Love at First Bark (Free Short Story) by Dana Mentink

Author:Dana Mentink
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780736972789
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers

Six

Marcy hammered away at her keyboard for hours. Between her breakfast with Jackson and her midmorning snack of grilled bacon and cheese with just a touch, mind you, of tomato tapenade, she’d produced one very fine paragraph. It was a lovely description of the mountainous town in a fictional kingdom which would, she knew, be hacked out directly by her editor.

“Where’s the hero?” she could hear Rhonda saying. “I want him on page one, every rugged square inch of him. Don’t bore me with skies and bushes and buttercups.”

But that was the trouble. Even after she’d toiled away at another paragraph, she simply could not conjure up a hero. Images of Jackson kept popping into her brain, but she could not make herself use him as inspiration. He was too real, too delightfully contradictory for her to wrestle him onto the page, and she found she didn’t want to anyway. A cowboy hero would have to wait for another series.

What is the matter with you, Marcy Deveraux? Writers dash off these proposals at the drop of a hat. Tossing a pillow onto the floor in frustration, she felt like throwing an all-out temper tantrum.

She was not surprised when she heard a scratching at the door. She admitted Charlie, who sat on the floor, tail wagging and looking with such a hopeful expression that she gave him one bite of the succulent hickory bacon she’d fried up for her sandwich. Content, he snuggled in next to her on the sofa. She stroked his warm side while she stared at her one measly paragraph on the iPad screen. Every so often Charlie would reach out a tiny paw and tap her knee as if to say, “You got this, Marcy. I believe in you.” Charlie was beginning to grow on her.

Her phone buzzed with a text from Agent Rhonda.

“Who’s the hero?” Rhonda demanded.

Charlie, disturbed by her movement, rolled on his back to offer up a fuzzy tummy for scratching. Frantically, she dashed off the first reply she thought of. “The hero is Charles, a roguish, dark-eyed scoundrel.”

With breath held she waited for the reply.

Rhonda’s reply materialized on her screen. “Love it. Rakes are in right now. Work faster. I will call at 6 a.m. tomorrow.”

Marcy tossed the phone down on the sofa. “Hear that, Charlie? She loves it.”

Charlie lay on his back, frozen with all four legs in the air, still waiting for the tummy scratch. Laughing, she obliged. “Doesn’t take much to make you happy, does it?”

Even with Charlie as inspiration, Marcy plugged away unsuccessfully at a first chapter. Snippets of her conversation with Jackson circled in her brain.

“But he’ll never be anybody’s hero if he knits baby blankets or runs a home for old folks.” She recalled her absolute infatuation with Phillip. With a guilty start, she realized she had not wanted to see the real things, so blinded was she by the stereotypical romantic trappings. She’d elevated him to a prince in her own mind, and that had made her an easy target for his lies.

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