Bev and I wolfed down a few sandwiches, watching the video guys break down their equipment. My face was still pancaked in the makeup the stylist had slathered on my face before the junket began, and it felt tight as a mask.

"What the hell time is it, anyway?" I asked Bev.

My manager snuck a look at her cell phone. "A fuck of a lot later than it should be," she said, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, Jax. I really need to get a better handle on these things for you."

I patted her arm for a moment. I once tried to get out of to sleep with me, a long time ago. She shot me down so gently that ever since, I'd felt a kind of protective instinct about her. "No, I talked too much. You know that."

Bev rolled her eyes. "You talk too much, and you reveal too much, Jax,"

I held my hand up to stave off the lecture I knew was coming. "I thought I did fine this time."

"What's it like to grow up the son of Annie Blue?" she said, mimicking the blogger's wispy little tone. "Right there, she was trying to trap you. You say, 'Great!' and move on. Don't give them any more fodder than they already have on you."

I grimaced. Bev wasn't coming out and saying it, but I definitely knew what she meant. Pitchfork magazine had called my "enigmatic" lyrics "the biggest songwriting mystery since Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain.’ "

"Who is Little Bit?" The headline blared.

But they got it wrong. Not “Little Bit.”

Lil Bit.

Liliana Nesbit.

The only girl I’d ever loved.

Chapter Three

Liliana

When she got back to the apartment, Angel stomped past me and slammed the door to her bedroom so hard that a book fell off of my nightstand.

She was probably angry with me.

She had a right to be, I supposed.

I sat at my crappy, thrift store desk and considered apologizing to her. But apologizing would mean explaining, which would mean she'd ask me questions, which would mean I'd have to explain my connection to Jaxson Blue.

I could just imagine how that conversation would go.

"Yeah, I lost my virginity to that sex god with his face plastered all over the internet.

"No. It's true. Me. Liliana Nesbit, the girl you know only as your mousy roommate who holes herself up on her room writing romance novels."

Yeah. Me. I'm not kidding."

She'd think I was crazier than she already did.

Best to just leave it.

Besides, I was in a groove now.

If there was one thing I had to give Jaxson, it was that he was good inspiration. As soon as I got home and in front of my wheezing laptop, the words started flowing.

It came to me all at once: my heroine, in an uncharacteristic fit of bravery, drew up her horse outside the gate where the intruder was last spotted. She called out, her voice rolling across the moor, but the only reply was her own echo calling back to her. The wind lifted a strand of jet-black tresses that she then tucked impatiently under her riding cap.

My fingers clacked away. Occasionally I took a break to bite the edges of my fingernails down to the nub, but otherwise all was quiet and focused. I could tell I was getting into the scene, because my heart was beating faster, my breath coming shorter. I was living in my heroine's head.

Right up until I realized what needed to come next.

The sex scene.

Those always brought me up short. Sex scenes are hard to write when you have limited experience to draw from.

Luckily for me, my limited experience was pretty incredible. Right up until the moment it broke my heart.

I leaned back from my laptop and cracked my knuckles. Geraldine Hunter, disgraced heiress to the Hunter fortune, just entered the vast, crumbling manse belonging to reclusive aristocrat Tristan Bard. Her heart beat rapidly in her tightly laced stays as she watched the devastatingly handsome Tristan descend the staircase, his eyes raking over her body…

Yeah, this was going to be good.

But I needed a little more caffeine before I could continue.

I stood up from my laptop and blinked at my room around me. The sun was setting below the building behind mine and the light could no longer make it into my solitary window. In my writing flurry, I’d forgotten to turn the lights on.

I wandered about the tiny space, still deep in thought, and turned on the lamp as I acted out the scene I was about to write. The way his Tristan's hands gripped the back of Geraldine's head, forcing her to tilt upward as his lips devoured hers. The way his "manhood" was so hard and unyielding that she could feel it even through the voluminous mass of petticoats that formed a barrier between them.

It was always easy for me to come up with the prelude. Passionate yearning, the tingling sensations that ripple up spines… yeah, I was a master of sexual tension.

But once my heroes got their cocks out, my scenes were always the same. They followed the script… the only one I knew.

I sat back down to start typing, slowly at first, then gathering speed. And as I wrote, I started blushing.

And squirming.

And hating myself.

And hating Jaxson Blue.

Tristan—no, Jaxson, it's always fucking Jaxson. I'll just find and replace the name afterward—leaned back in the bed, cradling his head in one hand while the other held a cigarette, the smoke curling lazily to the ceiling. "Was that your first time?" he asked me… Geraldine, whoever.

"No." I blushed. Then I told the truth. "Yes."

Jaxson's eyes tightened a little as he took a drag. "Well, you're ruined now, Lil Bit."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you're never going to have a guy as good as me."

I giggled. "You are so fucking cocky." I was so infatuated back then that it hurt to remember.

The words started to come. Thick and fast, my fingers moving feverishly to capture every little detail that I could recall. But I embellished, of course. Tristan was Jaxson, of course, but Jax done right. Jax, the nice version, the one who gave me the happily ever after I never got in real life.

The fantasy carried me, like it always does, right to the end. The sun was peeking around the edge of my building again as I looked up from my screen, eyes raw and aching.

5:14 in the morning, New York time, and I finished the latest Liliana Grace masterpiece. I typed my favorite words—THE END—and stood up, still punch drunk from my own self-inflicted book hangover.

The buzz of my phone vibrating against the desk nearly gave me a damn heart attack.

When I saw the number, I rolled my eyes. My father had no concept of normal, human bedtimes, a trait I’d apparently picked up from him. "Hi Daddy," I croaked into the phone, my voice hoarse from disuse.

There was a crashing clatter in the background, the whoops and hollers of a party still raging on the West Coast. It was a noise that was familiar down to my bones—the sounds of the after-party. But this one seemed more raucous than normal.

"Lil Bit!" My father was shouting over the noise, sounding more than a bit drunk. "Baby girl, she said yes! Annie said yes!"

I was too damn spent to understand what the hell he was talking about. "Annie said what, Dad?" I shouted back.

"She's gonna make an honest man outta me!"

There was a roar of laughter and the sound of muffled applause. My father yelled something I couldn't hear that was met with shouts of approval. But I was still standing stock still, trying to process what he was saying.