Author's note: this is a trial chapter of a new story that I am very excited about. So please, please, please let me know what you thought of it! And if you liked it, please vote and comment (though just reading it makes me happy).

Raven could see very little as she crept up the winding staircase. Her dressing gown caught around her ankles, and she hitched it up in one hand to avoid it tangling with her bare feet.

It was very dark when she reached the top of the stairs, and she wished she had brought a light other than her candle, for the passageway was lit only by the moonlight that pooled on the floor. The deep recesses of the stone hallway were left in an inky shadow.

Raven shivered as the wind hissed through the passage, throwing a tree's shadow into the shape of claws against the wall. Picking up her dressing gown once more, she hurried along the hall. The stone was cold under her soles and she felt chilled nearly to the bone.

She soon reached a door. It was locked. When she laid her hand on the handle, the wind moaned outside and the candle went out without a sound, leaving the smoke curling from the smouldering wick.

She wanted to call out, but found herself struck dumb. All at once, she felt a presence behind her, and it left her skin prickling and her senses crying out. She turned at once and gasped, but felt a hand come forward and hush her.

A man stood before her, and held one hand over her lips. Another rested on her waist. Both were very warm. She could not see his face - his features were obscured by a black carnival mask. But she could see his eyes, dyed silver by the moonlight and dappled by the clouds that scuttled by the window. They were fixed on her more firmly than then hand that held her waist.

After a moment, he lowered his hand from her mouth. She felt him brush his thumb over her lower lip as he dropped it. He said nothing.

"Let go of me," she said, her voice quivering. She let her gaze fall to the ground, where she could see nothing but the shadows cast by the bone-white moon.

The stranger did not loosen his grip. Instead, he gently nudged Raven's chin, drawing her face up so that her eyes met his silver gaze. She made no sound, the gasp she had loosed at his touch stolen away by the wind that whispered through the open window. He cocked his head and there was something in his eyes, something so-

Isabella stopped typing. She rolled her eyes and glared hard at the wall to the sounds of gleeful yelling. Then she glared out the window, the scenery of the blue-grey lake and the surrounding trees in their fall colours doing nothing to distract her. She drummed her fingers against the keyboard as the sounds of hooting, hollering, and thudding got louder.

Giving a sigh, Isabella shouted: "Could you please shut the fuck up?"

"Why?" came the corresponding shout from the next room over. After a moment, the source of the sound - a handsome, blue-eyed, brown-haired man in his early twenties, with a tennis ball in his hand - entered the room and leaned against the doorframe. He scoffed visibly as he went on. "You need to focus? I thought you said what you wrote was total shit."

"I do. And it is," said Isabella. She slammed the lid of her laptop shut, resisting the urge to pitch the whole damn thing out the window. "But it's a very specific form of shit, Isaac."

Isaac snorted in apparent disdain and Isabella glared at him, keen to defend the shit upon which her short - albeit successful - career had been built. "Not everyone can do this, you know," she said, waving her finger at him before gesturing at herself. "It takes a certain talent to produce the exact type of shit that people want. A saccharine, bland kind of shit that is not only palatable, but also relatable. Sweet, sexy, and simple. And that's why I've sold a hundred million copies worldwide. I know the kind of shit people want to read."

"You make it sound like hard work," said Isaac. He tossed the tennis ball up in the air and Isabella was certain that if she saw or heard him bounce it against any more walls, she was going to ram it down his throat.

"It is," she told him. He sighed but said nothing, so Isabella continued with a threat. "So if you want to camp out in my cottage - you know, the one that these shitty novels pay for - all of October, you'd better fucking live by my rules."

Isaac shrugged by way of a piece offering. Isabella nodded and leaned back in her chair, stretching. The muscles along her shoulders complained noisily as she did so, voicing their displeasure in the form of a deep-seated ache that seemed to curl about her vertebrae, and a more high-pitched whine of a burning pain in the muscles of her shoulders and her upper back. When she had told Isaac that her back was bothering her, he'd snorted and asked her whether she was fifty or twenty-six. She hadn't told him about the pain again.

"What's this one about?" he asked, ambling toward her. He jammed his hands in his pockets and jerked his chin at the laptop, before going to lean against the window frame. He looked very handsome silhouetted against the pearly light of the foggy autumn afternoon. Like he'd walked straight out of one of Isabella's trashy novels. She looked away.

"The usual stupidity," she said. Giving a sigh, she collapsed onto her desk, cushioning her head on her folded hands. "Woman called Raven Laurel, who gets herself into a bit of a pickle when she ends up staying at a windy old castle while writing a treatise of the castle's history. It's a creepy place and she's alone most of the time, except for the groundskeeper and the housekeeper."

Isaac snorted but grinned. "Nice. Now where's the romance? You do write romance, sis."

"I was getting to that," Isabella said. "Raven never sees the enigmatic owner, though the housekeeper talks a lot about him. But she ends up with him, by the way. I think. Or maybe he'll be the villain and she'll end up with the heroic groundskeeper, who I'll make hot."

"Gripping stuff," said Isaac, lightly sarcastic. He was smiling.

"You bet," replied Isabella, barely sarcastic. Her writing was gripping, but to a specific sort of person.

"So, what's she doing now?" asked Isaac. He ambled back toward her and tapped the laptop with one finger.

"She's just discovered a mysterious passageway," said Isabella, completely deadpan. She knew Isaac would fill in her disdain for her own work by reading her expression. "In her dressing gown. On a moonlit night. She gets confronted by a man in a mask. Spoiler alert: he's the owner."

Isaac chuckled. "They going to fuck?"

That was, of course, the primary reason people read her novels. Isabella shook her head."Not in this chapter," she explained. "Later. Probably in front of a fire. Maybe on a bearskin rug. He'll have saved her from drowning, I think."

"Very sexy." Isaac was laughing now, a full-throated sound much louder and much more pleasing than his low chuckle.

"Very," Isabella affirmed. Then, giving a groan, she hid her face in her arms. The next words were muffled by her sweater. "Only I can't settle on what he looks like. Normally that's not a problem for me. I've got the grey-blue eyes, but the rest - ugh. Can't do it. This guy is giving me trouble. Hence the mask."

"Just make him look like some hot celebrity." Isaac sounded smug.

"Wow, Isaac. Hadn't thought of that. Maybe you should get into this business. You seem to know everything about it," said Isabella. She lifted her head and gave Isaac the full force of her overtly sarcastic glare. He was grinning as she went on. 

"Some random celebrity?" she said, raising her eyebrows. She shook her head. "Not a chance. He has to be sexy to me, otherwise I can't write him. He also has to be universally appealing. Vaguely hot, so anyone can imagine whoever they want as their leading man. So Jenny the stay-at-home mom can imagine the hot delivery boy fingering her on a bearskin rug."

Isaac's face twisted in disgust for a moment, but then he smiled. It was an impish expression. "You could make him look like me," he suggested.

"I could, but then I'd be writing sex scenes imagining my brother fucking someone," Isabella explained. "I think I'll pass on that one, Isaac."

"Don't say I didn't try to help," said Isaac. Then he smiled and patted her on the shoulder. "You'll get past the writer's block, sis. You'll churn out another trashy story and make lots more trashy money."

"Thanks," said Isabella. She leaned her head against Isaac's arm. When he dropped to his knees to hug her she felt very warm. "I love you, you know."

"Love you, too," he said. He looked at her and then he smirked. "Love your piles of money even more."

Isabella shoved him off of her as she got up. "Leech," she accused, as she went into the next room. Isaac got up and followed her.

"But I'm a cute leech," he said, and pouted.

"Not to me, little brother," she said, mentally remarking on how it was a bit strange to call a six-foot-three man "little", regardless of the fact that he was four years younger than her. "Hey, I need to get out of the house. Get some fresh air. I'm going to drive into town and buy some groceries. Coming with?"

"Nah," said Isaac. He collapsed onto a sofa and looked up at her.

"Lazy leech," she told him. She was rooting through her purse, looking for a shopping bag. She found three.

"You bet. Pick me up some beer, while you're there?" he asked, giving a stretch. He had reached into his pocket and fished out his phone, and wasn't even looking at her as he asked.

"Definitely not," said Isabella. She didn't mean it. She was definitely going to the liquor store to replenish her stocks. She needed scotch, and she didn't mind beer, either.

She gathered up her coat, shoved a scarf somewhere in the direction of her neck, and banged out the screen door. It was cool out, and misty. It was a beautiful day, though Isabella was finding it hard to enjoy it. She overused mist and damp fall days in every one of her stories.

She got into her car, tossed her purse, onto the seat, and then backed all the way down the narrow drive. Making a three-point turn onto the lane, she was off. 

The drive into town was reasonably short, thirty seconds down her winding drive, ten down the country lane, seven minutes along the hilly gravel road, and then twenty minutes down the highway into town.

 It was too long to Isabella, however. She found herself in a mood even shittier than the quality of her novels as she wound along the highway. The beauty of the mist stealing along the tops of the trees and the glory of the leaves in red, orange, and yellow did nothing to make her feel better.

At one point, she spotted a raven perched on a telephone wire. She slammed her hand against the steering wheel. Her back complained at the assault.

"Is that some sort of fucking omen?" she half-yelled as she went by. "Fuck off!"

The raven didn't move. In her rearview mirror, she could see that it hadn't even turned its head. It was as useless as her own Raven, then.

Isabella wasn't in the best of tempers as she slowed, cruising into town. The sign welcomed her - "Welcome to Wellington, enjoy your time in our little home!" - but she felt the furthest thing from welcomed imaginable. Especially when she, pulling into the grocery store parking lot, found the spot she had been making for taken by some dipshit in an SUV.

He cut in front her and slipped into it, then got out of his car and leered at her.

"Asshole," she muttered under her breath, because even she wasn't stupid enough to pick a fight with some tattooed local. "I see you, asshole. I am going to write you into Black Heart, asshole. You're going to die messily. Everyone is going to hate you, asshole."

She found another spot, got out of the car, and slammed the door with far more force than necessary. Then she hitched her purse over her shoulder, retrieved a shopping cart from the entrance to the store, and rattled her way through the automatic doors.

The cart had a very dodgy wheel, and so Isabella had to lean her whole weight against the left side when she wanted to turn the damn thing. It reminded her distinctly of a car she'd had before she'd sold any novels and could afford a better one.

"Okay, groceries," she muttered aloud to herself. Someone looked at her and scoffed. She couldn't blame them. Big city type, blonde, muttering to herself as she grumpily perused the vegetables. She wanted to scoff at herself, too.

Isabella pushed her groaning, whining cart through the aisles as she picked up vegetables, fruit, a block of cheese, and two loaves of bread. The cart began to stall, however, three-quarters of the way down the cereal aisle.

"Oh, come on," she snapped, kicking the offending wheel. "This is the last thing I have to buy. You can't make it that far? Come on, come on, come on!"

She shoved resolutely at the cart. It didn't move. She shoved at it again. 

"Be that way," she snarled, and marched over to the cereal she wanted, selected three boxes, and then dumped them in the cart. She kicked at the cart again, this time aiming her blow a little above the jammed wheel.

She misjudged what the it would do. Her grocery cart suddenly decided to move, its wheel unjammed, and it went careening into a display stand of cereal boxes piled in an eight-foot high house of cards. She pitied the poor employee who had spent an hour setting it up, and she pitied the man now buried in cereal boxes on the other side.

"Oh, Jesus," she said, letting go of the offending cart. She waded through boxes and over to the man beginning to fish them out of his own cart. She grabbed two and began to help him. "I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry."

"It's all right," he assured her. His voice was low, measured, and overwhelmingly masculine. Like the sound a fine scotch would make if it could talk - a hint of a growl, a smooth purr, and just enough sex appeal to liquify any straight woman's insides. "I did this last week. They nearly threw me out of the store."

They went for the same box of cereal and then he looked up at her. She recognized him. She had seen the black-and-white photo on the back of too many novels not to recognize him. He was just as good-looking in person. Better, maybe. How was that possible? 

"I know you," she said, taking in - and cataloguing - the blue-grey eyes, the reddish-brown, grey-streaked waves of his hair, the two days' stubble. He looked like he'd walked out of one of her novels, not like he should be on the back of one of his own. Then she fumbled with her words and went on. "I mean, we haven't met, but I know you."

He cocked his head and smiled. Isabella felt phenomenally stupid. "I know you, too," he said. That surprised her a little - someone as famous and as well-established as him knowing her, a newcomer? It flattered her, in a sort of guilty way.

"John Steele," she said to him. He smiled again and inclined his head. He was too famous in her business not to recognize. John Steele, crime writer, who had sold hundreds of millions of copies and published over a hundred novels.

"That's me," he explained. Then he smiled and went on. "And you're Miss Isabella Winter."

"Unfortunately," she said. She took his hand when he extended it. It was very warm and slightly calloused. "My brother's a big fan of your work."

"My condolences, then," he said, and grimaced in a very pleasing display of charming but seemingly genuine self-deprecation. "He obviously has very poor taste."

Isabella laughed. "I don't think he'd agree."

"Well, he'd be wrong, then. My mother is very fond of your work, by the way," John added.

"Ah. My condolences, then," she said, mimicking his tone. She meant it, too. Anyone who genuinely enjoyed her work was to be pitied. "She obviously has very poor taste. I write very shitty romance novels."

John chuckled. "And I write very shitty crime novels. I understand your sentiments."

"Nice to meet someone who understands," Isabella said. Her mood had shifted from miserable to excited so fast her head was spinning. Either that or it was the immediate presence of the esteemed John Steele, whose smile was so transfixing Isabella thought she'd have to work very hard to write one more charming.

He smiled again - Isabella suddenly pitied her characters, was this what it was like, being such a fuzzy-headed dope around a handsome man? She didn't want to find out - and looked down.

"Well," he said, and then he looked up again. Isabella noticed, all of a sudden, that John smelled nice. She didn't want to know which part of her brain decided to investigate that, unless it was to punch said part. "You don't often meet someone who does. Only fans - who, bless their hearts, are as foolish in their tastes-"

"As they are with their money," Isabella finished.

John conceded that was the truth with a little inclination of his head and a smile. "Oh, and let's not forget the agents, who badger you day and night for book signings and film rights and a raise for doing fuck all-" said Isabella.

"And editors, who wouldn't give you the time of day until you got out of their slush pile, but now harass you endlessly for chapters," John added.

"It's hell, really," said Isabella, with a sarcastic, melodramatic sigh.

"But it certainly does have its benefits," said John. 

Isabella smiled. They were silent for a moment. Isabella wasn't sure what to say, a bit nervous around someone so famous and so handsome as John Steele. She was just considering how to make her exit from the presence of the man currently making her blush a very deep scarlet when said man spoke.

"This might seem presumptuous, since we only just met," he began, and Isabella was eager to hear that presumption. "But I'm at a bit of a roadblock with my current novel. Came up here to write and focus, but I still can't get going with it. I'd love to pick the brains of someone who actually understands the business. And not an agent, or an editor. Someone who's on my side of the fence."

Isabella realized he meant her. "It would be my pleasure," she said. "And I'm at a bit of a roadblock with my current novel, too. I'd love to have the input of someone who understands the process."

John smiled. "It's a date, then," he said. He looked like he was going to go on, but a horrified sound interrupted them.

"Not again!" came an agonized cry from beside them.

Isabella and John looked over. A teenage boy, uniformed, and looking distraught, was pointing with utter despair at the cereal box carnage. "Do you know how long I spent setting that up?"

John cocked a smile at Isabella.