Page 12 of The Perfect Rom-Com

Though he obviously cares less than nothing about the fact I’m reading them.

I’m that insignificant to him.

I’m the fly buzzing around someone’s tea at a mobster’s lunch meeting while said mobster is revealing clandestine codes to clandestine locks safeguarding clandestine money. I’m so unimportant that it doesn’t matter that I hear.

Which I suppose is fair.

Who, after all, can I tell?

I run my eyes down the first page. Then realize the sum of it is only one page. One page before digging into the actual sample chapters.

Crap.

How many pages was mine? Sixty. With twenty pages dedicated solely to character descriptions.

Terrific.

The embarrassment nips me right in the face, and I feel two flames of crimson burst on my cheeks.

I really am pathetic, aren’t I?

These past few days, the agents had been trying to tell me, and I hadn’t quite gotten it. I hadn’t quite clued in. They weren’t the enemy, as it turned out. If anything, they were the nice guys trying to let me down easy.

They aren’t the villains. I’m just the village idiot.

I glance up toward Agent Tim Graves with fresh sympathy and even more personal horror. I will never live down the humiliation of these past three days.

Focus, Bryony. You’ve still got—

“Three minutes!” a young conference volunteer calls out, and I turn to see her three fingers in the air as she stands in the center of the room, grinning madly. Three minutes left.

“So . . . you want me to find—?”

“What’s missing, yes. A fresh eye.”

Because that’s literally all I can possibly be, I see now. That’s truly the only thing I have that he doesn’t right now. A fresh eye.

Something every person on the entire planet can bring right now: a different brain than his.

Super.

It’s clear through the way he’s sighing right now and pulling back in his chair that he expects very little. Even his eyes are glazing over my shoulder, and I realize this very well may be a ploy to get me to stop talking and leave him alone. If not physically, at least mentally. He’s thinking, brainstorming about something important. This something that’s important. And of course little old me is expected to consider this special book viewing and enlightenment a gift for my silence.

I read the first page, trying to concentrate.

“Two!” a conference volunteer mouths merrily, circling around the room with pageantry as she drops one finger and leaves the remaining two. This is, very clearly, an exciting job for her.

“Well . . .” I stumble, eyes back on the proposal. I try to keep reading, to formulate an intelligent answer, but the words under this type of pressure have become alphabet soup. All the letters are just floating around, a name here, an adjective there. There’s a block somewhere between my eye and my brain that is seeming to stop the flow from seeing to understanding.

I scroll to the next page.

You have to do something.

Thumb up the screen to the next.

There’s gotta be something better to reading this first chapter. A hook. My eyes rage down the pages, and my thumb begins flying from one page to the next.

“One minute!” the volunteer cries, panning the room with her gigantic lanyard of a thousand fancy ribbons and sadistic glee.