The Frame-Up (The Golden Arrow #1)

by Meghan Scott Molin

Just stare at my boobs and get it over with, like every guy at every convention I’ve ever attended. I can never just live my life; I have to be boobs first, comic book writer second—if a guy even gets that far. I get weary of being a novelty in my world.

I’m running late for the office, and I need time to let the coffee soak up some of my morning grump.

Cue the disbelieving stare when man realizes woman has read comic books . . . and there it is.

a distinct possibility, seeing as LA fuels itself on broken dreams and hypocrisy.

I’m surprised when an arm reaches out to hold it open. I don’t even need to look to know that it’s Herbal Tea Guy. Usually the Muggles aren’t this tenacious.

I throw the ball even harder against the wall of my office. To be more specific, the half-height modular wall that separates my working pod from Simon’s. It’s supposed to foster creative collaboration, but it just allows us to annoy the living daylights out of each other.

I can’t say I’m always proud of my antics, but being the only woman in this office, I sometimes stoop to their level of boyish tactics.

“I brought you a coffee. Cinnamon dolce latte.” He offers it to me like an olive branch. My eyebrows shoot up, and my traitorous hand sneaks out to take the cup. Caffeine is my body’s drug of choice, and it seems he’s found my weakness. And remembered my order.

He’s muttering about how I should just leave the past alone again, but I can tell he’s a little glad we talked today. It takes a really good friend to dredge up your former life drama and maybe relieve a bit of misplaced decades-old guilt.

“Am I interrupting?” he asks, trying to allow me room on the porch and failing miserably. His shoulders look the “lean and fit” type, but right now they feel like the “huge and hulking” variety.

We’re back to silence. “A Prius, huh?” I look around the neat interior. Like brand-new off-the-lot clean. “I don’t actually think someone is running around in a cape,” he says, his eyes still on the road. “And yes. A Prius. It gets good gas mileage.” “So does my bike,” I say, looking out the window.

“You’re really something,” he says. It doesn’t sound like an insult, so I accept it as a compliment. Usually people say that to mean that I’m too much—too colorful, too passionate, too smart, too dramatic, too sarcastic. It’s what people say when they don’t know how to categorize me, as if I should just fit into the social box of a woman who wants a picket fence and two kids, just like my mom.

I know from my failed attempts at dating that even when people say they are okay with my dyed hair and career choice, they usually aren’t. After my last disastrous breakup, I decided I was going to stop letting other people’s expectations bring me down. I was going to be full-tilt me, come hell or high water. I’d colored my hair a bright pink, the most shocking color I could imagine for my mother, to signify my dedication to being nontraditional and never looked back. Instead of being intimidated, Matteo seems genuinely . . . charmed by my quirks. It’s been years since I’ve felt charming instead of like a spectacle. Charming is a nice change.

Time to nip this in the bud. I don’t have time to play the star-crossed lover or the lovely maiden or look like anything less than one of the guys in this office when I am up for a promotion. I work too damn hard to have it undermined by a man who drives a Prius.

And dammit if there isn’t a smile lurking in his eyes. This man is thoroughly enjoying watching me sputter. This man has my head spinning so fast, I’m losing track of what I’m reacting to.

“You’re so different when you talk about this. Like The Hooded Falcon is real to you.” That irks me more than anything else he could have said.

Why does everyone assume I can’t tell reality from fiction when it’s my job to write?

I’m never anything but polished and together. Especially for a meeting with the main executives of Genius. It’s what I do. It’s who I am at work. Show no weakness, give no quarter, prove women are up to all tasks, not just getting coffee. Except this morning.

I won this round . . . well, not really won but avoided catastrophe.

I love and hate how familiar my name sounds on his lips, as if we’ve known each other for years and it’s normal for me to be interrogated on my lunch hour for funsies.

It’s everything I don’t want in a relationship. I want depth, breadth. I want messy and colorful. I want sitting on a couch and watching Star Wars, not sitting at a fancy dinner with sixteen forks.

I’m hoping the “greater good” works out better for me than for Dumbledore.

I definitely have been dating the wrong people if clean clothes are a turn-on.

He closes rank behind me and blocks Matteo in the entryway. He’s still smirking, but now he and Lawrence remind me strongly of two big brothers; I’m more than mortified.

“So you’re saying that you’re a comic book writer, have purple hair and a million inside jokes from movies and books I’ve never seen or read, and that your dog was a plain ol’ box for Halloween?” “I thought it was funny.” I’m defensive now, and not a little put out. “It is funny. You just keep surprising me is all.” His face is warm, open, and inarguably magnetic right now.

I’d rather have him rifling through my underwear. My drawings are private.

“You have so many talents. So many skills. You can smell a story a mile away. Fastest brain this side of the galaxy. But maybe this isn’t your superpower. Maybe you’re not General Leia.

Usually I am repelled by the thought of dating an adult. I picture being a grown-up as stuffy, no room for play, fun, or color in life. It’s “go to the office, kiss wife on cheek, read the news, go to bed, repeat until you die,” as modeled by my parents. But Matteo . . . His version of adult is different. It’s polished, sophisticated, and sure, he owns more than one pair of shoes and a couch made from something other than plastic, but he seems alive still.

There haven’t been a pair of shoes that could sit next to mine in a doorway for more than a few months.

Kyle sucks in a breath. “You’ve never seen Star Wars? Like, ever?” “Never seen them, no. Is that bad?” Matteo has failed his entrance exam to my world. Never seen Star Wars.

I haven’t watched Star Wars without a liberal dose of cynicism since I was ten years old. But something funny begins to happen when we start A New Hope. The words scrawl across the screen, and Matteo reads them out loud, and a shiver runs down my spine. This whole universe is about to be opened up to him, and I’m the one who gets to introduce him to the marvels of the Millennium Falcon. And R2-D2. And I’m seriously hoping this is the old cut with the non-remastered Jabba. I realize I’m giddy. It feels magical. Like the first time I saw them myself and got caught up in the wonder of it all, instead of wondering where the stormtroopers got so much PVC to make their armor in space.

My own universe expands a smidge.

The heat between us isn’t make-believe. In this moment it’s real and palpable. Our gazes lock in the slowly waning afternoon light. It’s the first moment that I know for certain he feels this crazy pull too. The crazy pull that we can’t do anything about because we’re solving a crime together.

Sometimes glitter and men in drag are exactly what a girl needs to be set right again.

I’m

letting the story lead me, not the facts. Exactly how I write my comics. I get a nugget, a vision, then chase that story down its own path. I don’t try to box it in. I’m open to wherever it wants to lead.

I’m a brain-ninja to find this.

I need to be a rulebreaker. A vigilante hero of my very own. I am the Han frickin’ Solo of my destiny now.

I’ve seen a stiletto go straight through a foot.” A strangled noise escapes his lips, half pain, half laugh. Matteo scoots back in surprise, eyes wide as he looks down at me. “Only you would use fashion as a weapon, Michael-Grace Martin.

“I shouldn’t get you involved.” “Honey, that’s what real family is. They’re the people you call when the bodies pile up.”

No way out but through. Sometimes you just have to go into the fight and throw a lot of elbows.

I spent so much time pushing people away because they didn’t fit what I was looking for, and in the end what I needed was someone to bring me out of my prejudices. Open my eyes to the world. To realize that the perfect person will support my fashion design, my wacky hair, my comics, my job, because those things are all a part of me.