For the past few months I seem to have
been hogging this blog site, but I promise that this is the end of it for a
while. After today, I quietly move over and let others have their chance.
It’s just that at the moment I’m
having a hard time containing myself because it’s finally official! My debut novel, “Finding You Again,” was
released at noon today. Frankly, having
something like that happen to you is both awesome and more than a little scary.
January 11, a day when some people
who partied too hearty on New Year’s Eve might still be trying to recover,
though of course no one I know (wink, wink).
If anyone is interested in
numerology, it’s also a date that adds up to 8 (1-11-2012 or 1+1+1+2+0+1+2=8). Not sure if that’s a good sign or not, but
for anyone who wants to investigate the subject, expert numerologist Glynis
McCants has a fun and very informative website at
www.numberslady.com.
And if anybody who stops by would
like to have a brief sampling of the book, I’m posting some of it here.
The following excerpt takes place
the day after the hero, Eric Holt, and heroine Maggie Demarco have an encounter
that threatens to become too sexual, until Eric decides it’s a bad idea and
quietly leaves without telling Maggie he’s changed his mind.
So here it is: an excerpt from
“Finding You Again.”
EXCERPT:
“This from the man who left last
night without saying goodbye,” she said, giving him her best you
hypocritical-cad frown. But as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she
could have kicked herself for them. So he talked a good game without following
the rules himself. A lot of people acted that way. It didn’t mean she had to
point it out to him.
And she knew she shouldn’t have.
But somehow that damn unacceptable-modes-of-behavior comment had completely
thrown her. Then she remembered the way she’d been when he left—almost naked,
legs apart, and virtually clinging to the wall for support. Her face flamed at
the memory, and she shook off the hand he still had around her arm.
“Look, forget I said that,” she
told him as they reached the street. “In fact, let’s forget last night ever
happened.”
She turned away, heading in the
opposite direction, hopefully as far from him as she could get, but he caught
her arm again and pulled her back.
“No, let’s not forget. Let’s talk
about it instead.”
“No,” she said, trying to retrieve
her trapped arm and failing.
He let out a groaning sigh, as
though she was acting like an idiot putting up such a stupid fight.
“Into my car, Demarco,” he ordered,
stopping at the corner beside a blue BMW that looked like it belonged to a
junior executive, not a Hell’s Angel.
Maggie stared at it. “If this is a
kidnapping, one good scream from me and the school guards will come running,”
she warned.
He rolled his eyes, clear up to the
top of his head, where she hoped they’d stick. “This is an invitation to dinner.
No kidnapping involved,” he explained. “And while we eat, we can talk.”
She shook her head as his eyes
unfortunately righted themselves. “I’m not hungry.”
Taking a keychain from his pocket,
he unlocked the driver’s-side door and yanked it open. “Then you can watch me
eat.”
“Try not to take this the wrong
way, but watching you masticate is not my idea of the best way to spend an
evening.”
“Not even if I’m masticating...” He
leaned closer, almost in her face. “...grilled chicken and penne pasta with
vodka sauce?”
Maggie stared at him. As dumb as it
was, for one brief moment her love of the meal made her start to reconsider.
“Penne pasta with vodka sauce?”
He nodded. “There’s a wonderful
little Italian restaurant downtown. Armando’s. Best pasta with vodka sauce in
the county. If you play your cards right, I’ll let you smell a forkful.”
The brief moment ended, and she
snorted at the offer as she tried to pull her arm free again. “Don’t do me any
favors.”
“And if you stop fighting me, I’ll
let you have a forkful of your own. Hell, I’ll let you have a whole plateful
of your own, and they use the biggest plates you’ll ever see in any Italian
restaurant.”
Maggie shook her head. “No!”
“No is not an option,” he said as
he pushed her into the driver’s seat and got in after her, forcing her to
squeeze around the center console or else end up sharing the space with him,
the last thing in the world she wanted to do.
Sliding into the passenger seat,
Maggie bit her lip to keep from groaning. The death seat, she thought.
And a perfectly apt image for the turn her life had taken.
“Goodbye,” she told him, reaching
for the door handle on her side.
“Not on your life,” he countered,
pulling her hand away and trapping her against the backrest while he yanked at her
shoulder harness. “God,” he muttered, shaking his head as he buckled her into
it. “You have turned into a major pain in the ass, you know that? Stop
squirming while I’m working on this.”
“I’m a pain in the ass?” she said,
slapping at his hands. “Mister, have you got that backward. You’re the
ass pain. Not that that’s surprising. You were a pain in the ass in high
school, too.”
He stopped fiddling with her
shoulder harness and looked at her, his voice deepening. “Except for that one
night.”
Maggie felt her body heat. He
didn’t have to specify which night that was. The night she’d lost her mind, her
inhibitions and her virginity to the guy with the dark, dark eyes and the hands
that seemed to be everywhere at once: him.
“Right,” she said peevishly. “That
night you were a pain all over me.”
He grinned. “And yet I didn’t hear
you complaining.”
“I was sixteen, for Christ’s sake.
No girl complains when she’s sixteen. We’re all too busy trying to figure out
why what we learned in sex education has nothing in common with what we’re going
through.”
He leaned closer. “I’ve gotten a
lot better since then.”
She leaned farther away. “In your
dreams.”
“Dreams have nothing to do with it.
In the reality of every woman I’ve ever been with.”
“Go with a lot of demented females,
do you?”
“Only the cream of the crop, and
they always act just the way you did that day, like they can’t get enough of
me.”
Maggie narrowed her eyes at him,
astounded at how blithely he tossed the comment out at her. It was unfair and
totally out of bounds. That kind of overconfident bluster wasn’t just dredging
up an ancient memory. It was hitting below the belt, way below the belt. Granted
for that one brief moment (all right, that one brief couple of hours) she’d
lost it a little and been fairly wild. Well, fairly wild for a sexual-novice
sixteen-year-old. It still didn’t mean he had to dig the whole thing up again
and throw it in her face.
“Hey, don’t make it sound like it
was all my fault,” she said. “You’re the one who seduced me, remember?”
All right, now it was his turn to
narrow his eyes and look astounded.
Good,
Maggie thought. He deserved it.
“I seduced you?” he said, eyes
narrowed, astounded expression firmly in place. “Are you insane or just having
a premature senior moment?”
Crap. Her turn again to descend
into astounded, eye-narrowed territory. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you have the memory of an
amnesiac. Either that or you’re in complete denial. And if that’s the case, let
me refresh all the most important moments of that day for you.”
With her finally buckled into the shoulder
harness, he buckled his own harness and settled back comfortably in his seat as
if they were in for a long and detailed recounting of Maggie’s first up-close-and-personal
meeting with the male body in all its wild-and-ready glory.
She watched him warily, knowing that on
some level, despite his put-upon, how-could-you-accuse-me-of-these-things
expression, he was enjoying himself...just a little too much for her comfort,
too.
“Okay, here’s what really
happened,” he said, obviously warming to his version of the story. “We were
driving home after the school football game. Our team had won and we were
really pumped.”
Maggie nodded. So far, so good,
she thought. “Right. And you stopped the car in a secluded place.”
He frowned at her. “What secluded
place? I stopped in the back parking lot of Gino’s Pizza Joint.”
“It was secluded at the time,” she
pointed out victoriously. “Ours was the only car there.”
He sighed. “Of course it was. After
the game, that rainstorm began, so I stopped at Gino’s because it was safer
than driving through a downpour. By that time, all his customers had already
left to get home. That’s why ours was the only car there.”
“And then you came on to me.”
He rolled his eyes. “And then I did
a blow-by-blow reprise of the game. You slumped down next to me on the
passenger seat, frowned, said, ‘Borrriiinnngg!’ and I said, ‘Why? It was a
great game,’ and you said, ‘Yeah, but we just saw it, tell it to somebody who
wasn’t there,’ and I said, ‘Okay, so what do you wanna talk about?’ and you
said, ‘Dunno.’”
Maggie shook her head. “I never
said, ‘Dunno.’ My mom was always into proper speech and grammar. She would’ve
killed me if I said ‘Dunno.’ Hell, that’s why I ended up an English teacher.”
“And then after you said, ‘Dunno,’”
he went on, ignoring her, “I was feeling sort of frustrated, so I looked down
at you and frowned, and you looked up at me with this big grin on your face,
and then...I don’t know...maybe you were amused by my frustration...”
Despite her annoyance with him for
trapping her here, she couldn’t help smiling at that. “You did a really good frustration
back then,” she said. Actually, he still did a really good frustration, and she
was loving it.
“Anyway, I said, ‘Hey, what’s so
funny?’” he continued. “And you said, ‘You,’ and grinned even more and...”
“You got right in my face,” Maggie
murmured.
He nodded. “Big mistake, that,
because you looked so warm and giggly and...I don’t know... sweet.”
She slid lower in her seat, feeling
suddenly hot as the memories washed over her. Long-ago memories were rising up
so powerfully that, against her will, she found herself reacting to them all
over again. “And you said, ‘You have nice eyes,’” she said.
“Nice green eyes,” he
corrected. “Then I leaned over to kiss you, and then you jumped me. So how is that
seduction?”
Maggie sat up straighter again.
“Hey, if you hadn’t kissed me, none of it would have happened. I mean, all that
groping and fondling and pulling off clothes and climbing into the backseat and
everything.”
“You climbed into that
backseat first. Hell, honey, you vaulted over it like you were an Olympic gold
medal winner.”
She glared at him. “You vaulted
over, too,” she reminded him indignantly.
He shrugged. “Had to, or else you
would’ve been back there in your panties and nothing else and I would’ve been up
front getting it on with the automatic transmission while wearing only a pair
of socks.”
She made a face at the image. “What
kind of person would think about making out with part of a car?”
“A seventeen-year-old guy who’d
gotten so horny seeing you in your panties that he had to relieve the pressure
on anything he could find.” He shrugged. “So I followed you over the backseat.
And if your memory is finally coming back, you’ll recall you helped me over by
grabbing my arm...hell, by almost breaking it...when you pulled me across the
backrest
and onto you so we could continue what we
started.”
“Dumbest thing I ever did,” she
said, remembering him all over her, her all over him, both of them doing a damn
thorough job of it, too. Touching,
testing, exploring. And without any shame, just a crazy sense of exhilaration
and discovery.
But it wasn’t something she wanted
to dwell on, especially not now when they were alone and sitting close
together, almost as close as they’d been that rainy night in the car. She
automatically shifted away, not sure if she needed the buffer to protect herself
from him or...she bit her lip, hating to admit it...or the other way around.
And a Happy 2012 to one and all!
It's exciting and also a little frightening to know my first book in the Shadow Soldier series has hit cyberspace shelves. It's like sending a child off to school for the first time; all I can do is wish him well and hope for the best.
