Hot on His Heels (What Happens in Vegas) by Margo Bond Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

him back to his original point: No more posting Jocelyn’s whereabouts. He would wait until after this session to post a few key points from the speaker.
    If only he could concentrate long enough to figure out what the presenter was actually saying.
    …
    Sadie leaned against the wall across from the door to the room where the scheduled break-out session was about to end.
    If Jocelyn went to any of these professional sessions, surely it would be the ones on editing. Not that the romance editor had posted anything recently on Twitter.
    Her handle was as dead as Native American historicals.
    As the participants streamed out, Sadie scanned each name tag, and then each face for some sign, something to give away that this woman, or that one, or that one, was the most feminist romance editor in publishing.
    It seemed like there should be some sort of physical clue—even though Sadie knew that was ridiculous. Feminists came in all shapes and sizes.
    She did recognize one face, though. Jake Blaine strolled out of the room toward the back of the group, deep in conversation with Kamille Stone.
    He was a seriously dedicated personal assistant. At the thought, her eyes narrowed as she watched the two of them interact.
    Were they dating, maybe? Was he more than her assistant?
    Their body language didn’t suggest that kind of intimacy.
    There’s something there that is more than a working relationship, though…
    She felt like she almost had it figured out when Jake glanced up and made eye contact with her. The banked heat in that glance burned away every other thought in her mind and left her breathless. She felt pinned to the wall, utterly frozen and transparent, unable to move or even think. His own pause was almost imperceptible, but the way his lips curved up in a knowing smile made it clear that he was absolutely aware of the effect he had on her.
    He held her gaze for another half second. Then, as he leaned down to catch something Kamille was saying and moved past Sadie, he winked.
    As soon as she was no longer held by his stare, she drooped, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. On wobbly knees, she fell in behind the last of the exiting conference attendees and moved toward a chair she had seen out in the hallway, where she collapsed.
    Great. Not only did the man turn me into a little puddle with one look, he also made me miss my chance to see the rest of the editors who were in there.
    Just then, her phone buzzed. Another tweet from Jocelyn: Amazing talk on editing in three passes by Angelina Austin! The attached picture showed the speaker in her usual flamboyant mode.
    Jocelyn Dellarivier really had been in that room, and Sadie had missed her.
    A wave of despair washed over Sadie. Amelia had been right. There was no way she was ever going to find one woman in this huge crowd—especially since that woman wanted to stay anonymous.
    This had been a stupid, quixotic quest, doomed to failure from the beginning.
    She would simply have to do the best she could with an analysis of Jocelyn’s work.
    It wasn’t like very many people read academic books, anyway. The press would get a few hundred orders from academic libraries, maybe a couple dozen more from professors and graduate students doing similar work who wanted their own copies.
    And the tenure committee.
    They would get copies of the book. And then they would pick it apart, criticizing every aspect of it.
    Already, some of her colleagues had turned their noses up at her claims that popular romance fiction was worthy of academic study—and at least one of those professors was on the tenure committee. He was convinced that unless a work of literature was by a dead, white male, it wasn’t worth studying.
    Without something to set her book apart, to make it stand out as a truly unique piece of scholarship, her chances at getting tenure were pretty low. Until now, Sadie hadn’t realized quite how much she had been counting on finding Jocelyn Dellarivier at this