Free Steal Me by Lauren Layne Page B

hands shoved in his coat pockets as he watched her from several feet away.
    And despite her bad mood, Maggie might have smiled. Just a little bit.

Chapter Nine
    M aggie had writer’s block.
    She never had writer’s block. A little stumped on a plot twist, sure. Perplexed by what the heck her characters were thinking, definitely.
    But this bone-deep inability to put words— any words—on the page was new. And unwelcome.
    “What’s the point of a day off if I can’t write more than a crappy sentence about the weather?” Maggie asked her dog.
    Duchess placed her snout on Maggie’s leg, and Maggie absently handed the dog the other half of the chip she’d been nibbling on.
    She glared at the blank screen. Grabbed another corn chip and nibbled the corner as she waited for her heroine to tell her all the ways in which she was devastated because Colin had asked Stacey to the prom instead of her.
    Duchess’s snout returned to Maggie’s knee and Maggie glanced down, happy for the distraction. “No more chips, sweetie. You have kibble in your bowl.”
    The dog’s brown eyes were mournful. Kibble sucks.
    Maggie rubbed Duchess’s ear. “Okay fine, one more…but no salsa. Mostly because I forgot to buy any.”
    She could have been having cheesy scrambled eggs for dinner, but she’d finished off her egg supply last night instead of the yummy leftovers she’d been counting on.
    Leftovers that had been delivered straight to the Dumpster after a certain tall, dark-haired police captain had scared the crap out of her and made her drop everything.
    Of course, losing last night’s dinner to the Dumpster wasn’t really what was bothering her.
    You and me? That’s preposterous.
    Maggie slumped back in her chair, annoyed that Anthony’s words kept circling around and around in her head.
    “You know what’s annoying as heck?” she asked, running a finger down Duchess’s snout. “That a cop born and raised in Staten Island throws around words like preposterous . Like he’s freaking Sherlock Holmes or something.”
    The next words in the captain’s vicious little put-down blindsided her, because she’d been trying all day to block it out.
    Vin?…There is no way he’d be interested.
    Ouch. Ouch .
    Maggie blinked against the sudden sting of tears. It’s not like she even wanted to date Vincent Moretti. Or any Moretti.
    But that disdain on Anthony’s face…the combination of shock and revulsion that his exalted family would ever lower themselves to the likes of her…
    She couldn’t get his expression out of her head. It was as though he saw her. Not the Maggie she tried so hard to be; the smiling, sweet, ever-cheerful diner waitress. It was like he saw the Maggie Walker she’d been before she’d met Eddie—pathetic, timid, and weak.
    Even worse, she feared Anthony Moretti could see her as she’d been while she was with Eddie—submissive and gullible, a mere shadow of a person.
    Why else was he so disgusted with her simply for existing ?
    Maggie gave Duchess’s head one last pet and then forced her fingers to the keyboard, realizing that maybe she could get in her character’s head after all.
    Jenny, her teenage heroine, was feeling rejected.
    And Maggie knew a little something about that…
    An hour later, Maggie had added twelve hundred words. “Not bad, Duchess. Not bad at all. Shall we head to the freezer? The writing muse is demanding cookie dough.”
    Living alone could get lonely, but it had its benefits.
    Say, like eating ice cream straight out of the carton with nobody to judge.
    From her nightstand, Maggie’s phone chirped with a text message. She leaned against the counter, crossing her ankles as she eyed the device across the room and slurped a chunk of cookie dough off her spoon.
    Ignoring the phone was tempting. These days, it was bound to be one of three people, and Gabby was the only one of the three she wanted to hear from.
    The others were her father and brother. Her father wasn’t supposed