PW #121: Adult Contemporary Women’s Fiction: EX, EX, OH

Manuscript Status: Finished

Mentor: Tamara Mataya
Mentee: Kelli Newby
Title: EX, EX, OH
Category/Genre: Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Word Count: 85,000

Pitch:

Losing fiancé to the head of a roleplaying game empire? X

Burying herself in 80-hour work weeks to forget? X

Dating the ex of the woman who stole her fiancé? Oh…

Meg and Nicholas’ chemistry is volcanic, but he runs the game business with their wildly charismatic—and just plain wild—exes. Dating Nicholas means letting them back into her life just as she’s recovering from the devastating break-up they caused. Dungeons and Dragons? More like Lawyers v. LARPers as Meg takes on the manipulative people who aren’t quite ready to let her and Nicholas go.

Excerpt:

My Date was named Ed, but he’d asked me not to call him Ed. He was Ed-something. –Gar? –mund? –win? –ward? Suffice it to say, I was thinking of him as My Date so I wouldn’t slip and call him “Ed.”

Once more, my gaze returned to his large-faced watch that ticked away the one-and-a-half billable hours I hadn’t logged tonight.

“I see I have competition for your attention.” Offering a lopsided smile, he pulled his sleeve over the dial.

“Sorry.” I pinched my temples, hoping to dampen blood flow to the lawyer center in my cerebral cortex.

“My brother’s a lawyer. I should’ve known better than to leave a clock where you could see it.” He stretched back in his chair, as if to assure me he wasn’t upset. “Speaking of siblings, do you want to write your sister an invoice for tonight’s hours?”

I laughed, surprising myself. “I’d love that.”

Give him a chance. My Date had messy, rich-kid hair—like someone had coated him in prep school. It was rascally. I didn’t want to jump him, though. My libido had been in hibernation since my fiancé had run off a year before. Not bear hibernation, though. More like Sci-Fi cryogenic hibernation.