NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

THANK YOU READERS! You helped make the New Adult Romance Boxed Set a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, which means I'm a New York Times Bestselling Author. Can you hear the screams of joy wherever you are?

And stay tuned -- I have new releases coming in September, October, November and December!

Contest is over, and THANK YOU!

My latest contest is over, and the winners have been notified by email, so thank you for joining! Look for future contests -- these are really fun to run!

Maliciously Obedient on sale for $.99! Plus a contest!

Maliciously Obedient has soared into the top 100 on Amazon, top 20 on Nook, top 100 on iTunes and is on sale this week for just $.99 (regular price $3.99) -- grab it now and tell your friends!

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But that's not all!

(Boy, that sounded corny...)

My contest is still going on, so enter to win one of $150 in Amazon gift cards and one of five print copies of my new Billionaires collection!

And, finally, the New Adult Romance Boxed Set is STILL in the top 10 on Amazon and STILL only $.99 (Amazon's keeping it there temporarily, and we can't control when the price changes...). LAST CALL at $.99 for FIVE full-length NA books!

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TOP 10 on AMAZON! Thank you, readers!

The New Adult Romance Boxed Set is not only a two-week-in-a-row USA Today Bestseller, but now readers have skyrocketed it into the top 10 on Amazon's Kindle bookstore!

It's currently #7, in fact!

We are aiming for the New York Times Bestseller List and boy does this help.

Two more days at $.99, so if you haven't grabbed it yet, or you know someone who might like 5 complete, hot romance novels for just $.99 total, share and spread the word. Click below to choose your favorite eBook retailer!

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Meanwhile, I'm working hard on Random Acts of Trust, just wrapped up a new novella, and got an AWESOME idea for yet another novella that returns to the world of Mike, Dylan, Laura, Josie and Alex. What happens when Josie and Alex babysit six-month-old Jillian so Laura and the daddies can get some alone time? And when Laura discovers the alpha side of the two amazing men she's got wrapped around her finger, maybe it's HER fingers that get tied up....

No details, and no promises of a release date, but plenty of fun and hot, hot, HOTTIE HOT HOT and loving bedroom escapades...

 And also -- a reminder about my contest, which is still going on! Please enter!

Meet Sam from Random Acts of Trust

So as promised, here's another excerpt from the book. It's a bit out of order (though the same night as the earlier excerpt from Amy). There's a...spoiler...that I don't want to share, so I had to skip a few scenes and lines, which means you don't get to see Sam's very first scene in the book until it's published.

:)

Sam

“What the hell kind of state doesn’t have Happy Hour?” Darla asked, incredulous.

I was watching her talk to Trevor, the way her fingers reached out and touched his arm with a kind of possession that no woman had ever shown me. She would go on these rants now that she was living here, somewhere in Cambridge with an aunt who ran a dating service where Darla had a job. It must be a day job, because she was at every practice and every gig now, acting like a band manager and mother hen, though if you called her that she insisted she wasn't Mavis.

You wouldn’t know that she had her own apartment; she’d been spending so much time at Trevor and Joe’s that they’d bought her a toothbrush. She treasured it like it was an engagement ring, or something. Then again, in a way, it kind of was. Not that I could say anything - I was crashing on their couch for free, so I was just happy to have a few cushions to myself and not have to worry about where I’d live the next day.

“None of the bars have Happy Hour? What do you mean?” Trevor said.

“In Ohio we have Happy Hour most nights at the bars. You walk in and they’ve got free or super-cheap food, like wings and mozzarella sticks and all kinds of things that you can munch on,” she said. “And then they try to get you to buy one drink, get one free or buy one drink, get one half off – you name it. But here...” She rolled her eyes and threw up her hands. “Nothin’. And why do the bars close at one o’clock?”

Trevor shrugged. “Beats me. I know alcohol can’t be served after two.”

“Yeah!” Darla interjected. “So why one o’clock? What’s up with being so uptight?”

I laughed. “Maybe it’s the Catholicism in this state.”

She turned to look at me, crinkled her forehead, and asked, “What the hell does the Pope have against a mozzarella stick or a basket of wings? ”

“Darla,” Trevor said, pulling her in, their hips touching, his hands all over her ample ass. “You go march right over to the bar owner and give him a piece of your mind. Change the world. Free the mozz sticks.”

“The poor schmuck who owns this place doesn’t control any of that. It’s the voters,” she insisted. 

 “Run for governor. Vote for Darla!” Trevor shouted.

“Why would I do that?” she asked. “It’s so much easier to just sit here and bitch about it.”

Joe walked over and opened his mouth and then Liam marched over, interrupting, and said, “Something is wrong with one of the synthesizers, guys, and we need to fix it.”

Liam was taller than any of us. When we were younger he looked like a wiry praying mantis, but now he had that long, built look of a guy too tall for the society he was in. He towered over Trevor, and that wasn’t an easy accomplishment. This summer, though, he’d taken to lifting and had filled out a lot bit. It was good to see that if you took your own destiny in hand you could make major changes and shape your life – or at least your body – the way you wanted.

Joe looked relieved. The easy way the three of them hung out together, a touch here, a look there, a wink, a kiss - made me...something. I don’t know what to call it. It’s not jealousy because, frankly, I didn’t want Darla. She was nice and all, but she wasn’t my type.

Whatever my type was, it leaned more toward the studious. The quiet girl who surprised you when you got to know her. A rebel, wild child on the inside, yet a tightly analytical type on the outside – that was what I liked.

I liked people who fooled the world, who made you think and expect one thing, and then who delivered something so different it made the foundation of your entire philosophical system quake.

Only one person in my life had come close to that, and I hadn’t seen her in four and a half years.

I tried to be that kind of person. It wasn’t easy in a world that told us we were supposed to be happy, to project happiness at all times as a sign of confidence, assurance, and of contentment. What the message really taught was that we were supposed to live lies. Lives of lies.

Most of my childhood and teen years were spent lying non-stop about the kind of family I lived in, and I drew a line in the sand because I wasn’t going to lie about the kind of man I wanted to be, about the kind of man I would shape myself to become.

Drums don’t lie. Drumbeats and measures and music are exactly what you see on paper. They lay everything out in stark relief, page after page after page. The beats, the microbeats, the macrobeats, all of it are a kind of language that tells you - note after note, tap after tap - exactly what you need to do to get to the end of the song.

How you interpret the emotional landscape within those beats is entirely up to you. You can go heavy and deep, or you can go shallow and wild. You can paint your own clean canvas. If only life were that simple and uncomplicated.

As I looked up and studied Trevor, and Joe, and Darla, I saw a complication of their choosing and no piece of music, no set of lyrics or measures or notes laid out in a blueprint, could capture what they had improvised. Only they’d done it in three-three time.

 And also -- a reminder about my contest, which is still going on! Please enter!

TWO WEEKS IN A ROW! USA Today Bestselling New Adult Boxed Set -- sale ends Saturday!

Readers made the New Adult Romance Boxed Set a USA Today Bestseller two weeks in a row! Last week we were #110, and this week we're #65!

Grab it before the price goes up on Saturday! Just $.99 now at:

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Meet Amy from Random Acts of Trust

Here come the excerpts!

Amy

Drummers are mysterious creatures who seek the erratic microbeats of authentic life that are layered between the macrobeats of society. Sam's hands were always tapping. Did they move in his sleep? Were his dreams filled with the nuanced undertone of beated movement? What did those hands seek?

With his hands in constant motion, how could I let him know my body should be the one place where those fingers could be still?

His hands moved like a poem, the left one tapping out a line, the right one pausing at the perfect moment to communicate emotion. Hot and sweaty on stage, the band moved as one organism. Trevor sang lead vocals. Hot, tall, muscled, and taking the crowd to a new layer of existence - and everyone willingly followed. Joe stood quiet in the background, playing bass, providing the undercurrent of emotion that allowed Trevor to fan the flames inside all of us. Liam played guitar like a man strumming a woman’s body. He seemed to make love to the instrument in a way that I could admire from afar, but that never quite caught the essence of me.

Oh no - that was all in Sam’s fingers, in his forearms, his muscled shoulders, the obliques that twisted to play each part of his drum set as if it were my body. In a way, it was. Standing here in the crowd, far in the back, at a quiet table - as if there were such a thing as a quiet table at any set played by Random Acts of Crazy.

I found myself immersed in the fever of their song. Maybe I was deluding myself, and maybe it wasn’t the song. Delusion has a way of becoming part of life when you least expect it, or maybe when you most need it. I could sit here and pretend that Sam was just a guy on stage playing his drum set, fulfilling his part in the puzzle pieces that made up the whole of each song that they played so expertly. I could even imagine that I just came here because I was looking for something fun to do after moving into my new apartment and getting ready to start grad school.

My imagination knew few bounds when it came to the taut rope that pulled me in two directions: one, to the carefully calibrated side of me that organized and categorized and protected and planned to make sure that no uncertain variables could sway me from being centered and grounded; and then there was the other side, the one where my imagination ran wild.

That was the side pulled tight in the tug of war by Sam’s fingers.

“You want another one, honey?” the cocktail waitress shouted over the fray of the end chords of Random Acts of Crazy’s famous song “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.”

   

I nodded. Taking risks wasn’t part of my nature, but what the hell – a second Amaretto Sour wasn’t going to kill anyone, was it? Drinking was new to me. I’d only been legal for the past year, turning twenty-one late, after all my friends, with this damn August birthday. So, a year of drinking under my belt, at least legally, meant that it was still a novelty. Besides, I could walk home.

Alone, of course. My boyfriend these days was molded pink plastic, with stamina that lasted as long as two energized double-D batteries.

I wasn’t exactly the kind of woman guys picked up and took home. That's not quite true – it’s more that I wouldn’t let myself be that kind of woman. Not that guys didn’t try. Although, for the past two years I’d either been dating my now ex-boyfriend, Brent, or I had just carefully cultivated an outer shell that screamed Don't even try.

The last time I let someone in he shut me down. Cold. And didn't speak to me for four and a half years.

Right now my eyes caressed him, watching how he gripped the drum sticks, wondering if he remembered me. I was a masochist. I knew it.

Indulging in this moment of watching him, even as he'd so thoroughly rejected me, was probably the groundwork for a good twenty or so therapy sessions in ten years.

It was worth it.

The crowd roared as the song ended, and there pranced Trevor, just like he’d been years ago when the band started out, except that he was larger than life and had the women in the crowd eating out of his hand. A fine, masculine specimen onstage with jeans that were tight in all the right places. All the guys had changed so much since high school, since I’d seen them at their debut, way back when we were in high school. It made me feel old to think that that was now way back. Four and a half years felt like an eternity.

It was, actually, a lifetime.

Sam raked one of those beautiful hands through his auburn hair, and while I couldn’t see his eyes because of the bright lights onstage, and the shadows that added to the mystique of the set, I knew that those green-and-amber-flecked irises were still the same. He stood and the change in him made me gasp, scaring the waitress who had come by with my drink.

“You OK, hon?” she asked, bending down, making eye contact. Short, brown hair. Tight, wrinkled lips, like a smoker's. Kind, ocean-green eyes. She was as skinny as I was lush, and about my mother's age.

I looked back at the stage, but Sam had turned away, was now guzzling from a bottle of water as Joe spoke animatedly to him. My God. What had been a lean, gawkish kind of high schooler body had filled out into a broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted form, the kind you find on fire fighters or tree specialists. Tall and powerful and muscled, yet he carried himself without aggression. As he turned, the waistband of his jeans slipped just enough to show a flash of skin between the bottom of his shirt and the denim, my eyes eating the grooved lines of his carved flesh.

Words. I was supposed to have words. The waitress looked at me expectantly. “I’m fine, I just...they’re just so good.”

“You mean they’re just so hot,” she said in a conspirator’s voice, nudging me gently with her elbow. “You’re not the first one in this room to think about taking one of them home, hon,” she said, her heels click-clacking off as she delivered more drinks.

I laughed politely because that’s what you do, right? When someone makes a suggestion that taps into your inner world of fantasies and hopes and dreams, and says something that isn’t quite appropriate for public, casual talk.

And yet every word she said was true.