Press Release by Leslie O'Sullivan

Author:Leslie O'Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781648983160
Publisher: City Owl Press

Chapter 11

Good Business

We follow the hallway branch leading to the ocean-view rooms of the hotel. Cian swipes the keycard and holds the door open, letting me in before throwing the locks behind me. An entire wall of his room is glass. The moon, one click past half, rides low in the sky on a bed of stars.

Cian blows by me and starts pacing the room. “We’re both double-dipping already. You’ve got Jack on The Chieftain’s Son and Is it Hot in Here? panels. I’ve got Sala on Star’s Shadow and Women Taking Charge. We both need a bang-up triple-dip.”

My shoulder blades remain glued to the door.

Cian raps knuckles on the window. “Dash is looking for the unexpected. A mind-blowing fan experience.”

Kicking off his shoes, Cian plunks into one of the chairs at the table in front of the window and frees a tablet from the messenger bag on the floor. “I’ve got my cast on standby.” The snap of his fingers is a gunshot as he scrolls furiously across his screen. “Yes! MetaMeme is in L.A. If they’ll come down…” He types without looking up at me. “Grab your tablet, Meg. List your resources and every pie-in-the-sky whim you have for the panel. I’ll do the same, and then we’ll put our heads together and suss this out.”

The moment Cian’s door closed, my gnarled vines of memory, self-preservation, and previous lapses in judgement rise from the floor, twisting around me until I’m motionless inside their woody prison. Cian is competition, pure and simple. Have I fallen into the same scenario that ripped the guts from my body on the day I lost the Trinity scholarship because I put my head together with my then-boyfriend on our competing projects? The bastard abused his inside knowledge and our relationship to belittle and denigrate my presentation and exalt his in front of an auditorium filled with classmates, parents, and judges. My sister Taryn is always at me to get past it, but I lost three things in the space of a breath that day: the scholarship, my first love, and trust in anyone but me to create success.

Cian’s stream of consciousness fills the room until he stops cold, catching sight of the statue at his door. “Meg?”

A dozen variations of my own voice hiss warnings in my head. When I kissed Cian on the beach and kept him from walking away from me at Casa de Fiesta, I violated a fundamental truth that’s allowed me to move forward in life. Success is the exclusive responsibility of one person, me. Now I’ve gone and allowed myself to attach to this man. If I felt anything less for him, my feet wouldn’t be planted inside the doorway of his room.

But this is Cian. He matters to me. I’ve already let him in to my life, competition be damned, and I’m not sorry. Staring into the full-length mirror on the wall next to me, I see a fool. Not a fool who is repeating past mistakes,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.