Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130255 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 651(@200wpm)___ 521(@250wpm)___ 434(@300wpm)
Fred’s laughter followed me out.
Of course he’d show up today.
God.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ELLIE
Oopsie Ellie
Winston eyed me from the sofa cushion where he’d been curled up, asleep, all day long. He hadn’t even tried to escape when I’d left the door open this morning to run to the car.
If I didn’t know it was because he’d had his flea drops on after breakfast and was sulking, I’d be worried about it.
Seriously.
You’d have thought I was attempting to murder the fluffy little git the way he carried on. I’d even put tuna in his bowl by way of an apology for daring to squeeze some very necessary medicine onto the back of his neck, but he wasn’t biting.
“I’m not apologising to you again,” I told him, putting my feet up on the ottoman and hauling my laptop onto my thighs. “It’s for your own good. You insist on going off on your jollies, so you have to be medicated occasionally.”
He trilled at me, his little top lips vibrating.
Should have called him Elvis.
“It’s once every three months, Winston,” I reminded him, like he cared at all. “It’s not going to kill you.”
He lifted one leg and contorted his body so he could lick his non-existent balls.
Charming.
“You really know how to treat a lady, huh?” I muttered, pressing the power button on my laptop.
Maybe that was why he and Max got along.
Both of them knew how to treat a woman.
That was said in a very strong sarcasm font, by the way.
Yes, I was still smarting over his comments. I’d fully accepted that I’d overreacted, but I wasn’t about to admit that without him admitting that he’d been an ignorant walrus.
I also didn’t want to talk to him.
So there.
Maybe this was where my villain origin story started.
No.
I was too nice to be a villain. At least for now. There was no telling what kind of miserable, pessimistic git I’d become in the future.
Just look at Max for that.
I was almost certain he couldn’t see the value in fiction because he was so blinking miserable all the time. He wasn’t open to romance in real life, so how could he possibly understand all the nuances of it in fiction?
That was a Max problem, if you asked me.
As far as it went, I was going to ignore him. We’d tried to get along and we were such different people that it wasn’t going to work, so his little idea that he could inspire my book through a sexual relationship was a big, fat, load of hooey.
It wasn’t going to happen.
And that was that.
I didn’t care what he had to say about that. If I was doubting sleeping with him before, I sure as hell knew it wasn’t going to happen now.
No way.
I wasn’t even sure I was going to talk to him again.
In fact, I was going to make a concerted effort to finish my book so I could go home.
This was perhaps the first day in two weeks I’d wanted to go home. To get away from Windermere and the Greygarth Estate. I didn’t know if it was homesickness or I was just frustrated by Max, but the feeling was there all the same.
I didn’t want to stay in Windermere for much longer.
Of course, the first step to leaving was using the laptop that was currently sitting on my thighs and booting up. I could go home right now if I wanted to, but I was superstitious that I’d never finish my book if I did.
I’d started it here. Been inspired here. Figured it all out here.
I had to write it here.
We writers were weird little creatures.
With a heavy sigh, I typed in my password to access my laptop. When I’d gotten back last night, I’d started a new document and hammered out a few thousand words of a disagreement between the characters. It hadn’t been identical to the one Max and I had, but it was enough that it drove a wedge between my characters.
The kind of wedge that was easily fixed, of course, because miscommunication was the single worst thing in a romance novel in my very humble opinion.
It just made me mad.
So the argument between them wasn’t miscommunication. It was emotional, a knee-jerk reaction, something that happened in the heat of the moment that you regretted almost immediately after.
Then, today, this morning, I was going to fix it.
By making my hero grovel like a bitch.
It was fiction for a reason. I had no dreams or fantasies about Max showing up to grovel to me.
Mind you, I probably owed him my own apology, so you know.
I still wasn’t going to seek him out to give it, though.
The screen flashed at me that I’d typed in the wrong password, so I tried again and cracked my fingers while the laptop loaded. It was getting a little on the old side and was due a refresh, and I honestly just had so much shit saved on there that I couldn’t be bothered to sort through that it was starting to affect performance.