At Last (40 page)
Authors: Jill Shalvis
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction / Romance - Contemporary, #Fiction
Dear Reader,
You’ve now met several characters from my Warriors of the Rift series, and in SECRET OF THE WOLF you get to know Dante MacMillan and Victoria Joseph. Dante’s a man with a lot of people depending on him, from his colleagues to his sister, who’s just getting over chemotherapy treatments and an unexpected divorce—as well as three lovely four-legged friends named Big Ben, Studmuffin, and Sugardaddy.
Some of the real events that happened in the Phoenix area while I was writing this book included a huge dust storm called a haboob. The first one that blew through the area shut down Sky Harbor Airport. The monster was around 5,000 feet high when it slammed into Phoenix, but radar indicated it had reached heights of 10,000 feet prior to hitting the city. It was caused by the winds that come with our monsoon season, but instead of a rain storm the Phoenix area got a dust storm.
I think I’d rather have monsters in the form of werewolves and vampires, thank you very much. A 10,000-foot-high wall of dust is too apocalyptic for me. (Come to think of it, I may actually prefer a zombie apocalypse over a haboob. The one we had was very reminiscent of that
one scene in
The Mummy
. Of course, if Brendan Fraser came along for the ride…)
While Dante and Tori didn’t have to put up with monster dust storms, they did have to work with other monsters while they focused on a special project during their off-duty hours that brought them close in more ways than one.
As with
Kiss of the Vampire
, I have extras up on my website: a character interview with Tori, some pictures of Scottsdale where the story takes place, and a character tree showing the Council of Preternaturals and their hierarchy.
Look for the next installment,
Heart of the Demon
, coming soon! Finn Evnissyen may not be all he seems to be.
Happy Reading!
Dear Reader,
A few years ago, my family went camping. We brought our boat, and on the first day there, we launched it on the lake for the duration of our stay. My husband gave me my choice of driving the truck and trailer to the campsite
or driving the boat across the lake to the dock. It was windy, and I’m a boat wuss, so I picked the truck. Halfway around the lake, I got the trailer stuck on a weird hairpin turn and had to be rescued by a forest ranger. He was big and tough and armed and overworked, and undoubtedly underpaid as well, but the man helped me out of a jam so my husband wouldn’t kill me. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to write a forest ranger into one of my books as a hero.
Enter Matt Bowers. Big and tough and armed and overworked and underpaid. Like my real-life hero, he also stopped and helped a damsel in distress. Of course, Matt gets a lot more in the bargain than my poor beleaguered forest ranger ever got. Matt Bowers gets waitress Amy Michaels, beautiful, tough, jaded… and in desperate need of rescuing. She just doesn’t know it yet.
Hope you enjoy watching these two warily circle each other on their path to true love. Like me, neither of them takes the easy way. I mean, what’s the fun in that?
Our family had a great summer at that lake, and it’s a great summer for me this year too with not one, but three Lucky Harbor novels. So if you enjoy AT LAST, don’t miss sexy Special Ops soldier Ty Garrison in
Lucky in Love
and handsome doctor Josh Scott in
Forever and a Day,
coming in August.
Happy Reading—all summer long!
http://www.facebook.com/jillshalvis
Dear Reader,
There used to be a bar way out in the country where my husband and I would go with a bunch of our friends to dance on Saturday nights. We’d drive for miles and miles down these dark, unlit roads, and then in the distance we’d see the glow against the night sky from the pole lights in the parking lot. We’d pull in, the gravel crunching under our tires, and the place would be packed. After we found a place to park, we’d scramble out of our cars and head inside. The sound of country music and the smell of beer would hit us like a wave when we walked in the door. And the building—it was gigantic, a big, barn-like place—but we’d find a table and settle in for a night of two-stepping, drinking beer, and hanging out with our friends.
As I danced, I couldn’t help but do a little people watching. The women would all be dressed to the nines in their dancing outfits, trying to catch someone’s eye. The men would be on the prowl but doing their best to play it cool. I’d keep my eye on the blonde woman in the yellow dress: She’d come with one guy, but she danced with another one all night long. Or the tall, stern-looking cowboy at the bar who never took his eyes off the short, dark-haired girl in the pink shirt for a single second. She huddled up with a group of girlfriends, so I wondered if he’d ever work up the courage to ask her for a dance. There might be a couple arguing in one corner, and a couple kissing in another. It was always quite a show: love, lust,
broken hearts, maybe some cheating, and a lot of hanky-panky—all played out to the quick-quick, slow-slow beat of a country song. That dance hall is gone now, and the countryside has been swallowed up by neighborhoods and paved roads with streetlights, but I haven’t forgotten the nights I spent there.
So it’s no accident that the first scene of my book AIN’T MISBEHAVING takes place in a parking lot. Not just any parking lot, but the parking lot outside of Lu Lu’s, the local watering hole in Everson, Texas. When Marla Jean Bandy decides it’s time to quit spending nights home alone after her divorce, when she decides it’s time to bust out and have some fun, Lu Lu’s is just the kind of place I thought she needed. Decked out in a tight red dress and her best cowboy boots, she’s ready to get back out there and have a good time… until Jake Jacobsen, a childhood crush, shows up and tries to run interference. Marla Jean is about to find out that a parking lot on a Saturday night can be full of delicious possibilities.
I hope you enjoy AIN’T MISBEHAVING and have fun getting to know Marla Jean, Jake, and all the meddlesome, well-meaning folks in Everson, Texas.
Happy Reading!
Twitter @cannonmolly
Praise for Jill Shalvis and Her Novels
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Jill Shalvis
Excerpt from
Forever and a Day
copyright © 2012 by Jill Shalvis
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