Welcome to our third week of celebrations for the amazing
In today's post, we're going to look at
The Buyout and
Talk Turkey, and a personal story Bru has chosen to share. There's also another chance to win one of her books.
First up,
The Buyout
Blurb:
All Parker Anderson has ever wanted is to take over as CEO of Anderson Industries when his father retires. But when his father is ready to leave the company, he doesn’t plan to pass the reins to Parker. Instead, he plans to sell the company, jeopardizing not only Parker’s job but hundreds of others.
Parker finds an unlikely ally in Mason Pike, the company’s resident IT guru. What starts as a flirtation takes them from coworkers to co-conspirators in a plan to forcibly buy Anderson Industries out from under Parker’s father. While they focus on the buyout, their budding romance has to be put on hold, but that doesn't stop them from flirting and teasing each other to distraction—and once their master plan comes to fruition, nothing and no one can keep them apart.
Excerpt:
Parker’s stomach dropped as he watched his computer freeze, flicker, and then reboot. He held his breath, counting out the seconds the way his friend Greg’s girlfriend, Jill, had taught him. She was a yoga devotee, and even though he still thought any activity that required that much quiet and contemplation was not a sport, he did have to grudgingly agree that her meditation techniques had helped him get a handle on his infamous temper. He’d gone through six assistants in eighteen months before Luke had come to him, and that had been four years earlier.
He credited it both to Jill’s anger management coaching and Luke’s absolute refusal to take him seriously. It helped that Luke had known him since college. It meant he knew when to joke around and when to take Parker seriously. So when Parker threw the door to his office open, panicking as he bellowed for Luke to call the tech department to get someone up there immediately before disappearing back inside without another word, Luke calmly picked up the phone and did just that.
Parker paced his office, casting a glance at his blank computer screen every thirty seconds or so. That was the amount of time it took to pace two figure eights around his office, skirting the couch and the worktable he’d had installed a few years earlier, since his desk was far too expensive and impractical for him to bother actually working on it.
All he had to do was send it to Luke to be printed and collated. Fifty pages of research and strategy that were currently lost in the ether, since he hadn’t backed up the data anywhere else, and he hadn’t had a chance to send it to Luke before the computer crashed.
Crashed. Parker snorted, looking from the computer to the door again, his anger growing as minutes slipped by without the arrival of a computer tech. Anderson Industries had an enormous technical department, larger than most of the others at comparable companies, because Richard Anderson had been a programmer himself before amassing his conglomerate. As a result, he was willing to sink a fair amount of Anderson Industries’ operating budget into technology and the staff to maintain it. They had a stable of top-notch programmers as well, not that Parker had the faintest idea what they did. The tech department fell under Parker’s purview as vice president of operations. It handled maintenance and installation on all the things like computers and phones, and that was all he needed to know. His father oversaw the programming division, since it was part of the corporation’s research and development section. A section Parker desperately wanted to handle. That was the reason he’d thrown himself into the Johnson & Co. buyout; he needed to be able to prove to his father that he hadn’t studied business at Harvard just to be in charge of departments that did things like buy office supplies, pay the electric bills, and fix computers.
Parker growled when he looked at his watch. He had nine minutes to retrieve the report, print it, and be at his father’s office. He spent the first two of them contemplating firing everyone in the tech department, a threat he would to follow through on cheerfully if someone didn’t come through the door in the next thirty seconds to fix his goddamn computer.
Forty seconds later, the door burst open without so much as a knock. A tall dark-haired man practically fell through it, tripping over the threshold and nearly dropping the laptop he carried.
Luke’s head popped in the doorway a second later.
“Mason Pike here to see to your computer,” he said, meeting Parker’s eye with a half smile. “Sir.
Get the book:
Second in today's line-up,
Talk Turkey
Blurb:
Carson is a California transplant settling into life in the Windy City. On his first Christmas away from home, he assures his worried family he’ll be having a real Christmas dinner.
Recent culinary school graduate Tom Stockton earns some extra money giving out cooking advice at the Talk Turkey hotline. Tom’s honeyed voice and sharp sense of humor are attractive to the lonely Carson, and Carson finds reasons to call the hotline again and again. But on Christmas Eve, Carson’s call is less playful and more panicked with the big meal looming. Carson is just looking for advice, but Tom has a surprise in store that might lead to much more.
A story from the Dreamspinner Press 2015 Advent Calendar package "Sleigh Ride".
Excerpt:
It couldn't be that difficult. People had been doing it for centuries. Longer, even. Man had probably started roasting turkeys over the fire as soon as someone realized the ugly buggers were edible.
Not that the pristinely wrapped turkeys in front of him bore any resemblance to the sort of turkeys he was used to seeing. These weren’t crispy-skinned and steaming, with drumsticks and wings held aloft with string, ready-to-be-carved turkeys. They were vaguely ovoid-shaped and covered in bright yellow netting that didn’t look the slightest bit appetizing.
Did he need a turkey with a timer in it? How would that even work? Wasn’t that what a meat thermometer was for?
Blurb:
