best-seller status, and what the book had meant to her and why. How better to
make a connection than to share the same passion?
She hadn’t really expected a reply, but then
it had come. Henrietta Winfield had actually emailed her. With the door open a
tiny crack, she’d subtly, or so she’d thought, slipped her foot into it, and
volunteered to do anything that would keep her in Henrietta’s sight. And so it
had begun, a relationship that eventually flowered into a job and most
surprisingly, wonderfully of all, into friendship.
When she’d gone to work for Henrietta, she’d
quickly become immersed in the other side of the literary agency, the politics
of acquisition and promotion and selling. She’d been trained to recognize good
writing, poignant themes, popular tropes, but she hadn’t any experience
negotiating the volatile waters of selling the manuscript to a publisher. Where
were the best places to position a contemporary romance, a time-travel
paranormal, a family saga? What was hot, and even more importantly, what would
be hot next year? What were reasonable contract terms to expect for a first-time
author, and what were the key items to be hammered out to the best advantage
for her author clients? Those first few months she’d worked side by side with
Henrietta and Ron, who’d been senior to her then and had graciously tutored
her.
Part of her rapid-fire indoctrination had
been in the art of networking, one of the things she’d liked the least at
first. She preferred the quiet of her office and the solitude of her desk,
immersed in manuscripts or making phone calls to authors—even contract review
was better than face-to-face schmoozing with strangers. But she’d gone to the
meetings and receptions, because Henrietta insisted she needed to. And there,
at one of those very first too noisy, too crowded, and too false-friendly
congregations, she’d first met Derian Winfield.
Even with dozens of people between them,
Emily had recognized her right away. Derian was hard not to recognize. A few
inches taller than most of the women, she’d stood out from the crowd precisely
because she stood apart. She’d worn a suit, the dark jacket and pants well cut,
not flashy, but superbly fit to her lanky form. Her hair had been fashionably
layered to collar length, expertly setting off her chiseled features and
accentuating the clean, crisp lines of her neck and shoulders. But it’d been
her expression that had really defined her separateness. Unlike everyone else,
she wasn’t smiling, she didn’t appear to be drinking the amber liquid in the
short glass she held in her left hand, and she wasn’t talking to anyone.