Say, Kids!
It’s been a bit of a whirlwind year for me, what with finishing off my PhD and having A Basic Renovation published and finally getting those red cowboy boots I always wanted. The year’s not even halfway in and I can announce I have another book coming out. For Your Eyes Only drops in September from Escape Publishing.
Like ABR, with For Your Eyes Only  I’m offering readers another bite of grown ups falling in love in The Atomic City, but this time I toss in a bit of mystery with some of the laughs. Here’s a little glimpse of stocking:

“Are you trying to turn this into an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours thing?” Willa put her hands on her hips.

“Now do I look like the kind of idiot who’d do that?” His chin settled on the back of the hand he had resting on the window ledge.

“Hm. I don’t know. Idiots come in all shapes and sizes. Just look at me standing out here in the cold.”

“I am looking at you.”

“And what big eyes you have.”

“Are you insinuating I’m a wolf and this is some kind of fairy tale?”

Willa shook her head. “There’re a couple of other things I don’t believe in besides coincidence; fairy tales and happy endings.”

“Come on. Everyone loves a happy ending. Think of When Harry Met Sally, Bringing Up Baby, Gone With the Wind.”

“Gone With the Wind does not have a happy ending. Rhett leaves Scarlett.”

“All right, but they had the cute meeting. So did we. Now you’re standing in the snow with rosy cheeks. How romantic is that?”

“It’d be better if you were the one out here freezing.”

“You have me on that too. So how should I finish? How cheesy and trite should I get? How far do you want to take this little romantic comedy I think we’ve started?”

Willa sighed. Yes, it was a bit romantic, a little funny, and it felt wonderful, but she had more important things to tend to than effervescent chemistry. This cute little comedy was already over. “I have to clean out my gutters, shampoo my hair, and have a root canal.”

“What a coincidence. So do I.”

“No, seriously,” she moved her hand through the falling snow, “I’m passing through town and I have to be someplace by two. I don’t have time to fool around.”

He lifted his chin and sat up. “Fool around? Wait a minute. I wasn’t making a sleazy suggestion.”

“Weren’t you?”

His left eyebrow arched. “Is it the beard? Does it really make me look like the seedy type who’d suggest we get a room at some cheap motel for an hour?”

The rush of heat nearly made her knees buckle and Willa actually considered the idea of a cheap motel. An hour, yes, an hour with those electric hands and that warm body on top of me, pushing me up against the wall, pushing inside me instead of a ghost or a faded memory or my own hands.

Then she remembered the job and why she’d said yes to taking it.

Cold dread edged out the warmth that had begun to spread though her body. The fantasy of a dirty sixty minutes of carnal pleasure dissolved like the snowflakes falling on her coat.

She gave Uncle John a little smile. “Rather than telling you what I really think of your hairstyle and that ridiculous grin you’re wearing, this is where we do a simple fade to black.” Willa took a couple of steps backwards and opened the driver’s side. “You have a nice life.”

“Wait a minute. This is not how romantic comedies end.”

“Then maybe we should consider this a bittersweet love story of what might have been.”

John watched her climb into her car. “Yeah. An hour wouldn’t have been enough for me either,” he muttered to himself as she shut the door.