#FridayReads - Breaking the Rules

This is possibly my favorite category romance/romantic suspense of all time. Breaking the Rules from 1994 by the fabulous Barbara Samuel/Barbara O'Neal AKA Ruth Wind.

(Yes, that's my review right at the top of the Amazon page. And yes, I really did buy this book new, off the shelf in Kroger, in 1994 and still have it. The pages are yellow by now.)

Anyone who likes Rafe Collier will probably enjoy Zeke. There are some similarities there. :) And Zeke, in addition to being quite the hottie, is a very well developed character, and very real, unlike many of the millionaire-types you find in category romance.

The ebook is $2.99 on Amazon, if anyone's interested. The cover looks different now, though. This is the one that's on my shelf. The new one has a lake, a dock, and mountains on it.

In other news, the Cutthroat Business mysteries ebook bundle 1-3, consisting of A Cutthroat Business, Hot Property, and Contract Pending, squeaked onto the USA Today list this week, in #149 out of 150. :) So I am now a USA Today bestselling author. Yay, me!

And if Breaking the Rules doesn't float your boat, you could check out this webpage I've started with some friends who write in the same genres I do, in case something there blows your skirt up.

Until next time!

In the city of roses and ruins...

Remember that book I was writing back in the spring, about the timid librarian and the dashing FBI agent? The play-with-it-for-10-days-to-see-how-it-goes-book?

To refresh your memory, I wrote about it HERE and HERE.

Well, it's come full circle, back to me, and now it's coming to you!

Here's the lovely cover:

(And yes, I do think it's lovely. Some folks apparently feel the young man is a little "stiff" - someone even used the word "wooden," I'm sure quite innocently and with no intention of sexual innuendo - but I like it.)

As an aside, it can be very hard to find a royalty-free stock photo with two people who both look reasonably like the people in the book... because I do want them to look reasonably like the characters. It doesn't have to be exact, but if the girl's a blonde and the guy's dark-haired, I do prefer a blonde and a guy with dark hair on the cover. Maybe that's just me.

Carrying on: it's hard enough to find two people of the right age, with roughly the right attributes, but then they have to wear roughly the right clothes too - or clothes at all, really, since you'd be surprised how easy it is to find stock photos of naked people. This isn't that kind of book, though. There's a naked scene, sure, but it's really more a mystery or a suspense than it is a romance.

So they have to look right, they have to be dressed, and the whole atmosphere of the photograph has to be right. In this case, he's an FBI agent - hence the crisp white shirt and business slacks - and she's a librarian (with glasses), hence the timid look on her face. Finding stock photos of girls with glasses in the company of good-looking men is darn near impossible, FYI, so she's not wearing glasses, but they're in her hand. I swear.

And of course it's purple, and I love purple, so as far as I'm concerned, it's all good.

As for the story, it's 62,000 words of mystery, romance, and suspense. Here's the blurb:

A shy librarian and a dashing FBI agent must work together to catch a killer and recover a priceless silver treasure in this light and sweetly romantic suspense novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Do It Yourself Home Renovation mysteries and the Cutthroat Business mysteries.

On the island of roses and ruins, love awaits and danger lurks.

When Annika Holst's father dies, it's up to the young librarian to carry out his last will: to take his ashes back to his hometown, medieval Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.

But no sooner does the plane touch down in Stockholm, than the bag with the cremains goes missing. A young American named Nick Costa comes to Annika's aid... but can she trust the handsome stranger? And what of Curt Gardiner, another young man from “back home,” also visiting his mother’s native Sweden?

To catch a murderer, recover her father’s ashes, and find a missing Viking treasure, Annika has to put her trust in one of them. But the wrong choice could mean not only the loss of her heart... but of her life as well.

Sounds good, yeah?

Just so you know, the FBI's Art Crime Team is real. This is their logo; innit pretty?

I'd have cribbed it if I could, and put it on the cover, but I didn't dare. I mean, they are the FBI, right? They probably wouldn't appreciate it. Bad enough that I've appropriated their organization; I don't have to appropriate their logo too. But this is the reason for the title, and also the series title, up there in the corner of the cover. ACT-1.

(Yes, there's a chance - a good chance - there'll be more than one ACT book. I just have to square away a few other commitments first. Like the second SFR, the seventh DIY mystery, and the sixth Cutthroat Business mystery, in roughly that order. Talk to me again in the spring.)

In the meantime, if you want to give Act of Redemption a try, you can get an eBook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, or Kobo. Sony and the iBookstore will take a little longer, since they'll go through Smashwords and it can take a couple of weeks. But the book is coming there too. It's $2.99, FYI, and totally worth it, if I do say so myself.

(And yes, if enough people ask for a print version, I will absolutely put one together. Just as soon as I have a chance to breathe.)

Anyway, there you have it. If this sounds like something you'd enjoy, go forth and buy. I hope you'll like Nick and Annika!
 

A Done Deal

It's official: A Done Deal, the last - at least so far - book in the Cutthroat Business romantic mystery series, has entered the world.

You can find it for sale from these fine etailers:

AMAZON

BARNES and NOBLE

SMASHWORDS


The iBook version, along with Kobo and Sony and Diesel and a few others, goes through Smashwords, so it'll be a week or so until it's available there, but in the meantime, if you have an ereader that isn't a Kindle or a Nook, Smashwords should have a format you can use.

Here's a taste of Chapter 1:

Todd looked coy.“What would you like Santa to bring you, Savannah?”

Rafe, I though, and immediately chastised myself. He was gone, he wasn’t coming back, he didn’t want me. I smiled. “Nothing. I have everything I need.”

“Diamonds?” Todd suggested.

“God, no.” That brought to mind engagement rings, and I couldn’t imagine anything worse than having to turn down another proposal in front of my entire family on Christmas Eve.

“A puppy?”

From his expression, it was almost as if he thought a puppy would make up for the baby I’d lost. My baby had been barely bigger than a blueberry when I miscarried, but after all the agonizing I’d done over whether or not to keep it, it had become very real to me. And as much as I like puppies, it wasn’t the same.

“I live in an apartment,”I said. “With a no-pets policy.”

“I guess a kitten is out of the question too, then.”

“You could get me a goldfish. I’m allowed to have those.”

Todd’s expression lightened. “Do you want a goldfish?”

“Not really,” I said apologetically. “I was joking. I don’t really need a Christmas present.”There was nothing anyone could give me that I wanted. Especially Todd.

I wondered if I ought to ask him what he wanted for Christmas, but I was afraid of what the answer would be. And I’d bought him a sweater in any case.

I speared a mushroom with my fork and lifted it to my mouth.

“Isn’t that Collier?” Todd said, looking over my shoulder.

For a second, my heart skipped a beat and I almost choked. Then I realized two things: 1) he’d probably only said it to get a reaction from me—Todd was suspicious of my feelings for Rafe long before there were any feelings to speak of—and 2) there was no way he could be right.

I swallowed the mushroom and made sure my voice was steady. “I doubt it. If he were back in town, I’m sure someone would have told me.”

And it probably wouldn’t have been Rafe himself. If he hadn’t stuck around when I lost the baby, and he didn’t get in touch after I was shot, he wouldn’t bother to call to tell me he was back in Nashville, either.

I had, however, become friendly with Tamara Grimaldi, homicide detective with the Nashville PD, and she knew Rafe too, and kept tabs on him through her contact in the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations. I trusted her to let me know if anything important happened. Like, if he died. Or if he’d been shot or hospitalized.

Or if he’d come back to Nashville.

Todd nodded, reassured by my lack of interest, and forked up another piece of veal.

I continued my internal monologue while I chased mushrooms around my plate. Even if Rafe was back in town and nobody had bothered to tell me, he wouldn’t be here at Fidelio’s. He despises the place. I’ve had dinner with him here twice, and both times he treated the fancy cuisine and snobbish waiters with irreverent amusement. He wouldn’t choose to come here unless it was with me. And since we were over and done, he had no business being here. It was probably just someone with a passing resemblance to Rafe. Todd was a little bit paranoid on the subject; he was probably just seeing things.

“Are you sure he’s not back in Nashville?”Todd said. “Because that really looks like him. Just the kind of woman I’d expect him to be with, too.”

Woman?

I twisted on my chair. “Where? I really don’t think...”

And then my breath went when I saw that yes, it was indeed Rafael Collier on the other side of the restaurant, just sitting down at a romantic table for two. A table I had once shared with him, as it happened. Behind a pygmy date palm. And the woman he was with was exactly the kind of woman I would expect him to be with, too.

A woman very much not like me, I might add.

Like Rafe, she looked like she might be of mixed race. Long, dark hair fell straight like a waterfall down her back, and she had exotic almond-shaped eyes in a stunning face with flawless caramel skin and red lacquered lips. She was shorter than me, and even in four inch heels she barely came up to his shoulder. Granted, he’s tall—six three, give or take—but she was still on the petite side. And she was poured into a short, tight, Christmas-red dress that clung to every curve she had, and his hand was right there, on the exposed skin of her back. That, more than anything else, hurt. He was touching her. In a sort of intimate way. Skin to skin. The same way he’d touched me.

I own a red dress too. I’d bought it to coax a proposal from Todd, back when I thought being engaged to Todd would make me less likely to indulge in my feelings for Rafe. Instead, it had been Rafe who peeled it off me at the end of the night.

My dress isn’t as short or as tight—hers looked like lycra; mine’s satin—but it’s also backless, and I could remember disconcertingly well the feeling of his hands on my back, warm and hard and a little rough. I could remember what happened afterwards too, and the thought that they’d be leaving Fidelio’s and going home to make love in his bed—the bed where he’d made love to me—was enough to turn the Chicken Marsala to sawdust in my mouth.

# # #

Houses, Hunks, and Whodunit - Part 2

Since I talked about houses last time - specifically, Aunt Inga's house, or more accurately, the Second Empire Victorian - I guess it's time for hunks. Or more specifically, one hunk. This one:

I know. Yum, right?

His name is O.T. Fagbenle - also known as OT or O-T - and he's a British-Nigerian actor. In addition to acting, he sings, and he also writes music. And did I mention yummy?

Anyway, he can do an American accent. I saw him in Masterpiece Theatre's Miss Marple, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and he played an American GI. And I have decided that if anyone ever - or in the next two years or so, before he gets too old - decides to make a movie out of A Cutthroat Business, he's who I want to play Rafe. Just check it out:

It took me four minutes longer than the fifteen I had promised before I could pull my pale-blue Volvo — the safest car on the road — to a stop behind the sleek, black Harley-Davidson waiting in the circular driveway. The man straddling the seat matched the motorcycle: dark, muscular, and more than a little dangerous. The T-shirt might as well have been painted on for all that it left to the imagination, and the tattoo peeking from under the left sleeve looked like the tail end of a viper curled around his bicep.

I hesitated before I opened the car door. Real estate can be a scary business on occasion. Those of us who are involved in it advertise our faces and phone numbers all over town, then agree to meet total strangers who call, claiming to want to see an empty house somewhere. Often in an area that isn’t the best, like the one I found myself in now. Sometimes — rarely, but it happens — one of us gets attacked. And there was something about this man that suggested that I ought to step carefully. So I did, both because it seemed prudent and because the gravel was difficult to navigate on three inch heels. “Sorry I’m late. I’m Savannah Martin..."

And then I stopped — dead, if you’ll pardon the pun — when he removed the mirrored sunglasses and I met his eyes.

They were as dark as those on a Jersey cow, and surrounded by long, thick, curving eyelashes. There’s nothing wrong with my lashes — nothing a liberal application of make-up can’t correct, at any rate — but I would have sold my soul to possess his. He could hawk mascara for Maybelline with those lashes. Not that that was the reason I was staring.

“Struck speechless by my good looks, darlin’?” His voice was amused.

“Sorry,” I managed, fighting back a blush. How mortifying, to be caught staring! “For a second there you looked familiar, but...”

“You ain’t never forgotten me?” He grinned. White teeth flashed against golden skin, and a ghostly memory stirred, like an alligator in a swamp, but it subsided without breaking the surface.

“Um...” I said, distracted. The grin widened wickedly.

When a few seconds passed while I didn’t say anything else, he added, “Been back to Sweetwater lately?”

So he was from back home. Well, it made sense. The drawl, slow as molasses, was pure South, and he wasn’t someone I had met recently, or I would have remembered.

“A few weeks ago,” I said slowly, running mental mug shots past my inner eye. “You?”

“That’d be telling.” Another grin curved his lips and the alligator stirred again. I concentrated, and almost had it, but just as I was about to reach out and grasp it, it slipped through my fingers once more.

You couldn’t give me a hint, could you?”

I smiled hopefully. He contemplated me in silence for a few seconds before he said accommodatingly, “Sure. Columbia High.”

I nodded. Of course. He was someone I had gone to high school with. That explained it. Long enough ago that I wouldn’t necessarily remember him right off; not so long ago that I had forgotten entirely. But there had been hundreds of students in my high school, from all over Maury County and beyond. How in the world did he expect me to recognize him after all this time...?

And then the brick dropped, or the alligator reared, or whatever. I jumped back. “Oh, my God! Rafael Collier. You’re...”

“Guilty as charged.” He made a little mocking half-bow. His voice was pleasant, but his eyes were anything but. They had turned as black as the motorcycle he’d been riding, and approximately twice as hard. I swallowed and opened my mouth. And put my foot in it.

“I thought you went to prison.”

He lifted an eyebrow. Just one; the other didn’t move so much as a fraction of an inch. “That was twelve years ago, darlin’. I got out.”

Obviously. I swallowed again and took another step back.

# # #

 

So what do you think? Does he look like Rafe or not? And if you don't think so, who do you think would do a better job?