I’m usually pretty good about remembering anniversaries, but my husband beat me to the punch yesterday and remembered what I hadn’t: it was one year ago yesterday that Wicked Burn–my first single-title from Berkley–came out. It sort of blew me away, to consider it. I’m still relatively new to publishing, so as you might imagine, this last year, I was on quite a learning curve. I wanted to take a moment to say ‘thanks’ to all of you who have accompanied me on the journey. I greatly appreciate your support, and I hope we’ll be able to share many books and reading moments in the future.

I thought I’d put up another excerpt from Holiday Bound, my Christmas themed short novel that’s out now from Samhain and as of today, it’s also available at Amazon for your Kindle! This one continues a bit where another excerpt I’ve posted here left off. Enjoy!

Angeline imagined his shapely lips, set off to perfection by the short, dark goatee, tilting into a small smile. She recalled how she’d wondered if he could keep an employee, his manner was so surly.
But he sounded like he was fond of Macy the Manager. Maybe it was just Angeline who brought out the worst in him? Wasn’t that all the more reason for her to enjoy a casual conversation with him?

Only it wasn’t casual. Nothing about her interaction with Alex Carradine had been casual since he’d first barked at her while she sat in the SUV. Angeline knew all that, but she couldn’t stop herself from trying to make a connection with him, no matter how tenuous that connection was.

“My mom and dad put a real one up every year. They smell so good. I went with my dad every year to cut it down until I went to college,” she said in a hushed voice.

“What about your place in the city?”

“I put up a small one. Fake. I still like it, though. My mother gives me an ornament on Christmas Day. It’s a tradition. So I like to put them up every year. This will be the first year I’m not spending Christmas with my parents.”

“You were going to spend it with my dad, instead.”

The flames crackled in the taut silence that followed. If she’d let herself think about what she said next, she’d never have done it in a million years. But she wasn’t thinking. As she lay there in front of that fire with Alex, she was just feeling. And she was doing it more than she’d ever done in her thirty years of existence.

“Alex?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve never slept with your father.”

Sweat popped on her brow in the strained silence that followed. She felt a drop of it run between her breasts. How could she possibly have been nearly frozen less than an hour ago when her flesh now throbbed with heat? She closed her eyes when she felt his hand on her shoulder.

He rolled her onto her back. She opened her eyes. He’d scooted over in his sleeping bag and leaned down over her, bracing himself on his elbow. She stared, mesmerized, at flame-gilded muscle. His face looked rigid and stark as he stared down at her.

Something fell into place deep inside her, like the last tumbler turning to spring a lock.

“Angeline?”

“Yes.”

She groaned at the impact of his mouth taking possession of her own. She’d thought she was hot, but Alex was fire itself, his sleek tongue a fierce, demanding flame. A fever possessed her, burning away rational thought.

He cupped her jaw and drank from her thirstily…wildly. When his taste registered in her awareness, a primal wave of lust surged up from her belly. Her vagina contracted in painful need. She kissed him like she was deprived of air and he could supply her with his breath…with life itself. She hadn’t realized she was struggling to feel his long, hard body pressed next to her own until he roughly broke their kiss. She blinked her eyelids open, registering the small snarl twisting his handsome mouth. When she craned up for him, desperate for more of his taste, he hissed a curse and whipped back the cover of her sleeping bag.

“Get out of there.” His low growl made her nipples pinch with excitement. She’d never imagined lust so powerful or raw in her life, let alone experienced it.
She scurried out of the sleeping bag. He pushed his bag down over his hips and pulled his legs free. She groaned when he pressed the front of his body to her side. She could feel his cock—long, thick and straining—against his jeans.

He grabbed the hem of her sweater and lifted it over her head.

“I’ve been wanting to do that all night. For years,” he said thickly as he tossed the ivory sweater aside. His eyes gleamed as he stared at her breasts covered in an ivory silk bra. She’d wished she’d worn a bra with some padding earlier, when her nipples kept tightening under Alex’s bold stare.

Now she was glad he saw her desire unmasked. Her nipples pebbled beneath the thin, clinging fabric. She held her breath when he slowly raised his hand and traced the upper swell of one breast with a long finger. His cock lurched against her leg.

“Alex,” she whispered. She pressed her hip against his penis. She experienced a wild need to have him closer…to take him in her body. When he opened his big hand and shaped a breast to his palm, she reached for the waistband of his jeans.

The next thing she knew, he had her flat on her back, his knees on either side of her hips. He pinned her wrists to the carpet above her head. She panted shallowly as she looked up at him. She wasn’t afraid, even though she’d never had a man hold her down before. Instead, his unexpected action made molten heat flood her pussy. She transformed into a wild, primitive thing, arching her back, thrusting her hips against the stiff column of his erection.

She became as single-minded as a female animal in heat, knowing only some deep, biological imperative to seat a cock deep inside her.

To seat Alex deep inside her.

“Shhh, calm down,” he muttered between clenched teeth as she writhed against him. She saw that his forehead, chest and ridged abdomen gleamed with a light coat of perspiration. Her hunger grew at the sight. She opened her thighs and cupped his firm cock between them before she clamped them shut and their sexes throbbed into each other.

“Goddammit, Angeline, do you want me to tie you down?”

Order Holiday Bound from MBaB or from Amazon
Read another excerpt here.

Also, remember that a comment on ANY blog post this week qualifies you to win a pre-order of Release from Amazon.

For those of you who belong to my Total Exposure chat group, the authors on the loop give each other interviews on release days. I thought I’d post the interview Fiona Jayde gave me for the release of Holiday Bound here today.

Thanks for the great interview questions, Fi. I really had to think for some of them.

Fi: Congratulations on the release of Holiday Bound!
I’m really looking forward to this book – the excerpt sizzled with sexual tension! Now that I have you in the hotseat….LOL

How about a bit of a background on Holiday Bound ?

Holiday Bound is the story of a man who sort of falls instantly for a woman, but refuses to pursue his attraction because she works in his estranged father’s law firm. His father is this powerful, gorgeous man in his fifties, who looks much younger than he is.

To say that Alex Carradine and his father, Mitchell, don’t get along is a huge understatement. Mitchell is all about power, career, etc., but Alex is more of this earthy, balanced individual. Father/Son have a huge blow-out, and Alex ends up selling his seat at the Chicago Board of Trade and buying a ski resort on a wooded mountain. He’s thrilled with his choice while Mitchell is furious at him for throwing away his education and lucrative career. Alex figures his dad is trying to mend fences when he calls and says he’s coming to visit for Christmas with a ‘friend.’ When Alex sees Angeline Kastakis, though, he realizes his father wasn’t extending the olive branch, but jabbing at him by dangling Angeline–the woman he’d been so attracted to years ago–in front of his face. Unfortunately, it’s just the sort of thing Mitchell might do.

Angeline hasn’t ever slept with Mitchell, but she was hoping things would become more intimate after spending Christmas at his son’s ski resort. As fate would have it, though, Angeline makes it to Heavenly View, while Mitchell is snowed out. She’s trapped in a house with no heat, no electricity and a gorgeous man who either despises her or wants her like crazy–Angeline can’t decide which. So, their stuck together…and Alex has the intimidating task of having to convince her she was involved with the wrong Carradine.

But he rises to the challenge, don’t worry. 🙂

Fi: I’ve always loved the “stuck in a blizzard” storylines, and you’ve enhanced it by adding a unique twist to make it your own:) Was there anything you came across that inspired you to do this type of story?

I love ‘shut in’ stories, too. I must, because I wrote both Holiday Bound and Release in close succession during a Chicago winter. LOL. Hmmm, this is weird, because I can’t recall how this story came about! Seriously…trying to recall. I started writing it at the beginning of this year, and then was asked by Berkley to propose for a opened spot in their schedule (which became Release). So I had to go back to Holiday Bound when it was halfway done after writing that book. OH! I just thought of it. I was watching an old Mary Tyler Moore episode–LOL–and Mary is casually dating this man who looks younger than his age. And she meets his son, who was the product of a really early marriage, and she’s actually closer in age to the son, and she sort of falls for him vs. the father.

The back story of family strife between Alex and Mitchell Carradine was all my doing. Family dynamics, weirdness and conflict–yeah, I can write that. LOL.

Fi: You really make characters come alive!! Do they come to you fully formed or do you get to know them through the course of their story? How did you get to know Angeline and Alex?

I think they definitely get fleshed out in the writing process. For instance, when I first started writing Alex, I didn’t picture what his family life was like, what nature would have meant to him, what family meant, how he’d acquired his goals and values when they were so drastically different from Mitchell’s. His mother and the grandmother and grandfather who raised him aren’t actually in the story, but once I ‘got’ Alex’s background during the writing process, his character really came together for me.

Angeline was a little more fully formed when I started. I wanted her to come from a very loving familial background, but to have a splinter of ‘different-ness”, something that would have made her feel really flattered by being asked out by a super-successful, powerful man like Mitchell Carradine. Angeline is the daughter of Greek immigrant farmers, and while she has a great deal of natural sophistication and confidence, I can see how she’d believe she was really into Mitchell Carradine for a short period of her life. We all make mistakes, right?

A lot of times I don’t ‘spell out’ these little character building aspects in the book, but I think when I have them in mind, or just allude to them briefly, it adds depth and believability to the characters and helps to ‘buy’ their motivations.

Fi: I’ve mentioned before how I love your build up of sexual tension:) Who are your inspirations? Ss there a particular couple who has the best sexual tension as far as Beth Kery is concerned?

Thank you, Fi! Hmm, good question. As you know, I’m a File-ite, and I used to love the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully on the X-Files. There was something so intimate in how they could ‘read’ each other and how they knew these little idiosyncrasies about one another. I know when I wrote both Sweet Restraint and Release, I included a lot of that type of thing–when the h/h knows these incredibly intimate and personal details about the other person even before they become lovers.

When I’m writing, I notice I used the words eyes, stare, gaze, etc. a ton. One story that always stands out to me for sexual tension is the movie Witness, which starred Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis. When I think of the tension between the two in that movie, I think of this incredible way they’d LOOK at each other. There was so much in those stares. Lovers’ stares are different than ‘regular’ looks because only a lover can see you with those ‘eyes’. But more importantly, while the gaze implies connection, it also assumes the space between the two, the distance…what’s keeping them apart. A lovers’ stare is by nature tension-filled, because it makes the reader aware on some level of the friction to close the distance.

Fi: How is writing a novella different then a full novel?

It’s SOO different. I haven’t mastered the art of it; not that I ever will, but you know. I have to say that Holiday Bound was the first shorter story that I’ve done that I was really happy that I got everything “˜in there’. The pacing felt okay to me, the believability as far as the main characters romantic angle, and the spacing between sexual encounters and “˜getting to know each other’ portions. Of course, Holiday Bound technically isn’t a novella, it’s a short novel, so maybe I shouldn’t congratulate myself too much for “˜getting it all in there”. LOL. For me, part of the difficulty with novel vs. novella is the erotic romance genre. It’s already a challenge, to make sexual encounters and evolving emotional involvement realistic in a novel, where you’ve got maybe 95 thousand words worth of space. But to do the same in 37 K or 28 K…or 13? Sometimes, I think that’s why the fantasy or paranormal genres work really well for short erotics, because you can make it “˜believable’ because it fits in with the rules of the world you’ve built.

Fi: Lets say you were going to have lunch with Sandra Brown. What would you ask her?

I’d probably ask her about times where she felt really frustrated with her writing or her career. I’d ask her if she thought it was worth it…and hope she’d say yes. 🙂

Thanks again to Fiona for the interview. And remember that Holiday Bound is on sale now (10% off for the first week) HERE.

And remember that I’m giving away a pre-order of my Feb 2, 2010 book RELEASE to one commenter on any blog post this week. (Check back on Friday afternoon).

Holiday Bound is here!

In other news, I’m over at the Bradford Bunch today, if you’d like to check it out!