Excerpts

An excerpt of my February 2011 release, Ride with Me, is available through Scribd. Click here to read the first chapter!

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Every Wednesday, I post a snippet from my current WIP. You can find them all via the category WIP Wednesday.

Some Sundays, I also participate in Six Sentence Sunday by posting six sentences from one of my works. They’re all available via the Six Sentence Sunday category.

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This story fragment won the Valentine Secrets Harlequin Mentor Challenge on the Harlequin Forum. The challenge was to write the 1,000-word opening to a Valentine’s Day-themed secret baby romance novel.

CUPID’S ARROW

“I don’t see what’s so romantic about getting shot in the ass by some fat, flying baby,” she said, taping a garland of pink-and-red cupids into place along the edge of the coffee shop’s counter. “It’s creepy. The whole Valentine’s Day concept requires some serious rethinking.”

“You’re just biased against the holiday because you hate your name,” Barry answered from his precarious perch on the stepladder, where he was pinning hearts to the ceiling.

Of course she hated her name. Who wouldn’t hate being named Cupid? No one took a woman named Cupid seriously, especially a woman named Cupid with blonde hair and generous, uh, assets. But the name wasn’t the whole problem. “No, seriously, there’s more to it than that. I’m cursed.”

He chuckled. “And here I thought I was the drama queen in this partnership.” She and Barry were joint owners of The Attic, a coffee shop in the heart of downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin. In their two years in business together, they’d worked out the perfect relationship: he handled the left-brain stuff, from finding and rehabbing the funky 1930s building to chatting up customers, while Cupid coped with the nitty-gritty of scheduling, ordering, and making sure Barry didn’t give away so much free coffee they couldn’t make the payments on their small-business loan.

“I’m not exaggerating! It’s a real curse. I become totally irresistible on Valentine’s Day. It’s like I give off crazy sex pheromones or something.”

“I’ve never had the least bit of trouble resisting you on Valentine’s Day, sugar.”

“I’m totally irresistible to straight men,” she corrected with a grin. Turning the corner of the counter, Cupid began stringing the cupids down the long side. “It all started when I hit puberty. In the seventh grade, I grew breasts, and Mike Marshall showed up in the middle of Mr. Deem’s science class with a dozen roses to recite a poem about me in front of God and everyone.”

“That’s romantic!”

“No, that’s humiliating. You didn’t hear the poem. The words ‘mouth-watering globes’ will be forever seared into my brain.”

Barry snorted, and the ladder wobbled alarmingly.

“Then, my junior year, I went out to the parking lot at the end of the day and found Sid Kershaw stretched out naked across the backseat of my car.”

Barry laughed. “Tell me you threw the poor guy a bone.”

“I wasn’t even dating him! We were practically strangers! And when he saw me, he had a bone, and I got so embarrassed I left him there in the car and walked home. It was four miles, Barry. In the winter!”

At this, Barry very nearly fell off the ladder, and she had to help him down before he killed himself.

“Thank you for that,” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of one hand. “I will treasure that image forever.”

“You know,” he said after a moment, “you should turn this curse thing to your advantage this year. You’ve had an awfully long dry spell of late.”

Awfully long didn’t begin to cover it. She’d gone eighteen months without an orgasm of the non-self-induced variety. Eighteen loooong months.

“Please, don’t you think I’ve tried that? Didn’t I ever tell you where Gwendolyn came from?” Thinking of her three-year-old daughter brought a smile to Cupid’s face, as always.

“You told me you and her dad were a one-time thing, but you didn’t say a word about Valentine’s Day. You’ve been holding out on me.”

“Well, it’s not the most flattering story in the world. I was living in Chicago at the time, and I signed up for a speed-dating event, you know, where you spend fifteen minutes with half a dozen different guys, no names exchanged?”

“You minx.”

“Yeah, well, so it was going fine, no sparks or anything, but then Date Number Four doesn’t show up, and I pop out into the hallway to get a drink from the water fountain, and there’s this beautiful man out there.”

“Date Number Four?”

“That’s what I thought. So I asked him, and he said, ‘At your service,’ and I laughed, and he stepped a little closer, and I stepped a little closer, and the next thing you know we were going at it in a broom closet. Hottest sex of my life, I swear to God. Nine months later, bam, Gwendolyn.”

“You didn’t use a condom?”

“Of course we used a condom. It just wasn’t strong enough to defeat the curse. And get this–when I found out I was pregnant, I got in touch with the organizers for Date Number Four’s phone number so I could tell him he was a father, but when I met him for coffee, it was a totally different guy. The real Date Number Four had the flu, never showed up for the speed-dating.”

“So the guy you did in the closet . . . ?”

“Who the hell knows? Like I said. I’m cursed.”

Barry laughed at her again as the bell over the front entrance rang.

“Oh, wow,” he said under his breath. “He gets free coffee.”

“You can’t give free coffee to every cute guy who walks in,” she said, not even bothering to look up.

“That’s not every cute guy who walks in–although I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating cookies. That’s Gabriel Arrow.”

“Who’s Gabriel Arrow?” she asked, finally reaching the end of the row with the cupids.

“I swear, you are the most clueless Cheesehead I’ve ever met,” Barry said, exasperated. “Arrow is the offensive-line coach for the Packers.”

Cupid looked up, curious to see someone semi-famous in her shop. They’d been open two years, and nobody from the local NFL franchise had ever come in before. Not that she would have recognized them if they had.

But when her eyes landed on the stranger, she gasped and dropped the tape dispenser. Because Gabriel Arrow wasn’t a stranger.

Gabriel Arrow was Date Number Four.