Let’s get out there & play! :hot

Last week, I shared an excerpt from my April Harlequin Desire, PROJECT: RUNAWAY HEIRESS, that was a glimpse of our heroine, Lily, from our sexy British hero’s point of view.

This week, I’m flipping the coin & letting Lily give you an exclusive look at Nigel… :moonyou

She threw a few items like her wallet, a lipstick, keys, and her cell phone (just in case) in a small, plain black clutch, and finally thought she was ready enough to jump when Nigel arrived.

She’d just taken a deep, stabilizing breath and was contemplating one last visit to the restroom when the doorbell rang.

Whatever calm she’d managed to find with that long inhalation evaporated at the shrill, mechanical sound, and a lump of dread began to grow in the pit of her stomach.

Fingers curled around her purse, she swallowed hard and moved to the door.  Because she didn’t want Nigel peeking inside and seeing that there were no personal touches to the apartment to affirm her claims of having lived in the city for several years, she opened it only a crack, using her body to block his view.

As quickly and smoothly as she could, she slipped out into the hallway, pulling the door closed and locked behind her.  Leaning back, she used the doorjamb to prop herself up, feeling suddenly overwhelmed and overly scrutinized.

Nigel’s hazel eyes studied her from head to toe.  He was standing so close, she could see the specks of green dotting his irises and smell the spicy-with-a-hint-of-citrus of his cologne.

She inhaled, drawing the scent deeper into her lungs, then realized what she was doing and stopped.  Holding her breath in hopes that he wouldn’t notice her small indiscretion.

It was not a good idea to start thinking her boss smelled good.  She already found him attractive, simply because he was.  Anyone, female or male, would have to agree based on his physical attributes alone.  Much the way everyone knew clouds were white, the sky was blue, and a handsome man was a handsome man.

That didn’t mean she should be building on that initial assessment by adding “smells really good” to the tally.

Is there anything sexier than a man who smells good enough to eat?  I don’t think so.  And neither does Lily. :hot

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Know how to give an author a heart attack?

Tell her pages from the latest manuscript she’s working on are missing.  Or better yet, let her discover that fact for herself.

What you’ll hear is a high-pitched Noooooooooooo!  Followed by a lot of cursing & crying.

That’s what happened to me last week when I was adding some newly typed-up pages of PROJECT: RUNAWAY BRIDE to what I already had on file.  Everything was going fine until I tried to piece them together & they didn’t fit.  Didn’t fit because a big chunk was missing.

Insert much wailing & hair-pulling & rending of garments.

I had no idea where the pages were or what had happened to them.  Where could they have gone?  The only explanation I could think of was that the missing section was part of the story I’d typed originally on my Neo (before switching to writing by hand) & that when I’d begin typing up the handwritten pages, I’d accidentally typed over some very important text.

Noooooooooooooooooooooo! :waaa

I was pretty much a basket case for a while, not knowing what I was going to do.  I had no idea what was missing, story- & dialogue-wise to write it again.  And quite frankly, I don’t have time to rewrite big sections of this story.

Then a miracle occurred.  No, really, it was a miracle.  I remembered that it’s possible to retrieve a deleted file from the Neo as long as that file hasn’t already had new text typed into it.

Yay!  But also yikes!  Really, what were the chances that I hadn’t typed over the old stuff thinking it was a nice, empty file?

But I dug out my User’s Manual, anyway, & figured out how to do at least look for the lost text.  Then I went through every file on the Neo & desperately tried to retrieve everything that had been deleted.  Ever.

Miracle #2 is that I found it.  I actually found the chunk of the story that was missing & that I really, really thought was gone forever.

Whew.  Major relief & massive panic attack averted.

But it was very, very scary, & I never want something like that to happen again.  Twice in a lifetime is plenty.  (Yes, this has actually happened to me once before, though not quite the same way.)

And now I can continue to move forward with Juliet’s & Reid’s story instead of floundering around moving backwards.