Envy(69)

“Right. Deck Cayton is every man’s fantasy. Every woman’s, too, according to you. He’s agile and quick, he can chase the bad guys and carry a woman to his bed. Why would I want to dispel his dashing image by showing up at personal appearances in a wheelchair?”

“No author photographs on the book jackets,” she mused out loud. “No book signings or personal appearances. I often questioned your publisher’s marketing strategy and wondered why it didn’t include you. They were protecting you.”

“Wrong. I was protecting me. Even my publisher doesn’t know who Mackensie Roone is. My editor doesn’t know my real name or whether Mackensie Roone is male or female. No one knows anything about Mackensie Roone’s true identity. My agent tells me the speculation has run the gamut from—”

“Of course,” Maris interrupted on a soft cry. “Mackensie Roone has an agent! I know her. You didn’t go through her when you submitted Envy. Why?”

“She doesn’t know about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I haven’t told her. She’ll get her percentage of anything Envy earns because I’ll bring her in to negotiate the final contract. But until that time, I chose to go this one alone.”

“Why?”

“Is there an echo in here?”

“Before I kill you, I want to understand this, Parker.”

Despite the first half of that statement, she appeared more befuddled than angry now, although he sensed he was being granted only a temporary reprieve. If he knew her at all, and he felt he was coming to, once she had time to think about all this at length, she was going to get as mad as hell all over again.

“Explain yourself, Parker. Why the secrecy?”

“I wanted to write a different book. Totally different from the snappy dialogue and fast-paced action in the Deck Cayton books. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not easy to write.” He grinned ruefully. “Frankly, it surprises the hell out of me how popular they’ve become.

“But because they’re so popular, and Deck is so well-known to the fans—I mean, to some, he’s like a member of the family who’s merely away from home between books—they expect a lot from me. They want the same, but different. They want each book to take Deck into a new and exciting adventure, but they’d turn vicious if I deviated too far from the formula.

“It’s hard to deliver every time out of the chute. Each successive book has outsold the previous one, and I’m glad. But that also raises the stakes and the standard, and makes each book harder to top.”

“That’s a refrain I’ve heard from other successful novelists,” Maris remarked. “They say it’s difficult to top themselves. Noah has said that about The Vanquished.”

Parker didn’t want to talk about Noah and his goddamned success story.

“I’ve come clean with you, Maris, now be truthful with me. If my agent had called you up one day and said, ‘Guess what I’ve got? Lying on my desk as we speak is a new novel by the author of the Deck Cayton series. Something entirely different from the mysteries. Very hush-hush. And he wants you to see it first.’ You’d have creamed, right?”

She blinked at the offensive expression, but she didn’t shy away from his eyes as they bore into hers.

“I wanted you to cream over Envy, Maris. But without knowing anything about me or my past successes.”

She looked away, readjusted her eyeglasses, absently brushed a gnat off her arm. When she looked at him again, she said, “All right, yes. I wouldn’t have used your crude terminology, but I would’ve been excited by such a call. Why would that have been such a terrible thing?”

“Because I wanted an unbiased opinion of the writing.”

“Which entitled you to make a fool of me.”

“No, dammit! That wasn’t…” He felt his own ire rising, and he suspected it was because her argument had merit. He began again. “I sent the prologue to you unsolicited because that was the only way to guarantee an impartial reading. I wanted you to approach it without preconceptions. I wanted it to stand on its own, not on my reputation as a bestselling author. I wanted it to be good.”

“It would have been just as good without the charade, Parker. My reaction to it would have been the same.”

“But I would never have known for sure, would I?” He gave her time to respond, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. He was right, and she knew it. “I tricked you, yes. But I needed to prove to myself that there was more in me than a scotch-drinking, skirt-chasing hunk with a big gun and a bigger dick.”

“Deck Cayton has more substance than that.”

“Thanks. I think so. I wasn’t sure you did.”

She bent down and picked up the book.

“Are you going to bang me over the head with that?”

“Maybe.” Her anger hadn’t dissipated. It was still there, simmering. She just had it under control. “But even as mad as I am,” she said, “I can’t abuse a book. It goes against my nature even to dog-ear a page.”

“I’m that way, too.”

She returned his peacemaking smile with a glare. “Don’t you dare try to charm me, Parker.” She passed the book down to him and dusted her hands. “What you did was—”