Love Isn't as Easy as the Books

Part 1

Freen Sarocha found herself bookless in the VIP airport lounge. Well, not really bookless. She just finished the book she brought with while she was waiting for the plane to refuel.

After looking through her enormous e-book collection (which paled in comparison with the actual library that she owned) with total disinterest, she decided to check out the bookstore in the airport that was probably filled with newspapers, gossip magazines, and Peterson novels.

With her big hat and sunglasses on, Freen made her way to the poorly stocked airport shop. Ok so maybe it wasn't that poorly stocked. In fact, it had to be one of the better bookstores in an airport that Freen's ever been in. The benefits of being an international hub.

She wandered amongst the shelves for a bit, nothing new or intriguing really jumped out at her.

For a moment she considered trying to finish the Russian masters (again), but her brain immediately protested. She'd been reading reports and summaries and memos for what felt like several years, so this was an occasion for something light and fluffy.

Harlequin romance section it was.

Then she saw the whole bookshelf dominated by Marsha Blackwood, Freen's personal favorite bad romance novelist. Her secret vice. The heiress owned a hard copy of every book ever written by the ludicrously prolific writer (and also the subsequent copies on her e-reader so she could have access to the entire catalog whenever the need arose).

In just one misguided second, Freen wept for there were no more worlds to conquer, or in her case Blackwood novels to read.

That was when she turned around and saw a book of partially unpacked new books. A brand new Blackwood book: The Artist and The Heiress.

The cover, in all of its cheesy camp glory, featured two women, one in an overly flowing red dress that defied both fashion and physics and another with toned muscles and paint stained hands reaching for the other woman with a perfect dark tan and perfect tattoos.

Usually Miss Blackwood was a writer of straight romances, which were fine (it's not like Freen ever considered herself picky for one gender or the other), but this new title intrigued her. The only other lesbian romance that Blackwood wrote (The Conqueror and The Warrior [Blackwood isn't very creative when it comes to titles]) was a very early work of hers, the first if Freen remembered correctly, but also one of the least formulaic.

Most harlequin romances seem to follow a very strict formula like no other genre. But The Conqueror and The Warrior was a break from the usual tropes and conventions, it was rawer and bleaker and rougher and, let's be honest here, hotter than any of the other Blackwood novels. In fact, it was Freen's favorite of her catalog, and she had no less than five copies of it (one digital, one hardcover, three paperbacks in various stages of worn and loved).

She picked one of the copies off the shelf and went to pay for it in cash.

The twenty-something hipster cashier scoffed at her selection, and Freen Sarocha was about to give him a piece of her mind when she realized her face was on a magazine cover about thirty inches away from the cashier's head.

She took her change and walked off, back to the VIP section of the airport.

Hopefully she could lose herself in a trashy romance novel for a few hours as her corporate jet refueled and was cleaned and then continued on her company wide PR campaign to fix her father's numerous mistakes and was taking her to 15 cities in 9 different countries over the course of two weeks.