.”
“Even the black one?” Gertie asked.
“This isn’t your fault.” Ida Belle said. “You couldn’t tell him that you were undercover. He should know that. Unless he's a complete moron, he’ll realize he's being unreasonable.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten involved with him in the first place. It’s completely against official policy and common sense. And I had to get mixed up with the deputy sheriff, of all people.”
“Oh, pish-posh. Who follows the rules all the time? Ida Belle, remember that party at the French embassy, when you and I —”
“Gertie, don’t we need to get going?”
“Oh. I suppose we do. Yes. Let’s see.” Gertie held her conference program out at arm’s length and squinted at it. “What are we, Session One? I think I’d like to go to Write a Bad Romance.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “It sounds like it'll be fun. The last conference I went to, the highlight was Keynote Address by former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin. Nothing against Major General Kalugin, of course.” Gertie disappeared into the bathroom. “Just give me a minute to freshen up.”
A few minutes later Gertie emerged from the bathroom. She wore flowing black trousers, gold earrings that dangled like mobiles, a tangle of gold necklaces, and a leopard-print silk blouse. Her white cotton-candy hair was secured with a glittering leopard-print headband.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Ida Belle asked.
“Lexi says an author has to eat, sleep, and breathe her brand, 24 hours a day,” Gertie declared. “And my brand is hot, sexy, seniors. Ready, ladies?”
The registration area downstairs had gotten a lot more crowded while we were settling in to our hotel room. The conference attendees were overwhelmingly female, generally north of fifty, and in a rowdy mood. It felt like a bachelorette party for grandmothers. Exhibiters were setting up book display tables in the meeting space outside the Mardi Gras Ballroom, but the big attraction was the bar. Two white-jacketed bartenders worked furiously to keep the drinks flowing and the line moving.
“We got time for another one before the session starts.” Ida Belle went to the end of the line. Gertie and I followed her, although I didn’t really need another cocktail at this hour. The man standing in front of us stepped backwards and then turned around to see what he’d bumped into. He ended up sloshing champagne and orange juice all over Gertie's blouse.
Gertie took it surprisingly well. Instead of clocking him with her giant handbag, she smiled and said it was the kind of thing that could happen to anyone. The man disappeared and returned with a stack of bar napkins, apologizing the whole time, started to dab Gertie’s blouse, realized what he was doing, and sheepishly handed her the whole stack of napkins.
His name was Larry Lindgren, he said, and he was from Minnesota. He looked like Santa Claus on his summer vacation, with his Hawaiian shirt, straw boater hat, and plush white sideburns.
“I write clean contemporary romance,” he said as Gertie dabbed the juice from her blouse and deposited soggy napkins into his hand. “No bad words, no bedrooms, no bloodshed.” Ida Belle and I nodded politely. Gertie and Larry were soon chatting away, debating marketing funnels and permafrees and other things that sounded like a foreign language to me.
“So where are you ladies headed for the first session?” Larry asked.
“We’re going to Write a Bad Romance,” Gertie said. “Larry, would you like to join us?”
Chapter Four
“Write a Bad Romance”
Galerie 3
Join Hungry Pen Press as we team up with your favorite authors to write a bad romance! Twenty lucky participants will be chosen in a drawing to win a spectacular Hungry Pen gift basket full of the hottest and hungriest billionaires, shifters, and more! What are you waiting for? The bad ones are the most fun, so come write a bad romance with us!
Gertie grabbed Larry’s hand and dragged him over to claim the remaining two seats at a table in the corner. This left Ida Belle and me to fend for ourselves. Abruptly, I found myself being hustled to an empty chair by an energetic little woman with bright red hair, about five pounds of turquoise-and-silver squash blossom jewelry, and a dyed turquoise rabbit fur jacket.
As the spry redhead pressed me into my seat, I looked around to see where Ida Belle had gone. I caught a glimpse of her exiting the ballroom.
Traitor.
Most of the occupants of my table were women who had at least two generations on me. The lone man was in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore square black glasses, and carefully trimmed stubble. He looked like my stereotype of a Serious Writer, and I wondered what he was doing at a romance convention.
My new friend, the tiny redhead, kicked off the introductions. Her name was Fel, she announced, and the other ladies all giggled knowingly, as if we were all expected to know who she was already.
“I’m a writer,” Fel added, which triggered another wave of merriment. I chuckled half-heartedly just to fit in, although I had no idea what I was laughing at.
“And of course this is my assistant, Danny.”
Danny, the Serious Writer, nodded politely. Fel then turned to me.
“And you are?”
“Me? I’m Sandy Sue, but everyone calls me Fortune. So please just call me Fortune.”
“Fortune, what a great name!” exclaimed a large woman in a bright red cashmere shawl and a matching pillbox hat. “Is that your nom de plume?”
“I’m sorry?”
“She means your pen name,” another woman explained.
“Oh, my pen name. No, I’m not a writer. Are all of you romance writers?”
“Except for Danny,” Fel said. “He thinks that if he writes anything except Serious Literary Fiction, Hah-vahd will take back his master’s degree.”
The young man rolled his eyes good-naturedly as the women at the table tittered.
“So Fortune, you’re a fan then,” said a woman in gray cornrows adorned with beads that clacked as she moved. “You a virgin?”
“What?”
The women all burst out in raucous laughter.
Danny gave me a knowing smile.
“Is this your first romance conference, she means.”
“Oh. I see. Yes, it is my first.”
The women at the table murmured their welcomes.
“None of us would be anywhere without our fans,” Fel beamed at us. “I’m so glad all of you are here. I know some of you already know each other, but why don’t we go around the table and introduce ourselves?”
As the woman to my left treated us to a lengthy chronicle of her bookish girlhood, I sized up my new friend. Judging from the clear admiration for her from the other women at the table, and the fact that she had her own assistant, this Fel must be a big deal. She was about Gertie and Ida Belle’s age, and except for the bright red hair, reminded me of Gertie: tiny, flamboyant, and ancient. I’d have to introduce them if I got a chance. The three of them would probably become fast friends. Now that I thought of it, Gertie, with her newfound interest in all things romance, probably already knew who this Fel person was. I’d have to ask her.
The room quieted as the emcee announced the rules
of the game:
“Participants will sit at an author’s table and draw classic tropes and descriptions at random. Then comes the hard part – your team will have to come up with a romance using all of the cards selected and share with the room!”
Pillbox Hat drew from the stack labeled Hero.
“Law enforcement,” she read. “At least one of our lovers works as a police officer, FBI agent, IRS auditor, or similar.”
“Who’s going to draw the heroine?” Fel asked. “I know! Let’s have our virgin do it.”
I realized everyone was looking at me. I drew a card off the stack labeled “Heroine.”
“What does it say? Tell us!” someone urged.
“Beautiful All Along, aka Ugly Duckling,” I read. “Not conventionally beautiful, but in the course of the story changes her appearance by removing her glasses, doing her hair in a more flattering style, or getting a makeover from a sassy friend.”
“Or she just thinks she’s an ugly duckling,” cackled a woman in a magenta feather boa, “but she’s really tall, thin, hot, and blonde, and all she needs is a better haircut.”
“We have our hero and heroine,” Fel said. “Now we need to draw our Situation card. Shonda?”
Beads drew a card off the stack and read,
“Mistaken identity. One of our lovers is not what he or she seems. This allows the misunderstanding to continue for reasons that may or may not be known to the reader.”
“I’ll draw setting.” Fel picked up the stack of cards, shuffled them, and pulled one out with a dramatic flourish.
“Small town, rural setting,” she announced.
“Oh, I love small town romances,” gasped Feather Boa. “This is gonna be great!”
Chapter Five
“Don't forget,” Fel said. “This game is about making a bad romance. I know you’re all accustomed to producing work of the highest quality. Well, we’re here to do the exact opposite. Now, what do we have? A hero in law enforcement, an ugly-duckling heroine, a mistaken identity plotline, and a small town setting. Go!”
“The hero is a government spy,” Beads volunteered, “so he’s undercover, and there’s your mistaken identity. And the small town is close to a secret military installation where something is amiss.”
“Oh, and the heroine is a data analyst at the military installation,” added Feather Boa. “The hero has to get to know her so that he can sneak in and steal the launch codes before the corrupt higher-up can sell them to the bad guys. But he doesn’t plan to actually fall in love with her.”
“Launch codes sound a little Cold War to me,” I said.
“Well it’s supposed to be bad,” Pillbox Hat said, “so if it's clichéd, that's good. Because it's bad. Wait.”
“I know what you mean,” Beads said. “Actually, speaking of clichés, why don't we have the heroine be a young, beautiful scientist?”
“The Victoria’s Secret model with the Ph.D. from MIT is a thriller cliché,” chimed in a dour woman with rimless glasses and masses of wiry gray hair. “Aren’t we supposed to be working with romance clichés?”
“We’re supposed to be having fun, Hanny,” said Red Hat. “I like our story. It actually sounds readable.”
“Maybe too readable,” Fel said. “If we want to win, we have to come up with a real stinker. Something bad. Now by bad I mean that the main characters lose our sympathy. What makes you lose sympathy for a character?”
“A heroine who’s TSTL,” said Beads.
“What’s TSTL?” I asked.
“Too stupid to live,” Feather Boa said. “It means she makes bad decisions, or she’s too much of a doormat.”
“Like if the hero treats her badly and she puts up with it without fighting back,” said Pillbox Hat. “Maybe he talks down to her, or tells her what she is and isn’t allowed to do, and she just follows his orders even when it’s obvious he’s wrong.”
“That’s why I went off the billionaire books,” said Hanny. “I hate that. I need a heroine who sticks up for herself.”
“What if she’s the one who’s undercover?” I said.
“The ugly duckling is the one who’s undercover?” Feather Boa asked.
“Sure, why not? Say he’s a small town sheriff,” I went on, for some insane reason. “And she’s a highly competent government agent.”
“You don’t have to say that she’s highly competent,” said Wiry Gray Hair. “Sounds like you’re overcompensating. Just say competent.”
“But maybe a bad romance writer would overstate it,” said Feather Boa. “Because she doesn't believe enough in her characters to let their actions speak for themselves. I think we should stick with Fortune’s original idea.”
I wasn't sure whether to feel flattered or insulted by Feather Boa's defense of my wording. “Sure,” I agreed, “highly competent it is. But she has to hide her amazing abilities from the hero, because she’s undercover.”
“Why would she be undercover in a small town?” asked Red Hat. “What’s in a small town that you’d need to be undercover for?”
“Meth manufacturing,” Feather Boa said.
“She’s looking for the woman who gave her up for adoption twenty-five years ago,” said Wiry Gray Hair.
“She’s hiding out from something herself,” said Beads. “Maybe there’s a bad guy who’s after her.”
“Wow, you’re good, I mean, sure, a bad guy, because that sounds very unrealistic and not like real life at all. Yeah, let’s go with hiding out from the bad guy. So the heroine who’s hiding out from the bad guy has to pretend that she doesn’t have any combat or survival skills, even though she does. And the hero keeps assuming she’s a ditz, even after she saves his life.”
“And then she kicks his hiney!” Beads exclaimed.
“No,” I said. “She doesn’t kick his hiney. But she does end up telling him the truth about who she is. And then he gets angry at her because she was dishonest with him. And then he disappears because that’s apparently easier than dealing with the situation.”
“But he’s a small town sheriff,” said Red Hat. “He can’t just walk away from his job.”
“Deputy Sheriff, then,” I said. “Even a small town needs more than one person working in law enforcement.”
“Ooh, this is good,” Fel started writing excitedly. “We got a hero who’s a real jerk!”
“So how do we redeem him?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” someone else said. “If he’s in law enforcement, he should know that if the heroine was on an official undercover assignment, she couldn’t reveal her identity to him. I don’t think she should get back together with him again after he’s acted like such a baby about it, do you? Maybe we should have the heroine end up with someone else.”
“But this is supposed to be a bad romance,” someone else said. “So she should end up with Sheriff Whinypants.”
My life story had apparently sparked everyone’s creative energies. I was the only one at the table who wasn’t feeling the enthusiasm. Why had I started this in the first place? For the same reason you poke at a sore tooth, I guess.
“Fortune, you got some great ideas,” exclaimed Feather Boa. “You must’ve read a lot of bad romances in your time.”
“Something like that. Oh, I’m so sorry, someone’s calling me.”
My roommate Ally was on the Caller ID.
“Hey, no cell phones,” everyone shouted at me.
“Sorry. This is important.”
I pushed my chair back and ran out of the ballroom.
Chapter Six
The hallway was quiet, a relief after the raucous session I'd just escaped. A few people stood around the meeting area, checking their own phones or reading through the conference program. I ducked into an alcove, next to a housekeeping cart piled with dirty mimosa glasses from the morning session.
“Ally, is everything okay?”
“Fortune, were you running? You sound out of breath.
“Yeah, I really have to ge
t back on my running program. You know how it is when your fitness routine keeps getting interrupted by murders and natural disasters.”
Ally laughed.
“Seriously. So are you having a good time?”
“Yeah, it’s interesting. They gave us goody bags full of free books, we got cocktails for breakfast, and they have these shirtless cover model guys everywhere. Not your typical, um, school librarian conference, that’s for sure.”
“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
“No, I was just in a session where we were playing a game called Write a Bad Romance.”
“Ooh, sounds fun! What did you come up with?”
“I guess it was kind of fun at first but then it got boring. You called at the right time. It was a good excuse to leave.”
“So you been bitten by the writing bug yet, like Gertie? Oh, Fortune, you should become a romance writer. Then you could stay in Sinful! And you could put people we know into your books! Wouldn't that be fun?”
“I don't think a literary career is in the cards for me, Ally. I'm just here to keep Gertie company and get a change of scenery.”
Ally didn’t know that I already had a full time job with the CIA. Keeping up the deception was a hassle, and I felt a little guilty about it, but it was for her protection. If Ally ever did find out the truth about me, I wondered whether she'd handle it better than Carter had.
“I’m calling about Merlin,” Ally said. A young man in a maroon polyester uniform came in, nodded to me, and wheeled the dirty-dish cart away.
“Sorry, what was that? Merlin? Is he okay?”
“He's fine. It’s just that that catnip toy you got him right before you left? He’s wrecked it already.”
“That's what I get for turning my cat into an addict. Okay, listen. I have a stash of catnip toys in the top shelf of the pantry, in that big blue tin with the Danish cookies.”
“Oh, I know what you're talking about. I thought that was a sewing kit.”
“You think I own a sewing kit? Anyway, don’t let Merlin see where the toys are or he’ll try to get to them himself. If you need to buy more at the General Store, let me know and I’ll pay you back. Um, have you seen Carter around, by the way?”