On the weekends, we eat out a lot. Dinner Friday night through breakfast on Sunday morning, generally. While it’s nice to think it’s because my husband wants me to have weekends off, it’s actually more like he wants “real” meals that taste good at least a couple of times a week.

Very often, sitting around the restaurant, the Tall Kid and I will commence plotting. It’s always a Devlin Group book because he couldn’t care less about my other books. And we use the yeah, but method of plot brainstorming.

What if he…

Yeah, but I did that in the first book.

Well, what if she…

Yeah, but…

What if…

Yeah, but…

And so it goes.

Needless to say, we’re working on DG4 and we yeah, but-ed ourselves a plot and it’s a doozy. A nice, big bad-ass plot with plenty of opportunity for some cool shit.

Yeah, but…

It won’t work and TK just can’t accept the why not of it. I explained to him that, if that plot was happening, Jack would go to ground with the heroine—lockdown in a safe location—while the other guys went after the bad guy. Not so compelling now, is it?

He’s fighting for it. He first argued there was nothing wrong with that because the other guys going after the bad guy would be more exciting. I had to explain—yet again—that in romances, the readers like to actually read the hero and heroine’s story.

Then he tried the “just do it anyway” path, but I just can’t. The reality is that faced with an enemy there’s a good chance they can’t stop, the hero would not go running around with the heroine. They’d put her in a secure location and that would be that until the threat was neutralized.

So now TK’s at it again, trying to find a way to salvage his favorite aspects of our plot while dodging that giant yeah, but… I threw at him.