Here's a quick:
Trapped by day in a
dreary office job, under the thumb of a boss with dubious designs on his curvy
assistant, Vanessa dreams at night of prowling the city as a beautiful and
powerful beast. Never mind the naked sleepwalking. And there are worse things
than the mild sensory hallucinations that would have Vanessa believing she’s
faster, stronger, and keener of eye than she really ought to be. The really crazy thing is her feeling that
the sexy walking wall of muscle, Eric Salo, truly is flirting with her across
the café counter every day at lunch.
But what if, just
maybe, Vanessa isn’t crazy?
What if her dreams are
her primal animal—her latent shifter—speaking to her? What if a hidden world of werewolves,
werebears, werelions, and weretigers awaits her? Worse, what if the shadowy men she remembers
watching her as a child, before her parents were killed leaving Vanessa and her
brother all alone, are real as well and have found her again? And most importantly, what if the only one
who can protect Vanessa and help her figure out who she is and what it all
means is a sexy blond werewolf named Eric Salo?
What’s a curvy girl
doing losing her head and her heart to a 6’4” Nordic Adonis with fangs and
fur? That’s just crazy.
A snippet for good measure:
Nine square
blocks of music stages and spicy food stands sprouted up like flowers between
cracks in the pavement as she prowled the thickening crowd in all its sensory
glory. Passionate music, hot food, the bright colors of banners and stall signs
and summer clothing, and dancing in the streets. Vanessa sipped on a virgin
mojito lemonade and wove her way through the crowd with a smile on her face, a
sway to her hips, and a lightness of heart that made it seem like a perfect
evening, one where anything could happen….
Like
finding a 6’4” Nordic Adonis smiling at her from across the street as Vanessa
danced idly by herself in front of a guitarist jamming for tips. “Like sex and
candy,” she muttered under her breath, immediately thinking of the eighties
song. Eric Salo was both rolled into one. Vanessa laughed and shook her head at
herself. “You’re talking to yourself, crazy girl.”
If
there was ever a man to go crazy for…with that broad Scandinavian face,
handsome at first in a tough guy way but then softened by dimples when he
smiled and a suggestion of a cleft in his chin…. Vanessa took it in stride when
she imagined—hallucinated?—that she could smell him from so far away, amid the
throng of so many other people. Delusion or not, she caught the stirring scent
of mandarin and rosemary under a woodsy overtone that reminded her of summer
vacations in the mountains and the fantasy of sex in the forest. It was
probably that she just remembered the smell from encountering her dream man on
almost a daily basis.
Another
heavy girl might have blushed furiously and turned her head away seeing the man
gazing her direction with bright green eyes from over the top of his
sunglasses, his shoulder-length blond hair stirring in the hot summer breeze.
He wore a hint of a sensual smile on his lush lips as he stood there at ease in
his strength. That was the thing—one of the things—that struck Vanessa about
Eric Salo. He was one massive man, not just tall but hard and bulging with
muscle, and yet he didn’t have that inhibition of movement that some
bodybuilder types had. Salo moved with power but also sensual grace, like an
animal in his prime, in his element.
Vanessa
took a deep breath when she realized her stomach had tensed and started to
flutter at the sight of her lunchtime fantasy guy. That was who Eric Salo was
to her, that gorgeous hunk who always went to the same café she did for lunch
every day, who always sat a couple of stools over from her at the counter right
up against the window by the sidewalk, and who always chuckled at the same
things she did—at the characters who inhabited these streets and gave them life
and color. Like the swarthy young guitarist who had just fallen to his knees in
front of Vanessa to bid for her attention, to amuse the crowd, as he did his
best to channel Carlos Santana.
Vanessa
laughed at the street musician’s antics but kept glancing past her shoulder
toward her Viking Adonis. The woman tried not to shake her head at herself
again, at the note of familiarity and even possessiveness—as well as
hip-wriggling excitement—she felt around the blond stranger. She and Salo
literally hadn’t said more than a couple of words to one another. It was an
occasional, “Hi,” here and there or an, “Excuse me,” as one or the other got up
to leave and had to brush close in the press of the lunchtime crowd. Beyond
that… no more than sidelong glances and knowing smiles, and how much of that
was Vanessa’s acutely vivid imagination? The only reason she even knew his name
was because one of his business cards had fallen out of his wallet one day when
he was paying his check.
Eric
Salo. Environmental Engineer. Ulmer Engineering Services. As it turned out, the
walk from his office every day to the café took Salo right past Koller’s
building, past Vanessa.
But
tonight... tonight Vanessa wasn’t sure she felt like being passed. Idly
smoothing her long straight hair with one hand, hugging her cool drink to her
chest with the other, she eyed the crowd around and between Salo and herself.
The hulking blond was standing on the opposite curb with his thickly banded
arms crossed over his t-shirt-straining chest. Vanessa tried to seem like she
was just scanning the crowd and enjoying the sight as she wandered a couple of
steps toward the man, right up to the edge of the curb on her side of the
street. Was he really watching her? His gaze skipped over the streams of people
in their swirls and eddies, flowing up and down the sidewalks and in the
barricaded roadway, but his attention did appear to keep snagging on Vanessa.
She
sipped her mojito lemonade and wished distantly that it had been the real
thing. Not because she needed any kind of liquid courage. If anything, Vanessa
was always too bold for the people around her, like her overprotective brother
and for people who thought fat girls ought to be (seldom) seen and not heard.
But if she approached Eric Salo and he gave her that look, that ‘why would a
chubby girl think I was watching her’ squint…. Or if he didn’t and actually had a full conversation with her that led to anything else, and Aubrey found out….
Well then, she could have blamed it on the alcohol. As it was, with virgin
lemonade a weak justification, Vanessa was just going to have to admit that she
was bad at keeping a low profile, at settling into the quiet little office jobs
Aubrey wanted her to have instead of pursuing her public relations major, and
at not talking to gorgeous blond strangers.
That
step down from the curb sent a vibration up through Vanessa, and not just
because she was wearing three-inch heels on her otherwise office-like shoes.
She felt the electrical jolt reverberating through her rounded thighs, through
her core, up her spine. Hell, even in her sorely neglected clitoris. It had
been too long since she had allowed herself the luxury of flirtation, though
she thought about it a million times a day. Lately, all million of those
romantic, naughty, fanciful thoughts centered on the fantasy man in front of
her. The man she was walking toward right that minute with intoxicating,
exhilarating, terrifying adrenaline gushing through her body. The man who was,
she sensed, watching her from behind those dark sunglasses.
