What will you do the Day after Christmas????

READ STEALING CARMEN. I finally have a release date of December 26, 2007!! Yayyyy.

STEALING CARMEN is a delicious love story with a Christmas ending. I was so afraid it would not get a December release date because it's not part of the lovely Holiday series EC has planed. STEALING CARMEN came to me long after those deadlines had past.

So here is a little bit of Christmas early from STEALING CARMEN

He really was a fucking romantic. Carmen had seen right through him. Who arrives on Christmas Eve and expects the little woman to be waiting when she hasn’t heard from him in seventeen months?

Jack concentrated on getting the plane on the ground. It was a near thing but he eventually came to a skidding halt, the nose protruding way off the runway. The voice in his headset had been yelling useless instructions as he skidded in. Jack hadn’t minded. The guy needed to feel as if he were doing something useful while he watched a near crash. Now the man in the tower was silent.

“What? Disappointed?” Jack asked as he gingerly turned the plane and headed to the tie-down areas. Being both alive and on the ground improved his mood.

“You took a fu—freaking year off my life, bast—buddy,” the voice responded. “I don’t know who you are, but next time you crash into an airport, do it somewhere else.”

“Well, you’re new here or you wouldn’t have Christmas duty. You’ll get used to me,” Jack reassured the flight controller.

“Don’t tell me this is your home field.”

“Yep, it is now.”

“Fu— nuts.”

“If I’m lucky,” Jack responded with a chuckle to what the guy really said, though not quite how he meant it.

“Right. In that case give me her name so I can call her and let her know how near death you came. Any woman worth her salt will take your head off for attempting that landing.”

“Not a chance, buddy. Thanks, by the way. The landing lights helped.”

The voice laughed. “Go away so I can lock up. This place is officially closed ’til the weather clears.”

Jack was already about done shutting down. “I’m gone. Just have to tie-down and then my tail lights are outta here.”

He kept the Jeep in the hanger with the battery on a charger, he was pretty sure it would start.

Time to go see if she was still his. That was a damn optimistic thought. Even if the woman was living next door he couldn’t expect anything.

The time he’d been gone had been more than seventeen months in terms of who he was. Coming back to her might have been his motivation in those moments when nothing else would do it but that didn’t make it her responsibility to take what he was now.

There were new lines on his face, more gray in his hair and fresh scars on his body. His soul had paid a price for victory. Being the victor didn’t make him the winner if he didn’t get the girl. Her wanting what was left of him was the gamble.


Coming from Ellora's Cave December 26, 2007.