Thrill Me. Isabel Sharpe

up; the message played. Trevor’s voice.

      She listened. Hit Replay when the computerized voice gave her the option, and listened again. Just in case she hadn’t heard right the first time. Just in case the second time through would be different.

      It wasn’t.

      Trevor wasn’t coming.

      MEMORANDUM

      To: Staff

      From: Janice Foster, General Manager, HUSH Hotel

      Date: Monday, July 7

      Re: Beck Desmond

      Most of you already know that we are hosting author Beck Desmond in 1217. I’m posting another reminder that he is not to be approached for autographs or chitchat. While strolling the various parts of the hotel, he is often deep in concentration and we don’t want to be responsible for interfering with his work. It’s an honor that he’s chosen HUSH as inspiration for the setting of his next thriller. Anyone who bothers him will be transferred immediately to the pet area for waste removal duty.

      Note for Shandi Fossey, bartender, Erotique:

      See if you can get me Beck Desmond’s autograph. Janice

      BECK DESMOND took the phone away from his ear and stared at it with immense irritation. From the black receiver emerged the shrill heavily New York–accented voice of his agent, Alex Barkhauser, chattering away. He felt like affecting a high thin voice and saying, “Yes, dear” at regular intervals.

      Except that was undoubtedly what she wanted him to do.

      After a deep breath, he put the receiver back to his ear. Might be a good idea to hear at least some of what she was saying.

      “…me wrong here, Beck, your books are great, you know they’re great and you know I love them. But I just feel…”

      He pictured her squinting off to one side, gesturing in swooping circles the way she always did, as if she were beckoning the words out of her mouth. “Yes?”

      “I just feel like we’re sitting on something that could get bigger, you know?”

      “Bigger.” He let the word drop, then waited. Old sales technique his father taught him; let the silence sit and your opponent will fill it with what you need to know.

      “Sharon and I think you should try more emotion in your stories, more warmth, add a girlfriend for Mack, soften him up a little. Believe me, you’ll double your readership. Women will buy you in droves. Right now you’re selling to men. Women are a huge market in book sales. Huge. This is the next big step in your career.”

      Beck leaned back in the chair he’d brought with him from his condo on East 97th Street, spanned his temples with his thumb and middle finger and squeezed to try and relieve the ache. “Let me get this straight. You want me to take my hero, Mack, who has seen more of the baseness of human nature than anyone alive, and—”

      “Soften him up. Give him more heart. Give him more sensitivity. Give him…”

      “A puppy?”

      He heard a sharp thwack, and knew Alex had slammed her palm on the desk, a sure sign his complete joke of an idea excited her. “Yes! Perfect! A puppy. Small one, the kind women love to stop and pat in the street. He could meet his—”

      “You’ve got to be kidding me, Alex.” Next she’d want Beck’s ruthless detective spending afternoons shopping for shoes. “Mack is a man. No, he’s more than that, he’s the man.”

      “So make him the man with the woman.”

      “I can’t.”

      “Why?”

      “Because he’s a loner, he’s a tough guy. It’s not him.”

      “Give him a woman strong enough to change him.”

      “Strong enough to—” Beck reached for his bottle of Evian water and found his fingers trying to strangle it. Change him? Change the man Beck had lived with in his imagination for seven years, through more harrowing adventures, more near-fatal experiences, more death-defying risks than any mere mortal could stand? The man who’d taken down serial killers, drug lords, crime bosses, international art thieves, muggers, murderers and everything between? Change him? With a woman? “I thought women knew never to get involved with a man hoping to change him.”

      “She can change him without trying. Simply by being who she is and affecting him that way. Having him become a better person because of loving her.”

      “The only effect I want any woman to have on Mack is a raging hard-on. I don’t write romance novels.”

      Alex made the sound of exasperation New Yorkers excelled at, a cross between a cough and a raspberry. “I’m not asking you to write a romance novel. Just make him more human.”

      Beck exhaled his annoyance. The very quality that made Alex Barkhauser an incredibly effective agent on his behalf, also made her a formidable opponent. Namely, she was a pit bull. “I’m sorry, I can’t see Mack—”

      “Here’s an example.” Pages rustled over the line. “The sex scene you have here with whatsername.”

      “Tamara.”

      “Tamara.” Alex’s voice turned scornful. “Total stripper name. Call her Susie or something.”

      “Susie? Susie wears pigtails and scuffed sandals, not black lingerie. And women named Susie don’t masturbate.”

      “Well no woman masturbates like this.”

      “Like what?” The defensive edge in his voice disgusted him.

      “Like a male fantasy from a porn movie.”

      Beck’s mouth opened to protest. Then closed. Because it had nothing to say. That’s exactly what had inspired the scene. A movie he’d snuck in to see as a teenager and had never forgotten.

      “You can’t tell me your girlfriends do it like that when they’re alone. Wearing this entire black lace getup, do you have any idea how itchy and uncomfortable that stuff is? Plus, you have to be five-eleven, one hundred and ten pounds but oh, yes, somehow with enormous boobs, to look good in it. And the ten-inch dildo? Please.”

      “Alex. Can we move on to—”

      “Make it more real, Beck. That’s what I’m saying. The book rocks otherwise. But make Mack’s relationship with women, his attention to women, his sex with women, more real. Less like a teenage boy’s wet dream. Let’s start there and see where it takes us, okay?”

      “Where it takes us? To five percent sell-through, that’s where it takes us. For every female reader we gain, we’ll lose two men. I guarantee it.”

      “No. Your stories are great, Beck, this story is great, that won’t change. You’re not going to lose men over a love interest for Mack. Most men have actually been in love, you know.”

      “But this is fantasy. They read my books to escape all that.”

      “To escape being in love?”

      Beck closed his eyes. “That came out wrong.”

      Or maybe not. Weren’t most men wanting to escape now and then from the female-directed rules of “relationship” into something nice and tidy like good guys blowing up bad guys?

      Relationships had to be examined and worked on in exhaustive detail. Men had to be told they weren’t doing this, that or the other to female satisfaction. And always the question, what happened to the wonderful romantic men they used to be?

      The wonderful romantic men they used to be disappeared about the same time the adoring sweet women they were dating became critical, judgmental shrews.

      “Just try it, Beck. Try it. Soften up the sex scenes. Especially make Tamara’s self-pleasuring scene more real. Try that one first. And when Mack