RELEASE DAY!

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!

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