Trust Me on This - Jennifer Crusie [0]
Trust Me On This, originally published in 1997, is the only screwball comedy I’ve ever written. Wikipedia says that screwball comedy is “a combination of slapstick with fast-paced repartee, and a plot involving courtship and marriage [and] mistaken identities or other circumstances in which a character or characters try to keep some important fact a secret.” Yep, that’s Trust Me On This. Doors are slammed, identities are mistaken, drinks are spilled along with secrets, and everybody has an angle. Writing it made me feel like that guy who used to spin plates on TV: I had so many story lines rotating frantically in the air that it was a miracle nothing broke. But like in any good screwball comedy, the heart of the story is the romance, and that was solid and sure. Dennie and Alec may not have planned on each other or on any of the other things that go so wrong during one fast-paced weekend, but they’re good at adapting and even better at falling in love. I had so much fun spinning those plates in Trust Me On This, and now I’m hoping you’ll have as much fun reading it.
Jenny Crusie
Bantam Books by Jennifer Crusie
The Cinderella Deal
Trust Me on This
Trust Me on This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2010 Bantam Books Mass Market Edition
Copyright © 1997 by Jennifer Crusie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1997.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90797-1
www.bantamdell.com
v3.1_r1
For Ruth Flinn Smith,
sweet, smart, funny, kind, loyal, and loving,
my sister-in-law who became my sister,
and the best present my brother ever gave me
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Excerpt from The Cinderella Deal
Chapter 1
Four Fabulous Days!
Three Glorious Nights!
Join the 4th Annual Popular
Literature Conference at the
Historic Riverbend Queen Hotel!!!
April 7, 8, 9, & 10
Your Life Will Never Be the Same!!!
Victoria Prentice found the card as she sorted through her mail and stood transfixed by the tackiness of it. It wasn’t the first time she’d been disgusted by academic stupidity in the forty years she’d been teaching college students, but it was the first time she’d been both disgusted and involved. She’d agreed to deliver a paper at this circus so she could spend some time with her friend Janice, but she wouldn’t have if she’d known that this was how they were going to publicize it. The card promised everything except live girls and free drinks. Well, there went her reputation as a scholar. What were the idiots thinking of? It was all very well to take a stand against academic rigidity, but shilling a lit conference as if it were Club Med—
She stopped, appalled by the fussiness of her own thoughts. A lifetime of independence and freethinking, and what did she have to show for it? She was sixty-two years old and petrifying as she stood there. I’m getting old, she thought. Old in mind. That’s a terrible thing. She’d spent too much of her life arguing over dead authors and dead literature, playing it safe, and now she was sneering at something lively. Getting smug. Isolated. Victoria felt a twinge of something like dissatisfaction and shrugged it off.
She was not dissatisfied. She’d worked damn hard to get where she was, and she’d loved every minute of it. No, her life was fine, she just needed a jump start, a change of pace, to be with somebody who