Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
“It’s only four and a half hours.” This is my new mantra as I stand in front of my open wall of beach. Four and a half hours in the truck with my father sitting next to me and my mother in the back seat.
I would make them go with Essie and Mike, but Essie’s SS car is a little vintage Mercedes. When we show up at a signing, she drives that thing up so she can make an entrance. And Dad doesn’t quite fit in that backseat.
It’s only four and a half hours.
CHAPTER THREE
DAY ONE — THE ARRIVAL
“Welcome to the Aria, ladies.”
Stepping out of the passenger’s side of Britney’s car, I look around and take in the enormity of the place. I’ve never been to Vegas before. You’d think, growing up in LA, I would’ve been, but somehow the whole ‘Vegas, baby!’ thing just never grabbed me, so this is my first time and I don’t think I had a clear picture of what it would be like.
The hotel is massive. The parking lanes are massive. The billboards are massive. The whole shebang, from what I’ve observed so far, is over the top. Which is something I understood it to be, intellectually, but seeing it in person is a bit overwhelming. Which is maybe why I’ve never been here before. I can ‘people’ okay if I have to, but concentrated throngs of people all ‘peopling’ at once in thirsty and desperate ways isn’t my jam.
With me being half-Greek, you might think Dionysian debauchery would be in my natural wheelhouse. Not so much. The more puritanically repressed British vibe I inherited from my mom seems to have won out as the dominant one.
Probably why I respond to the Austens and Brontës of the world so much.
And speaking of classic, romance-novel sex bombs…
Britney slides out of the driver’s side and I see the eyes of the young valet who’s holding her door open go wide.
Britney’s six feet tall, blonde, and exudes an effortless sexuality that may predate all the attention she receives from men, but at this point is most certainly reinforced by it. She can’t help it. I think, if given the choice, she’d probably opt to turn it off because of how exhausting it can be for her, but since that option doesn’t exist, she’s learned to harness it and use it like a superpower.
“Thanks,” she says, handing him the keys to her Mercedes SUV and smiling politely.
“Are you here for the convention?”
“We are.”
“Amazing.” He smiles and nods his head like it’s the coolest thing ever. “Are you one of the authors?”
“No. No, she is.” She points at me and I give a small wave to the cute boy wearing the white polo shirt tucked into dark blue club shorts.
“Oh,” he says, looking at me across the roof of the car, still smiling, but now with something more like practiced courtesy than eager enthusiasm. “Cool.”
Another couple of white-shirted, blue-shorted parking attendants pop the liftgate and proceed to pull out the many cardboard boxes of paperbacks stacked in the rear.
“Can I get the name on the reservation?”
“Cynthia Lear,” Britney tells the kid.
It took me a long time to come up with that. I workshopped a variety of nom de plumes before I settled on one that felt right. When I started writing romance just about twenty-four months ago, I had to make a decision—do it under my own name or pick a pseudonym.
Ultimately, I decided to go with a pen name.
Not because I don’t want people to know what I’m writing or because I want to protect my identity or anything.
If anything, it’s the opposite. I definitely want to be recognized for my work and I’d love to see my actual name on the covers of my books, but unfortunately ‘Cordelia Sarantopoulos’:
A) doesn’t really fit that well on the covers. I tried fifty ways of placing it, with a bunch of different fonts, and it always seemed to crowd out the title somehow, and…
B) is not terribly sexy.
Cordelia’s not bad, I suppose, but Sarantopoulos doesn’t really get the job done.
So, after much consideration, I settled on ‘Cynthia Lear.’
‘Cynthia’ just because it has ‘sin’ built into the pronunciation and I thought that was kinda cool, and ‘Lear’ as an homage to my actual name. King Lear’s youngest. His favorite daughter whom he banishes, but who returns home to care for him after he goes mad.
Dad once told me that when they found out I was going to be born a girl, he and Mom went back and forth between Cordelia and Ophelia, but ultimately decided that if I was going to be named after someone from a Shakespearean tragedy they’d rather not have it be the one who goes nuts and drowns.
(Coincidentally, I still do have a pretty well-articulated fear of drowning and I suppose it’s debatable whether or not tapping out the ‘one, two, three, four… one, two’ pattern on the roof of the car—like I’m doing right now—before I can walk away technically qualifies as ‘nuts.’ Ah, well. Best-laid plans…)