This week from the WIP (Work in Progress) which once again sadly has no title. It will come to me at some point. :-) It's about a chef. And a wacky interior designer. I'm having fun with Bradan and Mirelle!

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“You hugged Jerick Ellard the other night.”


Her eyes widened. “What!”

“You hugged him.” His jaw tightened. “You obviously were friends with him and he was a client.” Christ, he sounded like a petulant little boy.

She laughed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

He felt his chin jut out. He stepped closer. “You said we could be friends. The other night.”

“You want me to hug you?” she asked incredulously.

Yeah. Oh hell, yeah. But probably best not to answer that one out loud. He stepped closer and reached out to lift a stray golden strand of hair away from her face, moving it behind her shoulder, taking the opportunity to let his fingers stroke over her soft hair and then brush across her shoulder. “I just want to be friends.”

“Friends.” The word came out on a breath.

“Sure.” He was lying. Through his teeth. He dragged his fingertips up the side of her neck, sliding under her hair where she was so warm, her skin peachy-soft, letting his thumb skim over her small chin, then her bottom lip. Her scent drifted toward him, vanilla and lemon and sugar. It made his mouth water, made him want to inhale her, eat her up. Her eyes darkened as she continued to stare at him. He didn’t just want to be friends with her. He wanted to bang her brains out.

He cupped the back of her neck and pulled her closer, still holding her gaze. He looked at her mouth, soft and pink, a buzzing in his ears, blood rushing to his groin with painful heat, and his eyes closed as he bent his head to kiss her, to breathe her in.

And encountered nothing but air.

So close, so close...almost finished the WIP! I was hoping to do it this weekend, but of course the last scenes are the hardest to write - the most emotional, the most gut-wrenching, and it's slow going. In fact, even though I'm anxious to be done, I found myself procrastinating because I knew how hard these scenes were going to be to write.

This whole book has been hard to write. I know it's going to take a lot of fine tuning of this first draft and I'm just hoping it all makes sense. Both these characters are really complicated.

I'm also surprised by the length of the book. My goal was 60,000 words and I usually find that's a very comfortable length for me. Lately I've been trying to write longer, but this one I wanted to keep fairly short. But Gabe and Reagan had other ideas! I could easily make this an 80,000 word book but I think it will likely end up somewhere around 65,000 words. It is what it is.

Before I talking about what I'm writing this week, I have to mention the Nine Naughty Novelists Anniversary Contest !  We're having a month long scavenger hunt and all the details are at our blog. November 9 will be our first anniversary so we're giving away some books and  $50 Amazon gift certificate!

Over the last week I have been writing again. Not a lot, but some. I'm still quite distracted by a lot of "writing business" issues but getting better. I was working on my new menage idea (as I mentioned, tentatively titled With Strings Attachd) and then go a little stuck. I believe I may have experienced writer's block!  My solution: work on something else. So I went back to Gabe's story and started zipping along with it. And it's going pretty well, actually! Since this story is set in Santa Barbara and that's where I actually am this week, hopefully the beautiful setting will provide inspiration. (see photo below!)

Also worked on edits last week, first round edits of my next Ellora's Cave release, Taming Tara. Just got second round of edits from my editor yesterday so will be working on that again this week.