Summer Heat (Wyoming Fever Book 2) by Elizabeth Lennox (books for new readers TXT) 📕

business associates, and made sure that I shopped at all of the ‘right’ stores so that I looked appropriately sedate.”  She took a deep breath before continuing.  “But slowly, Jerry started finding fault with just about everything I did.  Every dinner party, he’d laugh about my cooking.”  She sighed.  “I stopped cooking because I couldn’t handle the criticism.  So, I hired a catering company.  They chose everything.  According to Jerry, I wasn’t even qualified to choose the wine.  So, I let the caterers do that too.”  She closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath.  “I didn’t tell him though.  I just did it.  I stopped spending my ‘allowance’ on anything but the dinner party food and wine.  But Jerry still criticized the food and wine, encouraging the guests to laugh at me.”  Her eyes teared up and she looked at Arik.  “That’s when I knew that it wasn’t personal.  That he was merely trying to belittle me for his own amusement.”  She took a deep, cleansing breath.  “If he would criticize a professional’s food, someone who had gone to the Culinary Institute of America…!” She smiled, her head tilting slightly.  “Did you know that the institute has a wine cellar as well as a brewery?  The students don’t just learn to cook, but they learn the right kinds of wine to serve with each meal and they know how to make beer.”

“Sounds interesting,” he replied.  Really, he didn’t give much of a damn about the cooking school or the wine or the beer or anything other than what this ass did to Sage.  “So you realized that your ex-husband’s comments were…what?”

“He was just being mean,” she said.  “So, I started killing him off too.”

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck.  “Sage, I’m a cop.  More to the point, I’m a homicide detective.  Please tell me that you didn’t murder your ex-husband.”

She cracked up. For the first time since she’d started explaining, the laughter came across as musical instead of sad and desolate.  “No! Of course I didn’t actually kill him.  Not in reality. The murders started off in my head.  He’d leave for work and I’d just…” she shrugged.  “I started to come up with ways to kill him off.  I didn’t have the money to divorce him.  So, I just played around with various ideas.  Then I read an article about how other authors got started and…” her smile grew brighter, lighting up her green eyes.  “Instead of killing off my husband or my father in my mind, I wrote out the plots.  When I showed them to an editor I’d gone to school with, she said they were brilliant and demanded that I write out the whole story.”

“So, that’s how you got your start as an author?”

Sage nodded, grinning happily.  “Exactly.  I channeled my rage into my writing.  It was pretty gory at first,” she explained.  “But slowly, I started adding more details, more clues and emotions, more mystery to the plot.”  She shrugged.  “My books were an instant sensation, although I write under a pseudonym because I couldn’t let my husband or my father know what I’d done.”

That surprised him.  “Why not?  Wouldn’t you love to rub it in their faces?”

Sage shook her head.  “No.  That would be too dangerous.  Jerry was already manipulating me emotionally.  I knew that I had to write fast and in secret.  So every day, he’d leave for his office and I’d wait at least a half hour.”  She rolled her eyes.  “He liked to come back and surprise me sometimes. I think he was trying to catch me doing something he wouldn’t approve of.  And yeah, sometimes, he’d mock me for being so lazy.”

“You’re not lazy,” he snapped.

“Of course I’m not,” she replied, warmed by his immediate defense of her.  “I’m actually a very focused and goal oriented person.  When I started writing my first book, my editor thought that it would take me six months to get her the final manuscript.  It took me less than a month.”  She laughed. “I had a lot of anger to work through.  Before the first book was scheduled for release, I already had my second novel finished and turned in to my editor.”

“That’s impressive.”

“All of my books are about female serial killers,” she continued.  “And in every book, I kill off my ex-husband in various, horrible ways.  I also make the bad guy look like my ex, so if he ever does discover that I am a writer, he could see his image in the characters.” She laughed.  “I didn’t hold back either.  He was a selfish, weak, pathetic man who liked to make me feel bad about myself.  I can’t tell you how many names he called me.  But in one of the books, those names were a trigger for one of my women serial killers to hunt down and kill off another bitter man.”

“You don’t condone violence though, right?” he asked, stepping closer.

“Not at all,” she assured him.  “I don’t believe that real violence solves anything.  Which is probably why my ex-husband and father are still alive.” She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly.  “Writing was my healing power.  It soothed my soul in ways that nothing else could.  I even went to a therapist at one point, hoping that would help me process my demons.  And although that therapist was good, she wasn’t nearly as helpful as just writing out my thoughts and anger, releasing it from my mind.”

“So, why do you still write?”

She shrugged. “I enjoy it,” she told him.  “It’s pretty fun to come up with a new type of murderer.  I love it.  I love the intricacies of working through the plot details, loading the scenes with clues that seem obvious once the mystery is solved. At least,” she grinned, “that’s my goal.”

“What’s your pen name?” he asked.  “I knew that you were