Book Info
Earning
It
Romantic Comedy
Release Date: October 4, 2017
Length: Novel (46,000 words)
Ebook Price: $3.99
ISBN: 978-0-9905400-8-3
Content advisory: Adult language, explicit sex
Blurb
One blind date. One case of mistaken identity. One Navy SEAL faced with his high school crush. What could go wrong?
To Score…
Holy cow, my blind date is rawr-hot. Everything in me aches to explore more with this man, but I can’t. I’ve got too much on the line professionally, with me starting at my new medical practice on shaky ground. But I can’t deny that I want the sex. A fling is perfect. Bonus—I will prove my idiot ex-boyfriend wrong. I’m not cold.
Or Not to Score…
Once she mistakes me for her blind date, my plan is clear. Be this Rick the Lawyer she thinks I am. And for the space of this coffee date, talk to the only woman who’s ever made me feel any spark outside of combat. Best case scenario, I get to be outside my skin—free to be whatever the hell I want. Worst case—she recognizes me as we chat. She’ll be pissed, call me an asshole, but it won’t be anything she hasn’t called me in the past, so… Win/Win?
Book Links
Angela
Quarles is a RWA RITA® award-winning and USA Today bestselling author of contemporary,
time travel, and steampunk romance. Library Journal named her steampunk, Steam
Me Up, Rawley, Best Self-Published Romance of 2015 and Must Love Chainmail won
the 2016 RITA® Award in the paranormal category, the first indie to win in that
category. Angela loves history, folklore, and family history and combined it
with her active imagination to write stories of romance and adventure.
Author Links
Excerpt from Chapter 1 – Meets the hero
Pepper
ur 2 cold
I glare at the four-month-old text, barely glancing at the
bearded hipster bumping past me on the sidewalk. The sender? That’d be my ex. The hockey
goalie who slapped away our year-long relationship with a text. Well, a series
of texts over a five-minute span.
I’m
killing time, and like someone who keeps picking, picking, picking at a scab,
I’d pulled up those texts to stare at that last one. Cold?
Ambitious. Driven. Yes.
But cold?
I shove the phone into its pocket in my purse. I am not my parents. Thinking of those two
fills me with a familiar but fuzzy unease.
A searing wave of fuck-that-asshole follows. He’s still infecting my
life—what I need is closure. I can’t let that infection spill into my new life
here in my old hometown. I yank the phone back out, resigned at this point to
looking like an idiot to anyone who might be watching.
An article on Facebook from yesterday waves at me—hello, perfect
revenge!
Tap, tap, tap. A quick search, a phone call, and…Yes.
I mash the end call icon on my Samsung and do a tee-hee dance on
the sunny sidewalk. I sheepishly glance around to see who witnessed my little
bout of enthusiasm on Sarasota’s Main Street, but the locals and the few
meandering tourists are preoccupied with their own lives this morning. Why
should I care anyway, right?
Because thanks to my vengeance-driven donation, there’s now a Madagascar
hissing cockroach at the Bronx Zoo graced with the name Phil Stoddart.
It might be a placebo, but damn, it feels fantastic.
That task hasn’t wasted enough time, so I pop under the barely cooler shade of
one of the pin oaks lining the street and enter today’s tasks in my app. It’s
my last day for errands before I start work with my new medical practice.
Ha—look at me being all casual. My new
medical practice.
Try first. Yesterday, seeing the nameplate next to my door—Dr.
Rodgers—had brought goose bumps along my arms, making everything terrifyingly
and excitingly real. I’m finally starting my
career as a sports medicine doc. See, it’s that life I can’t wait to start after
twelve grueling years of schooling, but instead, I’m five minutes early for a
coffee date I’d rather not go on, much less be early to. So yeah, I’m stalling.
My high school best friend set me up with a colleague at her law
firm. A lawyer? No, thanks—got enough of them growing up. (Read: my parents.)
But since she’s
the only old friend I still want to hang with here, I succumbed. What’s one
morning?
All right. That’s as much as I can reasonably stall. Now to face Rick the
Lawyer, make small talk, and sip overpriced coffee. Maybe he’ll surprise me.
With the fresh reminder of Phil’s opinion of me, maybe it’ll be good to swim in
the dating pool again. Live a little.
I dodge the sidewalk amblers and push through the door of the
Mocha Cabana exactly one minute early. The rich scent of coffee and sweet pastries
envelops me. Customers of all ages are bunched around the café-style tables. The
population has definitely skewed younger since childhood. When I moved away,
the realization that not everyone was seventy-plus years old was an eye-opener.
I do a quick scan—all I have to go on is that he’s my age, he’s got dark
hair, and his name is Rick. And he’s a lawyer.
I paste on a smile.
My gaze latches onto the man by the corner window, whose
unnervingly masculine face is bisected by the fluctuating shadow of a nodding
palm frond outside. The table in front of him is practically Lilliputian, he’s so huge. He’s the only
man in the place matching Rick’s description, though, and my heart does a
tee-hee dance of its own. And I can tell, in that odd way that happens
sometimes, that he knows I’ve arrived and is aware of me viscerally. That he’s
watching without watching, because the air between us has that crackly, weighty
anticipation that triggers my sixth sense. This guy will have significance in
my life, it says.
Combined with a rush of attraction? Not the reaction I want for
a lawyer—or for anyone right now. Shit.
But Lordy, he must work out in his off hours. He’s fit in a way you
rarely see outside of movies and comic books. His hair is midnight black, and
if it wasn’t just past his ears, I’d totally peg him for active military—but
not in the way you might think. He doesn’t have those all-American good looks
honed into sharp cheekbones and jaw like you associate with Marines. No. It’s
in the posture, the confidence, the strength. He owns—dominates—the space
around him.
He has sharp
cheekbones, but they’re
not part of an overall shiny, do-gooder package. Instead, they’re combined with
an olive skin tone, five-o’clock shadow, and a commanding nose that all adds up
to Devastating..
Yipes, this easily-six-foot-two stack of hunky muscle is a
lawyer and—I swallow—my blind date.
Pulse stupidly racing and that weighty awareness tingling up my
back, I shuffle into line to order my café mocha. Deep breath. Live a little, I remind
myself.
Swim in the dating pool? Now I want to splash in it, and I can’t tell if it’s because I
want to cause a distraction or revel in the sheer fun.
One thing I do know—this reaction is so
not like me.
Excerpt Two – Steamy
We’re not going to make it to the
credits for Deadpool. We started out innocently enough—popping
popcorn (plain for me), fussing around looking for blankets, and arranging our
pillows on the couch—but there was a quality to all the innocence, as if we
knew more than watching a movie could happen here and were going through all
these maneuvers to bide our time and see if the other was on board before fully
committing.
First, we shared a blanket, a royal
blue one with some kind of stitching in the corners. Pretty, if you like that
kind of thing. Then we kept inching closer until I had my arm around her
shoulder and she was snugged up against my side. Then I threaded my hand
through hers.
Deadpool says, “Love is a beautiful
thing. When you find it, the whole world tastes like Daffodil Daydream.”
We were both unmoving under the
blanket, but now that stillness has more weight. Deadpool continues to
seemingly talk straight to me by telling me to hold onto love and not to make
mistakes.
Now each quiet pause in the movie
amplifies our awareness. I can hear her heightened breathing. The anticipation
tightening her muscles before the next crescendo of the music score drowns our
breaths out. Not that there’s a lot of quiet pauses in this movie—it’s pretty
kickass. Both action and dialogue, which would normally snag me, but it can’t
compete with Pepper. Not even when the hot chick from Firefly pops
onto the screen.
“Hey, it’s Inara.”
“Who?”
“Okay. We need to rectify this lack in
your life. Firefly?”
“Never got a chance to see it.”
I make a mental note to change that.
Our conversation is like this, like
we’re both glad to be talking about things other than the tension building
between us. “Oh damn, nice hit,” or “Shit, what did he just say?” Things like
that.
The tension skyrockets, though, when
things get hot and heavy between Deadpool and the Inara chick. I shift under
the blanket. I think her hand shifts closer.
Shit. I give in and lean down to her
temple. I hold myself still, my lips just an inch away from her beauty mark.
Her breath hitches. I brush my lips across that dot of temptation.
She’s rock still, and I’m psyching
myself up to move away, pretend for her I’d misjudged the situation, when
there’s movement under the blanket. Next, there’s a death clutch around my
neck—her hand has my T-shirt twisted into a fierce grip. Then she’s yanking my
head down to her, and our mouths bump into each other.
Oh yes.
I angle around and plant my elbow on
the back of the couch and cradle her head with my other hand. With my fingers
and my thumb resting against her cheek, I guide her in for a more controlled
but no less desperate kiss, my heart pounding as if I’d just finished log PTs.
Just like the other day at my
apartment, we’re attacking each other with our lips, our hands. I stroke my
tongue inside and groan. God, she tastes…tastes like…I don’t know what, but
it’s Pepper, and it’s intoxicating. And I want it. I want her.
But I hold back, taking my cue from her
for how far she’s willing to take this.
She tugs on the snap at my jeans.
Well, okay then.
