Mr. Romantic: A Mister Standalone (The Mister Series Book 2) (38 page)
Maybe it’s someone else’s turn.
Epilogue - Nolan
“Just be nice,” Ivy says as she straightens my tie outside her parents’ house.
“Hey,” I say, “they don’t call me Mr. Nice for nothing.”
“They don’t call you Mr. Nice
at all
, Nolan. Now stop.” She shoots me a sideways grin as the word comes out. We haven’t had another rape fantasy. And I’m not saying we’ll never do it again, but I’m over it. It was fun, but it was a stressful fucking night. And every time I think about yellow rope, I see Ivy’s foot, tied to that bedpost as the guns went off and that sick fuck, Boring Richard, shot her.
I don’t need to prove I’m innocent to Ivy. She knows.
I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, I decide. Fuck them all.
The front door opens and the Reverend William Rockwell stands there looking very much like a pastor’s daughter’s father.
Well, except him, I guess.
“Come in!” Sophia, Ivy’s mother, calls. Ivy slips past her father and leaves us there together. On the front stoop. He doesn’t invite me in, so I shift my feet a little, wondering why I’m letting this conservative dinosaur make me nervous.
“You’re not good enough for her,” my father-in-law says.
I nod, pressing my lips together. “Yes, sir,” I say. “I know that.”
“And you eloped, so you’re
never
going to be good enough for her.”
I nod again. “I know. I don’t deserve her. Not one bit. And I’m going to spend the rest of my life thanking God for letting such a smart and beautiful woman be my wife.” I have apologized profusely on the phone and email for weeks about the elopement. “We’re already planning a real wedding, Mr. Rockwell. So we can make it official in your eyes.”
He’s never going to forgive me. Especially after I tell him she’s pregnant.
“Hmmph,” Rockwell says, stepping aside. “If you keep kissing ass like this, Delaney, then we might even like each other in about twenty years. Come in.”
I step into his house and immediately feel at home. Ivy is everything my life was missing these past ten years.
And together we are building the best motherfucking resort the Southern California desert has ever seen. Ivy’s marketing plan was a whole lot more than free rooms to pique interest in the San Diego corporate community. It was cooking class weekends with our professional chef. It was golf lesson weekends with our new resident pro. It was dark-sky stargazing with guest astronomers. It’s a place for parties, and weddings, and anniversaries and corporate events.
In fact, my new career looks almost nothing like my old one. I might not have ever gotten that art degree, but I got something much better instead.
And it was just what I needed.
A beautiful new life with my beautiful new wife, Mrs. Romantic.
WANT THE NEXT BOOK?
Mr. Corporate by JA Huss
Weston Conrad is the best headhunter in the business. That handsome smile goes a long way towards convincing most people to trust him with their future.
I’m not most people. I’m his direct competition. And it doesn’t hurt to be just the kind of woman he’s been looking for.
I’m gonna flash you these legs, Weston Conrad.
I’m gonna wear low-cut shirts and micro-mini skirts.
I’m gonna dazzle you with wit and conversation and kiss those lips like they’re exactly what I’ve been waiting for.
So don’t hate me when you figure out my secret.
You understand, right? You’re Mr. Corporate and this is just business.
END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the End of Book Shit (fondly called the EOBS in my little pond), the place where I get to say anything I want and readers have to listen. ;) Just kidding. I bet most people don’t even bother reading these.
OK, so like most of my stories this one started out based in fact. If you read the Rock EOBS you know that I got a lot of the original premise from real life and if you read the Social Media series, you might’ve suspected I based it off something that really happened as well.
The Mister series is loosely based off another real event. All the characters are made up in my imagination. The settings are made up, the scenes---all fiction. But the basic premise—a group of guys get accused of something and suddenly their lives are turned upside down because the court of public opinion pronounces them guilty—is real.
My premise takes place ten years after the “big event” that changed their lives. And my questions are valid ones I think. What happens to people who endure social outrage on a vast scale? People who might not just get national attention, but global attention? How do they go on when the dust settles?
Well, this my version of how that scenario might play out. Mr. Perfect made pretty good use of his ten years between then and now, but Mr. Romantic? He’s not so sympathetic. And the way it affected him is definitely not sympathetic.
But I feel for this guy. I always want to believe people are innocent. I root for people to be found not guilty. Not to get off. Not to avoid justice. But because I want them to be unequivocally innocent and I want that to be a final judgment in a court of law. I want to believe that people are
good
.
I have a master’s degree in forensic toxicology. If you don’t know what that is, it’s basically drug testing. Biological analysis to determine what, if any, chemicals are inside the body of victims and perpetrators. And in my last semester we had to take an ethics class to prepare us for expert testimony in the courtroom. The one thing they hammered home in this class is pretty much the only thing that stuck with me. (I’m not a forensic toxicologist, right? I’m a writer. So I didn’t do much in this field to make it stick). But that one thing was this – “It is far more ethical to let the guilty go free than it is to persecute the innocent.”
I still believe that. While it sucks when a criminal gets off, it literally makes me sick to my stomach to think of an innocent person sitting in prison for something they didn’t do.
So I like to believe that everyone is innocent unless there’s a good reason not to.
Sadly, I’m a bad judge of guilt and innocence. Remember Laci Peterson? That pregnant lady who went missing just before Christmas in 2002? I wanted her husband to be innocent so bad. Not because I have some weird fixation with would-be murders. But because I want to believe that no man is capable of killing their pregnant wife and dumping her body in the ocean.
I was genuinely distraught when it became clear he was guilty. Lost my faith in humanity.
So when another high-profile case came on the news not long afterward I decided I wasn’t going to invest my opinion again. I got burned with Laci Peterson’s animal of a husband. I’m out of the guilt or innocence business.
But you know… you hear the news. You hear the evidence. You see the completely fucked up reaction of the media, hell almost the entire nation trying to lynch the people accused before they get to trial. And you form an opinion.
I had an opinion, I just told myself I didn’t. I wasn’t going to invest in these things anymore. I always lose. They are always guilty. So when the details of this case came out and it was found they were innocent—well, I got some of my faith back.
Not everyone is a monster. Sometimes people are set up. It absolutely happens. And for whatever reason, this case was one of them.
So when I started plotting the backstory for Mr. Perfect in February 2016 I decided I wanted it to be about a case like that. Ten years earlier a group of friends are accused of a terrible crime and maybe they did it, maybe they didn’t, but they got off because the witness died.
Now this is not exactly how the real-life case went. And believe me, that one is pretty interesting. But the book isn’t about
that
case. This isn’t
their
story. It’s just
a
story. One that could happen to anyone.
But then I started looking up what happened to these people after the case was over and that’s where the backstory really came to life. That’s when I knew it was what happened
after
that mattered.
No one gave a fuck about them after. No one cared that their lives were disrupted or that they had to find a way forward. No one cared about what they lost. No one even cared why they were accused in the first place.
This was my story. What did the public outcry do to these people? How did that experience of unjustified persecution change them?
This book is a look at five men, ten years later, and how one lie changed who they were forever. That’s it. It’s not a thinly veiled commentary on anything happening right now in the news and it’s not a statement about how people are treated by society and the media if they find themselves wrapped up in something bigger than themselves.
It’s not about any of that. It’s just about these five fictional guys trying to come to terms with how one night turned into a nightmare.
Mr. Perfect did pretty well. We’re all kind of proud of his reaction. He wanted to make the world a better place. Mr. Romantic? Well, not so much. He’s a cynical asshole with a rape fantasy fetish. Maybe he was this guy before the lie, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe that lie changed him for the better? He will never know because he can’t see his alternate reality where that night never happened.
I try to write unlikable antiheroes. I think I do a pretty good job. But I also try and give you a reason to root for them as they find redemption.
Mr. Romantic isn’t as dark as some of my characters. James Fenici is dark. Merc is dark. Hell, I think Ford is probably darker than Mr. Romantic. So that’s why there’s no trigger warning in my blurb. This isn’t a dark book and if you think it is, you missed the point. All Mr. Romantic wants is an answer. Why? Why was he a target? Why did people lie about him? Why does he have to live with a stigma for the rest of his life over something he never did?
And it turns out, that’s all each of the Misters want. Why?
Well, if you read the whole series you’re gonna see why. Mr. Corporate will have his own demons to deal with. Mr. Mysterious will have you questioning everything. And Mr. Match will get that final answer, no matter what he has to do.
Stick with me, I’ve got a story to tell. And I promise you, it’s something you’ve never read before.
If you’d like to hang out with me on Facebook I have a private fan group called
Shrike Bikes
. Just ask to join and someone will approve you as soon as they see it. I am in that group chatting with the fans every single day and we have a lot of giveaways and fun stuff going all the time. Especially around release days. I usually do a takeover and give away all kinds of stuff related to the new release, so come on by and say hi.
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Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.
Julie
JA Huss
*************
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