Desperate to protect his anonymity, Max challenges Eden to give him three dates. If she doesn't fall totally in love with him, she can run her story with his blessing. However, if she succumbs to his charms, the story dies.
Eden is confident she can resist Max's tacky, make-believe personas, but when a traumatic night leads them back to his apartment and she gets to know the man beneath the facade, her story takes on a whole other twist; one in which her heart will have the final say as to whether she chooses a career-making tell-all, or the fascinating man with the mysterious past.
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The first time I hear the term ‘Mr. Romance’, I’m convinced my sweet-but-naive baby sister has been duped into believing yet another urban legend.
I stop filling the coffee maker and turn to Asha, who’s sitting at the breakfast bar in our cozy apartment, looking way too put together for six a.m. on a Monday morning.
“You’re telling me that you can hire a man to make your wildest romantic fantasies come to life, Ash? Come on. There’s no way that’s a thing.”
“It’s true!” she insists. “Joanna was dishing the dirt in the break room at work. She overheard a whole bunch of women talking about him at some thousand-dollar-a-ticket charity event on the weekend.”
“What the hell was Joanna the secretary doing at that kind of event?”
“Her cousin is related to some obscure Latvian royalty or something. The crown prince’s limo broke down on the way in from the airport, so Joanna was invited at the last minute to take his ticket.”
I give my sister a deadpan look. “Latvian royalty. Of course. Makes perfect sense.”
My sister works at a publishing house, and even though I haven’t met all of her co-workers, the ones I have met are definitely on the strange side of quirky.
“Isn’t Joanna the compulsive liar?” I ask.
“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know stuff. She overheard a handful of women talking about this God-like uber-stud. One of them claimed one date with him cured her depression. Another said he saved her marriage, because until he unlocked her libido, she’d forgotten how much she enjoyed sex. This whole gaggle of women thinks he’s their romantic savior. Jill-off Jesus, or whatever.”
I shake my head and watch as coffee dribbles through the filter. Always the more imaginative out of the two of us, Asha has inherited all of my mother’s blind optimism, but zero common sense.
“So what you’re telling me,” I say as I pour two cups of fresh Joe. “Is that this mythical man-beast about whom Pants-On-Fire-Joanna was raving, is some kind of … what? Superhero gigolo?”
“He’s an escort,” Asha clarifies.
“Isn’t that just a dressed up label for man-whore?”
“No. He doesn’t have sex with his clients.”
“You just told me he did.”
“No, I said he makes their romantic fantasies come to life.”
“And that doesn’t include sex?”
“No.”
I screw up my face. “Doesn’t sound very romantic to me. A guy who doesn’t want to sleep with me? I can get that for free.”