Trade Me (Cyclone 1)

Definitely—whatever you do, kids—do not do drugs. They can lead you to the pinnacle of the world. They can give you everything. But beware, because…because…because…

Yeah, that’s ringing a little hollow, isn’t it?

So let’s stop with the pretense and tell kids the truth.

Hey, kids. Drugs are like every other risk you could take in life. For instance, you could save your money, get a loan that you’ll have to personally guarantee, and start your own business. If you do, chances are—sorry, kids—you’ll fail. Yeah, I started my own business in my parents’ garage at nineteen. But my parents backed me with three hundred grand, and that might have had something to do with my subsequent success.

You? You’d never get out of the garage.

You could go to college. Go ahead, kids. Take on a hundred grand in debt. Graduate. And then ask yourself why the kid in your class whose parents paid for everything has a better job than you, advances faster, goes further. Watch him 20 years later—the year you’re making the final payment on your own education, when your kid is signing up for a million bucks in educational loans (gotta love inflation, kids—it will never be on your side), and his kid is going to school with everything paid for.

Drugs are like everything else in life: they’re a roulette wheel that is slanted precipitously towards those of us who are already predisposed to win. We have golden tickets, and everything we do turns out all right.

So here’s the truth, kids. If you’re not already winning, don’t do drugs. They’ll eat you up and spit you out. You won’t win the Tour de France. You won’t make a hundred and ninety billion dollars. You’ll lose. And when you lose, it won’t be at the petty cost of a few days spent in the hospital. You won’t suffer through an embarrassing interview with one of the most powerful women in the world.

You’ll lose everything and nobody will even notice. Your tickets are aluminum. You weren’t born holding gold, and chances are, you’ll never touch it.

Now, as it turns out, I promised to write a soul-searching opinion piece telling people not to do drugs. But let’s face it. Drugs aren’t—and have never been—the real problem. (Except for heroin. Nobody ever accomplished anything on heroin, not even with a golden ticket, so kids, if you have any sense at all you will leave that crap right where you found it.)

And so I have to question the utility of browbeating small children about using drugs. I think that instead of telling them what they should do, I should let them tell me.

Here I am, holding this ticket made of gold. It bought me the world. If I wanted to, I could keep cashing it in for a higher score. It’s a little tarnished, yes—but gold is gold.

Given everything I’ve just told you, kids, what do you think I should be doing?

Adam Reynolds announced his permanent retirement as CEO of Cyclone Systems early this morning. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.

Hold Me: Excerpt

Liked this excerpt? You can find out more about Hold Me here.

Other Books by Courtney

The Cyclone Series

Trade Me

Hold Me

Find Me

Courtney’s historical romances

The Worth Saga

Once Upon a Marquess

Her Every Wish

After the Wedding

The Devil Comes Courting

The Brothers Sinister Series

The Governess Affair

The Duchess War

A Kiss for Midwinter

The Heiress Effect

The Countess Conspiracy

The Suffragette Scandal

Talk Sweetly to Me

The Turner Series

Unveiled

Unlocked

Unclaimed

Unraveled

Not in any series

A Right Honorable Gentleman

What Happened at Midnight

The Lady Always Wins

The Carhart Series

This Wicked Gift

Proof by Seduction

Trial by Desire

Author’s Note

The ideas that formed the backbone of this book go way, way back with me.

When I first consciously had the idea for this book, I realized that in order to make the premise work, I would need to have a huge company—the kind of company that had a market capitalization of several hundred billion dollars. As you can imagine, companies that meet that criterion are few in number: Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Google… There are more, of course, but it’s just not a very large list, all things considered.

Add in that the plot also required the company to be run by someone (or, rather, someones) who had acquired something of a cult of personality, and the number of similar companies gets even smaller.

And so I want to go on the record as saying that despite the inevitable comparisons that will be drawn, I really, really, did not set out to make Cyclone sound so much like Apple. When I first got the idea for this book, it was sometime in early 2013. Apple had not yet announced a smartwatch, and while there were rumors, they were distant rumors.

I said in the beginning that any similarities are coincidental. A more accurate statement is probably that the similarities that do exist are the result of the dictates of reality. There are only so many believable ways to set up a company that large, and even fewer to have one that is dominated by a particular personality. Adam Reynolds is my own invention. He’s not supposed to be a stand-in for any particular CEO, and to the extent that he has traits that may remind you of someone (dropping out of college, for instance), those are traits that are widely shared (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg) by multiple entrepreneurs.

I invented the fundamental traits of Fernanda/the Cyclone Vortex before Apple announced their own smartwatch. I, personally, would rather own a Vortex (sorry, Apple!) but then, I have the benefit of being able to make things up without having to solve any engineering difficulties.

I made up the details of Fernanda on my own. But as completely awesome as Blake’s car may sound, I did not make up anything about it. It’s all true. The car is quiet. The handles extend out toward you. It turns on automatically when you sit in it. I could add several hundred other details. I test-drove a Tesla to get a feel for it, and this was a dangerous thing to do. I had to actively restrain myself from turning this book into a Tesla love-fest. A friend of mine told me I should ask Elon Musk to sponsor the book, and I considered pitching the idea for about two seconds, which is two seconds longer than I have ever considered any potential sponsorship idea before. (This book is not sponsored by Tesla Motors.) (I have no desire to ever have my books sponsored by any corporations, whether real or imaginary.)

If I had 1.4 billion dollars, I would absolutely buy a Tesla. (You don’t need 1.4 billion dollars.)

I say I got the idea for this book in 2013, but there are aspects of it that have been around for longer.

I don’t discuss the precise contours of Blake’s eating disorder in the book, mainly because this is not a book about eating disorders; it’s a book where a character happens to have one. But for those who are wondering, Blake is not anorexic: He’s not obsessed with either his weight or his figure. And his particular eating disorder has a different presentation than anorexia normally would.

I got the idea for an athletic protagonist with an eating disorder in late 2012, when I was reading Tyler Hamilton’s The Secret Race. The book talks a great deal about the Tour de France and the many ways that athletes attempted to win. Obviously, much of it is given over to a discussion of Lance Armstrong. But he also talks about weight. At one point in the book, he states, quite plainly, that he thought all the cyclists around had eating disorders. This stuck in my head, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since.

Eating disorders in male athletes are not well understood. For female athletes, there has been a lot of research on what is called the Female Athlete Triad, an eating disorder that arises when an a

thlete (typically an endurance athlete) does not take in enough food to cover her training. This often results in a loss of bone mass, a reduction or even a cessation in menstrual periods, and other energy deficiencies. Overtraining in this way does not always result in significant weight loss—that’s why it’s a little harder to detect.