Kasey Michaels: Bowled Over

A little lean, flinty Clint Eastwood as he looked way-back-when in those spaghetti westerns. A little suave, sophisticated Sean Connery as James Bond, the only James Bond who really counted, except for Pierce Brosnan. So she threw some Pierce into the mix—everybody needs a little Pierce.

Maggie giggled at that. Who said she couldn't write sexy books?

She tossed in some veddy-veddy-English upper crust Peter O'Toole as he'd looked in Lawrence of Arabia. A bit of this guy, the meltingly sexy voice of that one, the mouth from this one, the eyebrows from another, the brooding indigo blue eyes of another one. On and on, slowly, as the level of fudge in the jar went down, she mentally constructed The Man in Every Woman's Heart.

And every woman's libido. That, too. Definitely.

She tossed in a few more physical attributes that, well, rang her bells, and finally had a mental picture of the perfect hero. Her perfect hero.

Handsome. Oh-God-Yes!

And smart. Leave the good-looking boy-toys for someone else—Maggie believed the perfect hero ought to have an IQ larger than his collar size.

Rich. Rich was good. As someone very wise once said, it's as easy to love a rich man as it is a poor man.

Witty. Sophisticated. A little bit arrogant, because the best heroes always were arrogant. In a nice way, of course.

Confident, something she wasn't, but Saint Just would be an absolute whiz at confident.

Brave, honest, steadfast—wait, that was the Boy Scouts, right? Unless a person had a square knot that needed tying or a pup tent to raise, who needed a Boy Scout? Not a perfect-hero-hungry woman! Let there be a little bit of larceny in the man's soul.

Maggie was on a roll. Knock her down, would they! Try to send her home to New Jersey, would they!

Heh-heh-heh. Heh!

Six weeks later, the Viscount Saint Just had become the hero of his very first book, The Case of the Misplaced Earl.

He was tall, lean, muscular, to-die-for handsome. He flattered his tailor just by wearing his clothes with the sort of elegant panache of a true gentleman. He carried a cane that concealed a thin rapier inside it. He favored a quizzing glass hung from his neck by a black grosgrain ribbon, and employed it to great effect when he stared down a villain. His coal black hair was done in the windswept style favored by Beau Brummell. He could ride, drive, shoot, fence, box, and recite Shakespeare.

He was a near god. He was Alexandre Blake, the sophisticated, wealthy, handsome Viscount Saint Just.

He was the perfect Regency gentleman. He was the perfect hero.

With the help of her friend and former editor, Bernice Toland-James, Maggie sneaked in the back door of Toland Books once more, this time as Cleo Dooley, bringing Saint Just and his sexy mind and body with her.

A few The Case of ... Saint Just mysteries later, hello, NYT!

And that's how it stayed for several years—Maggie and her imaginary perfect hero. Cleo Dooley wrote the books, the to-die-for sexy Viscount Saint Just solved the crimes and bedded all the lucky ladies, and Maggie Kelly giggled all the way to the bank.

Never mind that she smoked too much, talked to her two cats too much, whined to Doctor Bob every Monday morning at nine, got out socially entirely too little, and had developed this unnerving habit of comparing every man she met to her perfect hero and finding those men lacking. Hey, she wasn't in New Jersey!

So where was she, exactly? This was a question she tried not to ask herself too often as she edged toward her thirty-first birthday because she didn't much like the answer.

But then something strange happened.

The Viscount Saint Just happened. Alexandre Blake happened.

Really.

One day Maggie turned around in her solitary Manhattan apartment, and there he was, in all his Regency Era glory.

She recognized him immediately. Why not? She'd built him.

And there was his sidekick, the lovable Sterling Balder, the darling, naive, perfectly adorable comic relief, the sweetheart of a guy she'd created because even perfect heroes need someone to talk to or else they'd be talking to themselves, and folks tend to look at such people a little strangely.

Saint Just explained to Maggie—after she'd recovered from her faint—that she'd made him and Sterling so real, so complete, that they were able to "move onto her plane of existence."

Mostly he, Saint Just, after living inside Maggie's head for several years, observing her, was here, so he said, because she needed him.

Of course she did ...

For the past several months Saint Just, known to Maggie's friends as her very distant English cousin, Alex Blakely, and his friend Sterling Balder, known as Sterling Balder because the fellow couldn't possibly carry off an alias without tripping over it, have lived in Maggie's world. They had been, she told her friends, the inspiration for her now famous characters.

Her friends believed her.

Some people will believe anything.

Maggie had stopped smoking, although she still saw Doctor Bob every Monday morning at nine. She talked about her childhood years, her fears, her hang-ups ... even her inability to say good-bye to Doctor Bob and make it stick.

But she'd yet to tell him about Saint Just.

After all—she wasn't crazy. Even if she, after a terrible inner battle wherein she weighed common sense against the allure of the perfect hero—common sense losing in twenty-two seconds of the fifth round—was now romantically involved with a figment of her imagination.

Definitely a once upon a time sort of fairy tale, even if you couldn't exactly count on a slam dunk happily-ever-after when one was dealing with an imaginary hero come to life who could, you know, poof back out of your life as quickly as he'd poofed in.

This was, as Sterling would have said, "a worriment."

And then there's that other problem. Ever since the sexy, crime-solving Saint Just did his poof thing into Maggie's life, people around her seem to keep turning up murdered.

Maggie sat with her back to her computer, looking around her living room, which also served as her office, her dining room, her den, her library, her—how had she ever thought this arrangement worked for her?

Claustrophobics-R-Us.

Figuratively choking herself with both hands as she stuck out her tongue and gurgled, she decided, once and for all, that she had to relocate. Expand. Grow.

Leave Alex.

Whoa.

Leave Alex?

This time the gurgle was audible, closely resembling a whimper.

Not that Alex lived with her anymore, showing up in her kitchen early in the morning, looking put together while she leaned against the sink in her ratty pajamas, just trying to stand up straight until her morning caffeine kicked in.

He wasn't sleeping just down the hall anymore, leaving the top off her toothpaste, beating every password protection she put on her computer, and generally driving her insane.

No. He was now gainfully employed as a perfume company's photo model, financially self-sufficient, and happy, living in his own condo directly across the hall. He and Sterling both were happy.

She was happy, having them live directly across the hall.

She could watch out for him, keep an eye on him, make sure he didn't do anything too herolike.

And then there was the fact that, once Sterling was tucked up in bed, Alex could tiptoe across the hall to her for a few hours and they could ... well, how could she possibly leave Alex?

And the idea of moving had nothing—nothing!—to do with the fact that her onetime friend and now archnemesis, fellow author Felicity Boothe Simmons (once Faith Simmons, back before she went NYT and figuratively left the planet), had just bought herself a two-level condo soon to be featured in Architectural Digest.