The day is almost here! Only twelve more days until you can meet Ben and Eva starring in my very first contemporary romance.
In the meantime, I thought I’d wet your appetite with a little excerpt. Enjoy!
Chapter 1
I turned up the radio to drown out Paul and Jeremy’s daily argument over who would win a fight between Superman and Yoda. Although my vote went to Yoda, I didn’t advertise my membership in the geek club. Instead, I tapped my foot to Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl and shivered in the arctic wind blasting from IT’s massive air conditioner.
“Eva!”
The whiny voice made me flinch. My screwdriver flew out of my hand and crashed into the electronic chaos on my workstation. An avalanche of computer video cards and memory toppled onto the floor. I gritted my teeth as I turned to face my boss.
Cameron stood in his doorway, giving me his scrawny come-hither finger. “In my office. Now.” He disappeared into his dark cave.
A rush of heat swept across my face.
Oh hell.
Jeremy leaned out from behind the cubicle wall and shoved his glasses up his nose with his forearm. “Damn, dude. What the hell did you do?”
I groaned and rolled down the sleeves of my blue dress shirt. “I don’t think I did anything.” Did I?
“Are you sure you didn’t piss off Rita in accounting again?” Paul asked, his head buried in the chassis of a computer on his workbench. As usual, his hairy butt-crack showed above the sagging waist of his jeans.
Nice. Just what I needed to see right after lunch.
“I didn’t go near that old crab.” I threw up a hand. “And I didn’t do anything to piss her off in the first place. I just told her I couldn’t fix her computer speakers before the freakin’ e-mail server. Christ.” I shook my head and trudged toward Cameron’s office.
I popped my head into the pigsty. “You rang?” His windowless cell always smelled of fish and BO, an aroma that always stirred up the contents of my stomach and threatened to unload it onto his carpet.
Cameron slouched at his desk, fingers poised over his keyboard. His instant messenger dinged, and he typed without looking up. “Come in and shut the door.”
Flying fuckballs.
I backed out, inhaled as much clean air as I could, stepped into his office, and sat in the chair arranged in front of his desk. Shallow breaths helped me control my gag reflex as I stared at his bony profile and waited, my hands pinned between my legs and the chair so I wouldn’t fidget. I commanded my leg to stop bouncing, but it ignored me as usual.
He’d painted his office dark gray, the same shade as his desk, carpet, and chair. And, come to think of it, his hair, at least some of it. Who decorated a lightless hellhole in shades of gray? I wasn’t even sure it was a color, more a lack of color—a big gray hole. It matched his winning personality.
I mustered a smile when he turned his chair and folded his fingers together among the paper city on his desk. His silence stretched on, emphasizing the steady beeps and blips from the bank of servers outside his door.
“Something wrong?” I asked, fighting the urge to shake him and tell him to get on with it.
Cameron sighed and shoved his skeletal fingers into his rat’s nest of salt and pepper curls. “I’ve got a problem, and I think you’re my only solution.”
My eyebrows shot up, and my shoulders relaxed. If he needed my help, then he wasn’t about to chew me out. Better and better. “Yeah? What kind of problem?”
And why did he say it as if I were the lesser of two evils?
“My wife thinks she’s in labor.”
I shifted forward in my chair. “Oh. Crap. Then what the hell are you doing here?”
He clamped his fingers on to the edge of the desk, then proceeded to drum an annoying tune on it. “You know I spend most afternoons with Mr. Hathaway, right?”
“Yeah, though I’m not sure what the Big Cheese has you fixing all that time. How many computers does he have in there, anyway?”
Cameron reached into his drawer, then clunked a black iPhone on his desk and glared at it as if it had just peed on his shoes. “Mr. Hathaway is … eccentric. No—jeez, that doesn’t even come close to covering what he is. He’s effed up eight ways from Sunday. Look, I need someone to cover for me while I’m away, and you’re my sucker.”
~~~~~~
So, what do you think? One part geek plus one part funny-bone plus one part lip-smacking man in a snazzy suit. Have I peaked your interest? 🙂
Release date: August 6th, 2012
Publisher: Liquid Silver Books
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Jocelyn Adams 