Wild Ride to Love

posted by Nancy
Apologies to everyone for the unfortunate glitch that delayed today's blog. I especially hate it because we have a guest. Kathleen O'Reilly returns to the Lair with her latest Blaze release, Just Surrender. I've read the excerpt on her site, and I can't wait to read the book.

Welcome, Kathleen!

The hero and heroine of Just Surrender meet under less than promising circumstances, and then the hero gets an unpleasant surprise. Tell us about that.

Tyler is a surgeon, flying in for a fellowship in NYC, and he ends up in Edie’s cab, which isn’t really Edie’s cab, but she’s helping out a friend. Not being a real cabbie, she’s in it more for the meeting people than for the actual transportation aspects, and deciding that Tyler needs a friend (his girlfriend just broke up with him in a text message), she begins a night-long-trek through NYC and most of the surrounding boroughs, because she doesn’t think he should be alone. Tyler originally wants to just get back to his hotel and sleep, but he’s attracted to Edie, and uh, things move along from there.

What I like about both the hero and the heroine in this book is how similar their core personalities are. Edie wants to fix the entire world, wants to be everyone’s friend, wants to be the person that everyone goes to for help, and she’s got a big enough ego that she thinks she can. However, deep down, she’s scared of a real emotional bond, and so her actions are all very superficial. Tyler is a heart-surgeon. He wants to fix everyone, too, but he doesn’t think he’s capable of a real emotional bond.

Geez dumping a guy with a text message! After that, just as Ty and Edie are getting along so well (not!), something happens that makes his evening even worse . . .

They get a flat. In Brooklyn. In one of the seedier parts of Brooklyn. And it’s raining. Watching a man who needs to control everything stuck in a situation that is out of his control was a ball to write. In my real world, I know and love a lot of control freaks, and I adore when life whacks them upside the head, because… well, they don’t handle it well. I think God does it, on purpose, only because he thinks it’s funny. So do I.

So one thing leads to another leads to a bar. The excerpt on your website ends there. Is it fair to ask where our hero and heroine proceed after that?

Hehehe…. It’s a Blaze. There’s sex.

LOL! Would you like to share an excerpt here?

Tyler examined his mud-splattered shirt, pulling it free from his pants, ready to burn the damn thing. He looked up into the rear-view mirror and met her eyes. “Why are you smiling?”

“You look good in dirt," she told him, and he noticed the dimple on the right cheek, which was completely free of both dirt or guilt.

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m trying to cheer you up." She sounded sincere and completely comfortable. Not painfully aroused. Not wondering what he looked liked naked.

“Get me to my hotel," he growled, too tired for his clinical voice. "That'll cheer me up.”

“Why don’t you like me?”

“Because you feed on people’s pain.”

“I do not," she insisted.

“Then why are you so intrigued by the fact that I got dumped?” It stung. Yes. Stung. Tyler wasn't used to pain. He cured pain. He prescribed meds for pain. He analyzed pain, and monitored pain, but goddamnit, he did not feel it. It wasn’t even Cynthia so much as the idea that he wasn’t good enough. It was a pain he’d stopped felling a long time ago. Or so he thought.

“Aha, I knew I was right," Edie chirped, pouring salt into the wound. "Not that I'm happy you got dumped. Satisfied, yes? I mean, I do like to be right. Especially on matters of reading people. Don’t you like adventures?”

Adventures were the nation’s number one cause of death..

He blamed Cynthia for his foul mood. She had dragged him into this gutter of embarrassing juvenile behavior. Edie had merely pummeled him until he had no choice but to regress. Such asinine justifications cheered him up.

Almost as much as the cheery idea of dirty, bacteria-infected, saliva-swapping sex. Tyler smiled to himself. "Sorry," he apologized politely.

“Why don’t you let me buy you a drink?” she asked, apparently not sensing the darker trend to his thoughts.

“Why?” he asked, stalling for time, because his first answer that leaped to his brain was 'yes.'

“I owe you. You’re doing a nice thing, and you didn’t say a word when I tooled all over the tri-state region. Tonight you've changed a flat, your girlfriend of some indeterminate amount of time dumped you, all of which happened when you should be getting well laid at the hotel. If there’s anybody in the world that needs a drink, it’s you. Maybe a shot of tequila, or ouzo. I know this Greek bar...”

“I don’t want to go to a Greek bar,” he told her, shifting uncomfortably, finding an exposed spring in the seat, feeling it cut into his thigh. Probably severing the femoral artery, thereby letting him bleed out a quick and painless death. Then Cynthia would feel bad. Because she had dumped him in a text message.

“How about an American bar?” Edie suggested, as if all his immediate pains could be solved with alcohol. A bar was a recipe for disaster, but since Tyler had apparently not severed his femoral artery and was going to live, alcohol now seemed almost plausible.

“If I let you buy me a drink, one drink -- will you drive me back to the hotel?” There was a roughness in his voice that worried him. And now he was creating justifications of extraordinary mental dexterity designed solely to further his own penile agenda. Although to be fair, he didn’t want to have a penile agenda. He wanted to get to the hotel, take a shower, climb into bed. He could visualize it all. Unfortunately, his visuals also included Edie. And she was naked. And limber.

“I’ll drive you straight back to the hotel. I swear,” she promised, but Tyler knew when disaster lurked around the corner, when a surgery was doomed before it started. He didn’t like to think these were premonitions, because that implied his subconscious was guiding his decision -- or worse, his penis.

Tonight Cynthia had dumped him. Texas’ #4 cardio-thoracic surgeon with a net worth of over four million, who had saved her father’s life, not once, but three times, not that anyone was counting. If there was a woman in the world who owed him her undying gratitude, it was Cynthia.

So what if he wanted to be a jackass? If he wanted to have a drink? If he wanted to have limber sex with a woman who felt some deep-seated desire to make him feel better? By God, he should. If he wanted to do something wild, spontaneous, and hair-raising, then by God, he had a premeditated right to go for it.

It was because of such elaborate rationalizations that his father had called him Shit-For-Brains Sophocles, but Tyler always shrugged it off. Although now he did wonder if Sophocles ever created meaningless justifications in pursuit of limber sex. Probably not. Probably Sophocles never had shit for brains. Only Tyler.

“One drink. An American bar,” he agreed, resigned to his decision.

“A friend of mine works in a strip club.”

He smiled at her, mud-splattered and grimy with an agenda that was just as black.

To read more, click here.

******

What inner conflicts keep Edie and Ty apart?

In this book, it’s Edie who is running from a relationship. Her father is a world-class surgeon who has neglected his family for his career, although he’s still a very good man. Edie resents her father for putting his family second, but gets mad at herself for resenting all the patients who prevent the man from being a real father to her. Tyler’s journey is much shorter. He thinks that he’s not capable of loving anyone, but then he falls in love with Edie and realizes that he’d never met the right woman for him before.

Can you give us a hint of what ultimately brings them together?

Edie’s father, and I think that’s all I can say without spoilers. ☺


Don't you have a book out in May, too? What's that about?

Okay, so this IS the May book, officially. Amazon has been selling it since the 19th, but last night my local Target still had the April books out. And the Kindle edition goes on sale May 1st. Color me confused. But anyway, sometime soon, this book will be out, (unless you order mass-market from Amazon, in which case you can get it now).

I have Austen Hart’s story in July, JUST LET GO, and then in September of 2011, it’s Brooke Hart’s story, JUST GIVE IN.

After that, what's on your horizon?

I’m waiting to hear from my editor on my next trilogy, so we’ll see. And I’ve been working on a single title contemporary as well. No idea about that one, but crossed fingers are appreciated as well.

For more about Kathleen and her books, visit her website.

Kathleen is giving a signed, personalized copy of Just Surrender to one commenter today. So tell us, what's the strangest cab (or other vehicle) ride you ever took? Have you ever had a day where just everything went wrong? Or a chance encounter with a stranger who became a friend or more?

Travel Hell

Today we welcome Blaze author Kathleen O'Reilly back to the lair. Kathleen's latest book, Hot Under Pressure, was inspired by a travel problem she's going to describe for us, so today's topic is travel disasters. She's also going to give us a peek into the book, which is not only hot but funny. Welcome, Kathleen!

Hello, Banditas, and thanks to Nancy for giving me the opportunity to pull up a keyboard and chat for a bit. I love to be in the company of romance readers, and this blog seems to draw in the best.

When I first came up with the idea for HOT UNDER PRESSURE, I was stuck on the tarmac at LaGuardia. For about five hours. Now, this was the fall of 2007, and it wasn’t a pretty time in the airline service industry. It seemed like every day, there was some new delay, some new travel-atrocity and I shouldn’t have been surprised to be stuck – but you never expect it until it happens to you.

What happened to the social dynamic within the plane was fascinating. The cabin was abuzz with rumors regarding the actual cause, (I learned that airlines are reluctant to admit that the plan is being delayed because of maintenance reasons), but the flight attendant in the back would let us know when she knew something from the front cabin attendant who apparently had a hot line into the maintenance crew. People would wander from group to group, casually eavesdropping to see if they could learn something new. After two hours, they did let us off the plane (it was November, so heat wasn’t too much of a problem, but it still got uncomfortable), and some passengers left to find another flight, and some of us stuck it out, playing airline roulette, hoping that the part that they were waiting on would arrive.

I’m happy to say that the part did arrive, the plane took off about six hours late, and I pulled my not-spring-chicken parents out of bed at 2am to pick me from at the airport, instead of the completely respectable 7pm (I love you, Mom and Dad, and someday I’ll repay this one).

These days, everyone has their travel horror stories. A flight delay, a surly gate-keeper, the practical-joker bus-driver who likes to fool the passengers about the vehicle’s actual destination. The TSA officer who thinks that your accidental corkscrew brands you a terrorist. My favorite story is the one where I nearly got arrested in St. Petersburg, Russia. All because of Prince Charles.

So, how about it? Travel horror stories? Trips from hell? Feel free to share. To one lucky commenter, I have a copy of my newest release, HOT UNDER PRESSURE, a Harlequin Blaze that answers that long-suffering question: If air travel is going to be such a huge pain to deal with these days, can a single woman please sit next to a hot, single man who’s you know, nice? Sometimes (usually only in fiction), the answer is *yes*.

Two hours later they were still at the gate. They were waiting on either a part, or a new plane, the pilots weren’t sure which would arrive first, but they had high (ludicrously delusional) hopes for getting away tonight. In the face of such facts, Ashley had long abandoned her fear of flying. It was obvious they weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Instead she was thigh-locked with David, who had very nice thighs, too. Hard. His arms were fab as well. Thirty minutes ago, he’d pushed up his sleeves, and her gaze kept stalling out on the biceps, which were bigger than most, an odd incongruity for khakis and a button-down, and she wondered why. He wasn’t bulky enough to be a weight-lifter, but his arms were too big for a swimmer or a runner, definitely too big for a tiny airplane seat. They kept brushing against hers, casually, which didn’t explain the electric shock to her system.

Not that he was making it any easier. Conversation had ceased about half an hour ago when she caught him staring at her chest, and they both looked politely away.

Damn.

She crossed her legs, uncrossed her legs, and had a harebrained urge to ask him to join her in the bathroom. She’d pulled out Vogue and Harpers and Lucky, but even the lure of the sloe-eyed models in their daring designs hadn’t dimmed the awareness that simmered in the air.

The bright spot in the tension was Junior, which said a lot about her feelings of desperation. Junior wrote on David’s hand with a pen, and David laughed, sounding more relieved than amused. Junior ran up and down the aisle, and Ashley counted the laps, rather than fixate on the discreetly covered ridge in David’s khaki slacks.

Do not go there.

Go there, Ashley.

Oh, yeah, good of you to talk. You can’t have sex on a plane, Valerie.

People do.

Not me.

There was a momentary pause in her thoughts, because right now, given readily available options, she could so have sex on this plane.

Another thirty minutes passed, and the flight attendants were passing out drinks. Yes, alcohol, the world’s most potent aphrodisiac. When the flight attendant stopped at their row, David shook his head, Ashley shook her head, and Junior’s mother and father opted for double vodka tonics.

Outside the window, the lights of the airport started to dim. If she lowered her hand one inch, just one tiny inch, she would be touching his thigh. If she were careful, it would look like an accident.

Junior spilled a glass of orange juice on those khakis that she was not looking at, and David shot sideways, and there was a momentary barrage of touches. His hand, her breast. Her hand, his thigh. She jumped back, arching toward the aisle, and he moved away, hugging the far armrest. Junior’s mother apologized, and Ashley’s nipples were powered by a thousand jet-engines, ready for take-off.

It was shortly after her breasts had recovered from the shock that the captain came on the speaker and announced that moment they had all been expecting.

“Ladies and gentleman, we tried. But there’s bad weather in New York, and we couldn’t get the plane that we were hoping for, and they can’t get the part here until the morning, so I’m sorry to say, we won’t be going anywhere. If any of you need hotel accommodations at the airport, there’s a flight attendant waiting to give you the details.”

A hotel. Suddenly the word took on new connotations and images. A hotel implied a bed, privacy, something much more comfortable than a 1x1 bathroom designed by Boeing. A hotel implied sex.

The cabin lights went on, and people around them began to move, moaning, complaining, and in general, were not in their happy place. However, Ashley’s happy place was getting happier by the second. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to assume, most of all, she didn’t want to act as if she didn’t know what she was doing. After all, she was mature, she was an adult, and after eight hours of sitting thigh to thigh with this man, she was primed to explode with only a touch.

He turned, a slight inclination of his head, and she met his eyes. It was ESP of the most carnal kind. She licked her lips, his gaze tracked her tongue, and she knew that he knew.

He leaned down, his mouth near her ear. “You should know that right now, I’m a very happy man.”

For more about Kathleen, visit her website. For a bigger peek at Hot Under Pressure, click here. And to don't forget to leave her a comment about your own travel trials.