Turning, I leaned against a cabinet and folded my arms across my chest. “I thought you were the slim, young guy with the glasses. You even said you were shorter than most of the guys in your family.”
We’d emailed back and forth several times because he’d been more interesting than the edits. I gestured vaguely toward him. “This is not boring or short.”
He barked out a laugh. “My ex was small but not boring. Just insane.”
Narrowing my eyes, I thought back to the emails. “Why did you send me a picture of you with your ex?”
Tristan shook his head, almost like I was cute. I should’ve been more annoying. “Because I’m not a narcissist who has a thousand pictures of themselves on command?”
Okay, maybe that was reasonable.
“You were really supposed to be…shorter.” It probably wasn’t a good idea to tell him that he was supposed to have been uglier too.
He snorted. “Sure, you wanted a personal assistant who was shorter.”
“Yes.” I nodded and straightened. “Thank you for understanding that it won’t work.”
He barked out a laugh. “No. I think that has to be illegal. I’ll sue.”
Really?
Tanner would figure out a way to get me out of it. Well, either him or Austin. Austin knew everyone. “I’ll get a lawyer?”
He grinned. “And tell them what? You’re embarrassed that someone you were interested in hiring is an alpha Dom and you’re not sure if you can work with someone you’re attracted to? I wonder if you’d have to confess you had fantasies about being punished by your Dom admin? What if I promised to buy a ruler?”
Oh shit.
My mouth was open and I looked like a fucking goldfish, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I…you…”
There was no way Tristan guessed that randomly. Sure, it was a common enough fantasy among submissive omegas, but the ruler part? “I…”
His smile shifted and was suddenly more relaxed. “You named your first erotica character the same thing as your first mystery. You’ve got a handful of fans who’ve guessed, but it’s an underground thing. So see, I’m perfect. I know your secret and I have the skills to help you. And even better, I won’t have to read your backlist of erotica to catch up, so I can help you manage that side of things right away.”
I was still blinking at him, so he kept going.
Tristan seemed excited. “Your publisher handles most of the mysteries. I’ve seen you complaining about them online, but you only do minimal other advertising on those because with your core reader group being so vast it doesn’t make sense timewise. It’s the sexier stuff that you need help managing, right?”
I found myself nodding stupidly.
No one in my real life knew about that side. When it started out, I was worried that it’d flop or that the guys would drive me crazy about it, so I’d just worked on that stuff at night when it’d caught my attention, but now it was harder to manage on my own. Self-publishing was time-consuming, but the control freak side of me liked being able to make all the decisions on those.
But my publisher would have kittens if they found out about it, so I’d been careful.
“When Austin was humping Silas on TV, it seemed like half the country started looking for dirty books.” And mine were hot and funny, so they’d done really well over the past few months.
But there were only so many hours in the day and it wasn’t fair to Jonah to guilt him into giving me more hours. Shit. With the club starting to come together, I had a feeling he would need to put more hours in there.
“That makes sense.” Tristan nodded and suddenly something about his expression looked more professional.
Still hot…but professional.
“Right around that time period, there were also changes in what traditional publishing was looking for, so the leading online companies started relaxing their stances on what they’d promote.” He shrugged, still looking very business casual instead of hot and distracting. “There was a bit of flack when Smith & Benson sent out your newest book to one of their big mailing lists, but not as much as they were expecting, so I think you’ll see them doing it again in the future.”
“There was? They did?” That explained why that one did so well. “They will?”
That professional look slipped just for a second as he chuckled. “Yes. I’ve got some inside contacts and the rumors were great.”
Interesting.
“I was really in their newsletter?” My mysteries were in there on a