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GEMMA
May 2025

Chemistry is an invisible spark that won’t burn out even when you want it to. It’s not like a fire you build with broken sticks and light with a match, dutifully feeding the flames until one day you decide to stop, the bright fury fading into glowing embers as it gradually gives way to the dark. No, chemistry starts quickly and burns hot and fast, like the wildfires that rage across Southern California in the brittle desert heat. A live wire of electricity that doesn’t stop until it’s destroyed everything in its path. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of hurried people are milling around LAX this morning, tired travelers clutching large coffees and jockeying for open seats near gate 34B. When James Hayes locked eyes with me, I should have known this is how it would feel. That summer came rushing back in a flash flood, like watercolors dripping down the slope of an upright canvas.

“Gemma?”

My body responds on instinct, the way it always used to. The finality of our last conversation invades my mind like it was only yesterday, a bolt of white-hot adrenaline spiking through my heart the moment he says my name. Immediately I’m sweaty, my lower back sticking to my undershirt like a juvenile habit I should have grown out of by now. I haven’t been in the same room as this asshole in almost six years, but his shit-eating grin still has the power to stop traffic. His mischievous gaze is locked on mine as I approach, my heart rate pitching up to five hundred miles per hour, cruising at forty thousand feet. I’ve never been able to forget the exact shade of his mercurial, gray-green eyes. They could never commit to being one solid color.

“Holy shit,” James says, jumping to his feet as he pulls me in for a hug. He still wears the same infuriatingly alluring cologne—sandalwood and citrus with base notes of narcissism—and I breathe him in for just a second too long. Nostalgia punches me low in the gut as I wrestle out of his grip. James sticks his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels, grinning as he looks me up and down, the same way he always used to that summer. Before we ever.