We're getting SO close to the release of Bittersweet (Love Edy Book Two). To celebrate, I have a few thrills in store for fans. Starting today, subscribers to my newsletter updates will find out how they can win a Kindle Fire in time for the holidays. Checking in to RSVP for the Bittersweet Virtual Release Party on Facebook will give you chances to grab swag and more on Dec. 9th.
Finally, for those of you who aren't members of my Facebook Fan Club and/or didn't attend the Bittersweet Cover Reveal online, I'm including the Book Two teaser you missed out on. Enjoy!

Bittersweet (Love Edy Book Two)


The fear of not seeing pulsed hotter, truer, and more ferocious than the fear of seeing and knowing. With Hassan’s muscle-bulked body taunt over hers, Edy succumbed to the numbness. Even her breathing came in reluctant swallows. Tires shrieked outside. No, tires screamed their getaway as Hassan’s forehead pressed into hers. In his eyes flamed the fires of desperation.

“Don’t,” he whispered in Punjabi, lips brushing hers. “Don’t move yet.”

“This is the District Attorney, Rebecca Phelps. I have shots fired at my personal premises with one individual in need of urgent medical attention. The address is 2260 Dunberry Street.”

A bubbling, gurgling sound emerged. A wet splat of a cough.

“You probably want to hurry,” Edy’s mother said. “Either that or send the coroner.”

‘Coroner’ punched Edy in the gut. Friend or not, Wyatt wouldn’t meet his end bleeding out on her living room floor. Nor would he do it while her mother blew him off like another stray cat.

Wyatt gasped, as if shocked by some sudden, unseen fright. He began to moan, low, slow drawn out mewls, before a grunt seized him. He stilled.

“Wyatt?” Edy screamed. The second Hassan let her up, she tore for him.
Edy slowed once Wyatt lay at her feet, chalk white and rigid as a high wire.
Dying? Dead?

Yes.

Wyatt coughed, splattering blood on hard chapped lips, on an em dash of a chin, on cheeks of oyster, alabaster, pearl, wax.
Tears flushed him from sight. Edy blinked, inhaled, and shook resolve into play. “Hassan.”

“Yeah?” Already he stood at her side.

“Gimmie your sweater.”

It snagged on his eagerness and tore. Left in a sculpting, bare white tee amidst the whistle of frostbitten winds, Hassan held out his only source of heat to Edy in an offering. Offering her his last.

Edy dropped to her knees and ran frantic hands across Wyatt’s torso, halting at the slick stream painting his rib cage.
Breathe.

“Here,” she said and Hassan fell down alongside her. Together they pressed his battered sweater to Wyatt’s chest, clenching so that their knuckles touched. Edy’s heart strummed, gruesome as a death march, cadence steady despite the task. Her mother stood with her back flat to the wall, eyes narrowed, mouth cork screwed in disapproval. Every so often, she proffered a weak command for them to get away from Wyatt, to let the authorities do their job when they came.

Hassan leaned over him and put an ear to his lips as a single siren wailed long and low, too far, too slow, too late. Warm wetness pooled at their knees, gathering, growing, threatening by the second, and Edy refused to see it or to believe it. Wyatt whimpered. His chest shuddered and he swiped an arm out at thin air.

“I heard you,” Hassan said and jerked backed, burned.

Edy pressed a sopping sweater against Wyatt with all her might and shoved back the vicious lie that said ‘too late, out of time, so long.’ It all felt no good. She shoved harder against his ribs, then harder, and a broken breath escaped him, as if she’d done more harm than good.
She’d always done more harm than good.
Edy wiped her face and the tears ran like blood now.

Hassan stared off, distant, as if waffling between here and there, as he knelt nearby. Edy nearly screamed at him to keep up, to apply pressure, to apply all the pressure, but when her lips parted, he moved: he whispered to Wyatt. Then he went to pull down a curtain.
Up and on his feet he went, away from Wyatt with blood on his cheek and his fitted white shirt, blood flooding the knees of his jeans, and blood like gloves on his hands.

Sirens sliced into Edy’s skull as the hulking hole of night blew every scrap of fabric and scrambled red lights overhead. A bang sounded and then another. Wyatt wouldn’t move. Edy couldn’t see; if only she could stop shaking long enough and really see what was before her, she could make sense of all the red, all the blood, and—and—

Hands pulled at her. Not Hassan’s. Arms wrapped her. Not Hassan’s. Edy swung arms and legs viciously, connecting with bone, hammering to dent; because Wyatt needed saving and no one would stop her.

Rough hands yanked, shoved, and twisted Edy towards the exit as shouts followed her. Screams. Chaos. Don’t move. Don’t move. With the front door battering against the wall, and the window yawning like some forgotten cave, Edy welcomed this at last, the barking cavalry of hell’s legion, chaos at dawn, and the sight of her own personal hell having frozen over at last.

Bittersweet is available for a limited time at a discounted pre-order price on Kindle.
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