She’ll
do anything to get her way.
Tall, elegant and beautiful, Emma Thorpe
has wanted a baby for years. The yearning for a child occupies all her thought,
her time, her effort, and any money she and her husband can scrape up for
medical intervention. After trying and failing to conceive, the solution that
finally comes to her is to leave her husband and hope to find a man—any man—capable
of fulfilling her deepest desire.
Big, handsome Clay Thorpe isn’t the kind
of man to let his wife just wander away. It takes a few months of Emma’s
absence from his bed to devise a plan, but he’s determined. Eventually, Clay
lures Emma home with a convoluted strategy only he could concoct, involving an
antique diamond ring, sex three times a day, and...a turkey baster?
Read an excerpt:
The cowbell attached by a
copper spiral to the front door chimed.
Emma’s hands stilled at the
sound. She’d been standing at the glass display counter that faced the front
door, hands busy untangling the delicate chains of a snarl of antique pendants
that had arrived with the rest of what she’d bought at an estate sale the
previous month. She hadn’t had time to thoroughly examine all the various items
that she had acquired by the boxful. But now traffic in her store slowed with
the arrival of cold weather and put a virtual stop to outdoor sales and
auctions in southwest Wyoming for the year. She looked up, and when she saw who
it was she forced her fingers to be still and not tremble.
She doubted if this visit was
professional, even though he wore the full complement of official paraphernalia
in Velcro pouches on his belt and clipped to his shirt beneath the faux
sheepskin-lined winter jacket. He knew her well and would know she was asking,
without asking, what he wanted. In the middle of a chilly workday. In her shop.
Where if he wanted to start up again with the questions that she had no answer
for, she couldn’t very well turn and run.
“Emma,” he said as he removed
his tan ball cap with its seven-point gold sheriff’s department logo, which he
held in one hand by its curled visor. He stretched out the opposite long
forefinger with a clean, neatly clipped nail to give the chains she was working
on a tiny bit of a swirl on the glass. Not enough to make the job of
disentangling them harder. But enough to let her know he acknowledged he was
interrupting her day. “Quite a mess,” he said of the situation with the
pendants. Or of the situation between them, perhaps. She couldn’t be completely
certain at this point, what Clay meant.
She wasn’t sure what to say
either. May I help you? or What can I do for you today? were both
out of the question. He had made clear on several occasions since she moved out
exactly how she could help him and what she could do for him. Some of his
requests had to do with sex, between old friends, if friendship was all that
remained between them. Those she steadfastly refused. But most of his appeals
had to do with her moving back home. Which she couldn’t do, so there was no
point in talking about it anymore.
“Place looks nice.” He nodded
at the various Christmas displays which she had put up early in an effort to
make herself feel better: the tree in the middle of the worn plank floor with
its antique glass ornaments and strings of popcorn and colorful paper chains,
the gifts in foil and ribbons of gold and red and green under the tree and
distributed here and there among the rest of the store’s merchandise.
“Thanks.” She had spent many
hours decorating the shop, even though her heart had hardly cooperated with the
effort. She felt more like Scrooge than Santa this year. But it was her own
fault, and so she just got on with things whether she felt in the proper spirit
or not.
“I need something,” he said,
and she thought, Oh boy, here it comes. And, truly, she didn’t know at this
instant what her answer would be. Sometimes she dreamed about Clay and what had
been between them, specifically the fleshy ax handle he carried in his pants
and that he wielded so well and that she missed so much, and more generally
what a good life they’d had together. She had been determined to leave him, but
lately she had been questioning whether her decision hadn’t been rash. Perhaps,
as Clay had insisted more than once and which she had refused to consider,
there was another way.
****
Buy the book
About Christi:
My fiction is contemporary, so the settings and the
characters are completely modern and struggle with today’s issues. But the men
and women in my writing leave a big footprint, because their personalities and
their solutions to problems hark back to the iconic days which really don’t
exist anymore. My characters truly live by the Code of the West.Christi Williams writes contemporary sensual romance set in Wyoming. My strong heroines love cowboys and lawmen!
I love hearing from readers, so please contact me.
My links:
Some Like It Hotter http://writerchristi.blogspot.
