We’re down to the last 24 hours of the I-Team Reading Challenge. So now I have to ask...


I had a lot of fun meeting new readers who’d hadn’t yet read the books — and just as much fun chatting about the books for those of you who were reading the series for the second or third or fourth time. Sixth time?!? Yes, there were a few of those, too.

As an author, of course, I can only feel delighted that someone enjoyed one of my stories enough to read it again and again.

One of the things that I discovered doing the I-Team Trivia was how many of you didn’t know about “Heaven Can’t Wait,” my one and only novella, which happens to be an I-Team story. I’m so happy that more of you discovered it and took time to read the story, because it was terribly fun to write. But some of you had read it, and you included it in your re-read.

Now it’s time for the final roll call.

I know a lot of you already commented and or updated me all along, but things are so completely crazy both at work and with my writing right now that it would make things much easier on me to have you all here in one place.

So IF you completed the I-Team Reading Challenge, please comment below to be eligible for a signed copy of Breaking Point. Feel free to share your feelings about the series, your favorite story moments, your favorite characters. And, yes, definitely tell me what team you’re on — Team Reece, Team Julian, Team Marc, Team Gabe or Team RJMGZ.

Also, please tell me whether this was your first reading of the series or whether this was an I-Team re-read. Virgins and vixens. Which are you? I’ll do a separate drawing for each category.

The deadline to complete the challenge was/is Friday, April 15. I’ll draw names for signed books over the weekend. How many copies I give away will depend on how many readers are in each category.

If you’re reading this on Goodreads, please pop over to my blog at pamelaclare.blogspot.com to comment for your chance to win.

My author copies of the book have arrived, and they are so delicious! I can’t seem to put them down. I think they look better in person than they do in the .jpg. I give the credit to Jed Hill and his amazing body. As I said in a FB post and a tweet, I slept with Jed Hill last night. OK, so it was just the image of him on my book. But still... what a sight to wake up to!

I’ve already ordered a second case of books because so many copies have already been claimed. Those of you who donated to International Midwife Assistance will get yours first. They’re already signed the packaged and are going into tomorrow’s (Thursday's) mail. I-Team Trivia winners are next, along with my home team — those of you who spent long hours with me as I recovered from surgery and did my darned best to finish this book on time.

On a different note, I may have to scale back my crazy plans for this blog a bit. I had hoped to have a month of festivities leading up to the release of Breaking Point, but between trying to heal my neck, trying to get enough sleep, and keeping up with work at the paper and Connor’s book, I just don’t have time. My priorities right now have to be my health and also finishing Connor’s book on time. I hate to think that might cut back on our fun and give Breaking Point less exposure than it deserves. But that’s how it goes.

So what do I have in store for you?

I hope to post an interview with the U.S. Marshal who answered all my questions for this book. I also hope to do an interview with the I-Team heroes. If we can work in a Match the Hero to the Quote, we’ll do that, too. I might toss an excerpt in for good measure.

It’s awards season in the journalism world, and Friday night I’m going to be getting a huge award that I can’t really talk about yet because it hasn’t been announced. But you can bet I’ll fill you in this weekend. One of my co-workers at the paper is having a dinner party to celebrate the award tomorrow (Thursday) night — a pre-party, I guess you could call it. Then Friday night is the awards ceremony in Denver. My parents will be there, together with my older son and the reporting staff of the two papers where I’ve been editor. It’s going to be an incredibly special night for me. I’ll share as much of it with you as I can.

So back to today’s topic: The “Get Out of My TBR, Get Into My Bed” I-Team Reading Challenge.

Howdy!

I just wanted to apologize for not keeping up better with the blog lately. Not only is work busy, but I ran into some complications with my neck. I’m now taking prednisone and painkillers to get that back on track.

But it has put me behind in my writing and in rolling out all the fun I had planned to celebrate the upcoming release of Breaking Point.

Only 33 days and 16 hours to go as I write this!

Still, thanks to some help from my sister and some friends, things are moving forward. So here’s what’s under construction:

I-Team Trivia: These are some tough questions! Plus, there will be a section of matching the hero/heroine to the quote. You think you know Julian? Is Marc your man? Have you got Gabe down? We’ll see.

I-Team Hero/Heroine Interviews: This is always lots of fun. We can sit down and check in with them and see what they have to say about and to each other.

There will be prizes for winners, including signed copies of Breaking Point, the chance to appear in the next I-Team novel, an exclusive opportunity to preview Defiant and more.

If Jed Hill answers the questions I sent him, we could have an interview with him. I do plan to contact the former U.S. Marshal I interviewed for this story and see if she’d be willing to answer some questions for you all.

So pardon our dust and the various delays and stay tuned! Much fun to come!

Recent poll results: As the latest poll, about the use of words like “pu$$y” finishes out, I thought I’d comment on the fact that 100 out of 130 voters want to see Holly’s story. So here’s my promise: If my publisher doesn’t want it, I’ll write it for release as an e-book.

If you want to discuss the issue of words like “pu$$y” in romance, hop on over to my Facebook page, where a rousing discussion is underway.

Have a great day, everyone!

Calling Team Gabe! This is your chance to wax eloquent.

I meant to have this up this morning, but this week has been insane at the paper. I had a huge project more or less dumped in my lap and am trying to get it done before I leave for a week-long writing vacation that starts tomorrow at 5 p.m. Things have been so tense that I did something I really haven’t done in ages today — I got up in the middle of a meeting and walked out. Now I just want chocolate and a blankie.

::Deep breath::

Poor Kat and Gabe have been patiently awaiting their turn on the I-Team Reading Challenge stage so this blog is dedicated to their story, Naked Edge.

Naked Edge drew together some completely unrelated things. It combined my climbing accident — read all about it here — with my years of reporting on American Indian issue and my time volunteering as a naturalist for Boulder Mountain Parks (now called Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks). I borrowed names from my ranger friends, which amused them. More than that, however, this book was a very personal tribute to the Diné people and to my Diné friends.

Without a doubt, it was the most difficult book I’ve written. I wanted to make absolutely certain to be accurate when it came to the Navajo traditions in the story and to Native culture in general. That’s a very complicated, layered world to portray even when you’re familiar with it as I am — Kat’s Navajo heritage, the mixed cultures off the reservation where Native people from all nations come together for ceremony, friendship and a sense of belonging, their conflicts with mainstream society. I’ve said it a zillion times, but I wanted Kat to be Navajo through and through, not an “apple,” i.e., red on the outside and white on the inside. If I had to criticize most books, films, TV shows involving Native characters it would be for portraying Native characters in a way that makes mainstream readers/viewers feel comfortable.

At the same time, there were things I couldn’t write about. The real goings-on in ceremony, certain sacred words and phrases. Those things aren’t meant to be shared. Except how do you create an authentic Navajo heroine without going into those things? Well, you have to be creative and careful.

Kat became my favorite heroine. Strong and very comfortable being a woman, she knew exactly who she was. There was no need to “find herself.” She was herself. And some readers agreed at least, as she was voted Favorite Heroine in RBL Romantica’s Hughie Awards, ousting Eve Dallas from her multi-year hold on the lead spot. Go Kat!

But a lot of people didn’t care for her. The reviews range from glowing five-star reviews to a measly three stars from RT Book Reviews and one-star review in which the reader says the book was “incredibly stupid,” mostly because she didn't like the fact that Kat said she didn’t date. In fact most of the objections to Kat came as a result of her sexual choices. Some people got on Kat’s case for being a virgin and setting Gabe straight at their first real meeting (lunch). Some people got on her case for not wanting him to wear a condom the first time they had sex. Some people hated the fact that she went back to the rez to have her baby and for not having an epidural (!). Some didn’t understand how a woman could go to college and still have superstitious religious beliefs about coyotes and so forth. Allow me to explain:

Some women don’t date. Dating — i.e., sampling men to see which one you like, if any — is a serial event. Some women wait for a man who is interested in them as a wife and explore that territory very carefully. These are mostly women of strong religious conviction.

A lot of Native people — not just Navajo — don’t feel comfortable with contraception. In the case of the Navajo, the mingling of male and female waters is part of what’s sacred about sex. If you remove that, you’ve destroyed the significance of the sex act. So naturally Kat would want her first sexual experience to be all natural.

As for the birth at the end, if Kat hadn’t gone home, her daughter would not have been considered Navajo. To be Navajo, you must have a certain blood quantum AND be born on the rez. And not all women have epidurals. A lot of women prefer completely natural births. What’s the big deal about that?

And lastly, a lot of women go to college and yet are Christian, Buddhist, Muslim or whatever. They have beliefs that may seem strange, stupid and/or superstitious to outsiders, too, even though they’ve been to college. To suggest that going to college eliminates a person’s belief system is to fail to understand the importance of tradition and one’s connect to one’s own spiritual truth.

What struck me as so funny as I read through all of these objections to Kat’s character, particularly the sexual ones, is that they were coming from women. Haven’t women fought long and hard for the right to make decisions about how they live their lives? Kat was making choices that were right for her, but there’s a segment of the romance reading world that just is only comfortable with sex for fun and wants heroines to be rockin’ the contraception.

But I write stories about characters who feel real to me. Kat was a traditional Navajo. These things were natural for her.

I guess I needed to get that off my chest. Whew!

As for Gabe, there were some readers who felt he was so repugnant that he couldn’t be redeemed. I found that funny, given how many novels have man-whore heroes. Gabe isn’t a man-whore by nature, of course, and meeting Kat was a scary re-introduction to his core self. Ultimately, it forced him to confront his choices, his past and the way he had changed. But, yes, it probably took readers a while to warm up to him. That didn’t bother me, because I knew by the end they would love him.

Because this book took a lot of risks, I was pretty nervous before it came out. I even blogged about how nervous I was. Despite the fact that the story received some of the nastiest reviews any of my books have ever received, it’s getting nominated for all kinds of awards — and winning. Between AAR and the Hughies, it won six awards. So I think a lot more people appreciate the risks the story took and the different feel of it than hated it.

As for the Big Event at the end, you all have done such an amazing job of keeping that secret! I can’t thank you enough for that. It was a crucial moment in the story, the one where past and present come together and Gabe has to make a choice. And the only choice he can make is to express his love for Kat in the ultimate fashion. I wanted that to feel real and to break hearts. I think it succeeded because Naked Edge has been getting a lot of tear-jerker designations.

So, a year after it’s release, I stand amazed by the recognition the story is receiving. I hope with all my heart that it opened up hearts and minds to the contemporary Native experience. Much of what was in the book is real and those real events represent the kinds of things that happen to Indian people every day: the raid on the inipi, the theft of artifacts, the corruption and loss of sacred sites, the desecration of graves, the struggle to maintain identity, the fight to preserve one’s own spiritual beliefs and practices, and so on...

I’ve been an eye witness to much of that. The raid on the inipi really happened. The loss of a prominent sacred site really happened. I covered it, shared the outrage and wished I could have done more.

I suppose the ultimate satisfaction for me came when my friend Kat, after whom Kat is named, read the book. Her husband, whom I call Uncle Ray, is a full-blooded hereditary Navajo spiritual leader, and both of them are dear to me. Kat read the book and e-mailed me to say it was perfect and that it felt authentically Navajo to her. She saw things that no one else could see — elements of shared experience between the two of us, late-night conversations, jokes, my own personal experiences on the rez. There are elements of our friendship that are woven into those pages.

Maybe that’s what makes the book feel special to people, even if they don’t know what those elements are or realize they’re even there. (Egads, now I miss her so much!)

Today, she sent me a link to a hideous news broadcast in which a non-Native reporter took news cameras into an inipi ceremony. Cameras! She filmed it. They filmed the altar. They filmed the sacred elements. And they put it on TV. During the call-in portion of the program, a Lakota elder called in to say that what they had done was wrong. She cut him off! I was horrified. (I’m not posting the link because that would only perpetuate the insult and damage.)

I didn’t intend for this post to be so long. This is all really heavy stuff. I guess it’s okay to share it with you, though, because these are the things I think about when I put a story together.

So I’ll shut up now and turn it over to you.

Welcome back to the I-Team Reading Challenge!

First, let me apologize for Blogger. The colors in my sidebars here are all wrong, and they are unfixable. So if things seem weird looking, they are. It’s not you.

Second, I’d love to hear from those of you who are participating in the challenge to hear how far you’ve come. I know some of you are already done, which is amazing.

Third, thank to all of you for the wonderful birthday wishes! I had a wonderful day yesterday. Ronlyn sent me flowers at work, which helped brighten the day considerably. Beautiful yellow roses and daisies, they are so cheery and lovely! Then last night I went out to dinner with my parents, and my mother surprised me — that is far too mild a word for it really — by giving me my grandmother’s wedding ring as a gift.

The ring — antique gold with an antique solitaire diamond — is so delicate and beautiful. My grandmother wore this ring on her finger when my grandfather was off chasing German U-boats in the U.S. Navy during World War II. She had two young children and a baby — my mom — and had to take care of them, plant and harvest the garden, tend the chickens and the goat. She had to wash laundry in a tub and run it through a ringer. Wearing it on my finger makes me feel very close to her and puts me in mind of the lives women used to live.

Needless to say, I got all teary-eyed.

But on to Unlawful Contact! Marc has waited long enough. And now I turn my blog over to Kara... Oh, wait.

I guess I’ll share my thoughts about this book first.

As all of you know by now, Unlawful Contact was based on real horrors that occurred in Colorado’s prisons. I began covering issues related to women in prison in 1997, when it dawned on me after some high-profile violence in the men’s unit at the local lockup that we never heard about women at our county jail. I called the sheriff and asked rather stupidly, “Do we have women in our jail?”

Indeed, we did. But no one was looking at their situation. No one was reporting on issues that were affecting them such as separation from their children or the lack of training programs for women as compared to men or substandard health care for women. So I jumped into the deep end on these issues — quite literally.

I worked with the county jail captain to be arrested on a bogus felony and locked away for 24 hours in the women’s unit with the inmates. It was the 24 scariest hours of my journalistic life and, I believe, my finest. During that 24 hours, chronicled in detail in my Goldilocks Goes to Jail diaries, I learned so much about the impact of violence on women’s lives. What is the No. 1 thing that most women in prison have in common? Childhood sexual abuse.

I could go on and on and on and on about the things I learned in that precious, terrifying 24 hours. But we’re here to talk about Unlawful Contact. It was actually the second book I had planned for the I-Team series, but my editor thought the content was too dark.

“You had some other idea, didn’t you?” she asked. “Why don’t you write that instead?”

Okay, sure, except that human sex trafficking isn’t a light-hearted either. If the sexual abuse of female inmates is too dark, what about the sexual enslavement of teenage girls? Well, I didn’t ask that question. Instead, I wrote Hard Evidence, afraid the entire time that she would reject it for being too dark. She didn’t. And she let me move on to Unlawful Contact at that point without a single word about how dark the subject matter was. I guess I had convinced her I could handle it and still have a romantic story.

There are so many real things in this story, from prison slang to inmates OD-ing in prison to the sexual abuse of teenage girls by adult male guards to the rape of parolees by a parole officer to the stillbirth of an inmate’s baby that resulted from neglect on the part of the guards to the shackling of pregnant inmates during labor.

I lost sleep over these abuses. I lay awake at night thinking about these women, feeling rage and despair that we as a society could take people and treat them like this. It wasn’t the fact that they were behind bars. It was the fact that their sentence came with grotesque violations of their human rights. The guards who methodically raped those teenage girls got less time in prison than the girls were serving in juvie. Rape and abuse and the loss of one’s baby should never be part of a person’s prison sentence.

All of my passion for this topic — women in prison — went in to writing Unlawful Contact. I actually got out my old case files and read up on minute details. The autopsy report I describe in the story is from a real autopsy of an inmate who overdosed. The details of certain acts of violence are straight from my interview notes. (Note to the reader on Goodreads who said that the violence in the book is clearly exaggerated and that the author resorted to hyperbole: In fact, she did not.)

Then at the end of the book I engaged in a fantasy that all the wrongs were corrected, that new laws were passed, that the bad guys were defeated and there was liberty and justice for all who deserved it. But it was a fantasy.

Unlawful Contact came out in 2008. I tried that year to get a senator friend of mine to carry a bill that would outlaw the shackling of inmates during labor and delivery. He was not interested in carrying such a bill. I waited, did other things. And still I was haunted by the idea of women being chained to beds during the hell that is labor.

As most of you know (or maybe not), last year I took up that issue again. I started from the beginning, spending months negotiating my way into the Denver women’s prison. I was not honest about why I was there; I told them I wanted to see what kind of prenatal care the women got. What I really wanted to do was get the inside scoop on shackling. Within a month, I had the detailed research I needed to take to lawmakers. I arranged for a meeting with the senate president (a wonderful man from my town). He listened. He was appalled. And thus the ball finally started rolling on what eventually became Senate Bill 193. I wrote the first draft of the bill, was the primary expert who testified on this practice in the House and Senate committee hearings — and the damned bill passed with only one “no” vote (from a lawmaker who is currently hungry for my support of one of his bills). The whole drama of the shackling bill is preserved on this blog for anyone who wants to search for that label.

For me, the bill’s passage felt like the culmination of so many years of hard work. More than that, it made it easier for me to sleep at night. And a strange thing had occurred — fact had become fiction had become reality. Is that life imitating art? Not sure. But can you see what it meant to me?

When I think of Unlawful Contact, that’s what comes to my mind. Let me put it this way: Extreme Exposure was based on one five-month-long investigation. Hard Evidence grew out of a single cover story and several interviews. But Unlawful Contact was the bringing together of more than a decade’s worth of experience covering prison issues.

(Similarly, Naked Edge was more than a decade of reporting on Native issues and close ties and friendships with Navajo people, as well as my own catastrophic climbing accident and a lifetime lived with rock jocks and other crazies. But Gabe has to wait for his own turn...)

In terms of the fiction, writing Marc was pure pleasure, though Julian was such a tough act to follow that I was really off-kilter for a while. Julian kept stealing scenes, and I had to keep cutting him out. The scene in the cabin when Julian finds Sophie... Let’s just say no one who loves Julian loves him more than I did in that moment when I wrote that scene.

The tension between Julian and Marc was the beginning of a wonderful bromance that has continued to bring me joy in my writing up through and including Breaking Point. In fact, I think it kind of reaches new heights in Breaking Point.

As for the scene that made some readers hate me: Sophie spat out the morning-after pill. Get over it! I am not a guidance counselor, sex educator, nurse, Planned Parenthood PR person or in any way responsible for ensuring that people use contraception. Sophie loved Marc. She knew she might lose him at any moment. Quite literally any moment. And she let nature take it’s course. I would do the same in her shoes. If you don’t like that, feel free to throw the book against the nearest wall.

To this day, Unlawful Contact is a very special story for me. I cried so hard when I wrote that scene at the end that made all of you cry. I played “A Time for Us,” the love theme from the 1968 Romeo and Juliet over and over again to make myself as sad as I could possibly be, and I wrote my way through an entire box of tissues to make that dark moment seem real.

If I can say one thing about all of my books, it’s that I’ve always felt that romance could be about something. I’m not trying to push a political agenda. I’m not trying to tell anyone how to vote or what to think. I just want to write stories that reflect the world in some way and that resonate back out into the world.

And that’s what I have to say about that book. If anyone has actually read this far, congratulations! And I appreciate it.

So now I yield the floor...

So how many of you have made it through Hard Evidence either for the first or second time?

Before we go on, just let me warn you that there are spoilers here. Reader beware!

This was my second attempt to write romantic suspense. The story grew out of a cover story that I wrote about the hideous, dark topic of sex trafficking and sex slavery. It was a really distressing article to write. But what stood out for me when I worked on it was that the men and women who worked to combat this crime sometimes have to pose as the monsters they’re trying to bring down. I knew it was dangerous work. But what concerned me most was the damage it would do to a human being’s soul.

And with that realization, Julian Darcangelo came into my mind. Like Nicholas Kenleigh from Ride the Fire, he stepped into my imagination more or less fully developed. I knew who he was, what he’d been through, how it affected him. Just like Nicholas, the dark emotion underpinning his story felt like very rich emotional material for me.

I’m not sure why I find inspiration in my characters’ misery, but there you have it. When I do workshops, I always tell people that I know I have my characters down when I understand their pain.

Thinking in retrospect, some of Julian’s über-alpha personality might be a result of my reaction to readers’ and reviewers’ responses to Reece. “A politician hero? You’re kidding! How stupid!” Never having read romantic suspense before I wrote Extreme Exposure, that novel was probably my most pure, un-influenced notion of what I thought romantic suspense was. But mostly it was just Julian being Julian.

He had to be beyond tough to endure the life he’d lived and to have succeeded at his career. But he was also very emotionally wounded, and we had a discussion not too long ago about where that led him — to a scene that one reader-reviewer on Amazon called rape. I thought some of you made some really amazing comments — things I hadn’t considered or put into words quite that way. (Have I told you lately that I love you?)

While reactions to Tessa were mixed, most readers went into heat over Julian. So what was it? His swagger? The five rounds to the vest? The sucky-swirly thing? The reaction took me by surprise. I just wrote what was in my head, and then I got e-mails full of drool. (Not that it bothered me, mind you. I just check e-mail with a sponge nowadays...)

Scenes I loved writing... Anything having to do with Julian’s background. The scene in the stairwell where he kisses Tessa for real. When he arrests her. The shooting range when she freaks out and he carries her to the break room. (“Coke or Pepsi?” he asks. “Okay,” she says.) The sex scenes. Tessa’s scenes with her mother.

Speaking of which... I was working on the reunion scene between Tessa and her mother in a coffee shop. Tessa wakes up, sees her mom and... I started bawling. In a coffee house! I made a couple trips to the bathroom to staunch my tears and yell at myself in the mirror. But then I realized it was hopeless. I’m not sure why that scene affected me like that, but the idea of these two women, both of them strong in their own way, both victims of an unspeakable crime and other violence finally connecting...

So what were your favorite scenes and quotes? For those of you who are on your 5th time through the story, are there aspects of the story that strike you differently as you re-read it? And for you members of Team Julian, what is it that you love so much about him?

And what specifically does the sucky-swirly thing entail, Ronlyn? You said you asked Julian. Let’s hear what he said. Or maybe I can get him in here to tell us himself. And, yes, this is something you’ll want to try at home.


Help promote Breaking Point: If you want to run an ad like the one to your right (scroll up a bit) for Breaking Point on your blog or website, please let me know. Anyone who runs the ad on her blog will be entered into a separate and exclusive drawing for a signed copy of the book. The ad, which I think is super-sexy, was designed by Jennifer of Sapphire Designs. Feel free to share with friends and help word about the book to go viral! The more friends who share it, the more chance you have to win.

To add the Breaking Point ad to the sidebar of your blog just copy the code in the text box below the ad and paste it into your sidebar on your blog for the 160x600 ad.

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And if you would like to use the smaller 200x150 ad just grab this code below in the text box and post to your blogs sidebar.

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Also, watch this blog for big news next week. No, no hints.

Happy Friday, everyone!

So, how is your read through the I-Team stories going?

Some of you have checked in via Facebook or on the original blog post to tell me how you’re doing, and I know a number of you are already done. That amazes me. I sat down to “re-read” Surrender right before Christmas — for research purposes for Defiant — and I haven’t made it 50 pages into the book yet.

I thought it might be fun to start with Extreme Exposure and have an informal chat about the story. I can answer questions — for example, “I heard that the scene in the Rio really happened. Do you really talk like that when you’re hammered?” — and you can share favorite scenes and quotes.

I’ll start...

So, as some of you already know, the stories in the I-Team series are fictionalized versions of investigations I really did. Extreme Exposure is close to me — and Kara, the heroine — because I am a single mom just like she is. Trying to balance work and motherhood when you have a high-impact job isn’t easy. My kids spent a portion of their lives coming to the newspaper after work, doing homework and eating TV dinners in a special kids room (complete with VCR), while I finished putting the paper to bed. I’m sure I’ll be able to make up for it by paying their therapy bills later...

Particularly precious in this novel for me are the scenes with Kara’s son, some of which grew out of my own experience of being a mother to two boys and being asked silly-sweet questions like, “Mommy, what does frog poop smell like?”

One of my favorite scenes is when Reece talks Connor into coming out from under the bed. I think it shows the kind of man Reece is. The woman he loves is in bad shape in the next room, but he’s focusing on her son, showing Connor strength and offering him security and comfort.

And I’ll just confess right now... “Jiggle stick” is a word my older son made up.

Yes, that really happened. More than being embarrassed, I found it funny and shared it with everyone in the newsroom. It became part of a running joke that lasted for years.

Now I’ll get on with writing the other Connor’s book and leave the conversation to you. Is there anything you want to ask? What are your favorite scenes? And, for those of you re-reading the book, did anything strike you differently in Extreme Exposure this time around?

Another busy week.

On Monday, I wrote a column in support of home birth and renewing the statute that enables lay midwives to practice legally in Colorado. I feel very passionate about this subject, and so I wrote too much. Go me! Fortunately, I’m the editor, so my long column magically fit, while letters to the editor was somewhat short this week. Hmmm...

On Tuesday, Benjy went back to New York for his first semester as a senior. I took Tuesday off and stayed home with him, then drove him to the airport and cried all the way home. But I’m getting used to his being gone again. He gave me the great news that he’s going to be inducted into the National Honor Society.

We had a snowstorm on Wednesday that caused an inordinate amount of traffic snarls. It took some people three and four hours to get home from the paper because traffic came to a standstill. I think we’ve had such a dry winter here at the base of the foothills that everyone has forgotten how to drive in snow. It took me two hours to get home from the office, and I rarely reached a speed higher than 10 mph — but we only got three inches of white stuff. Three inches! From the way people were driving you’d have thought there was four times that.

As one of my coworkers put it the next morning, “A clown on a unicycle could have passed me last night.”

Clearly, what we need is a major blizzard that dumps three feet in two hours. Then people will get some real practice driving in snow and stop being afraid when they see a few flakes on the roads.

Okay. Got that off my chest.

So I heard something from my editor’s assistant yesterday that might interest you... They have 10 bound galleys of Breaking Point that they’re sending my way. And that can mean only one thing.


Not only do I plan to give away lots of copies just for fun. I plan to do it in some fun ways.

First, there will be some straight giveaways. Those are easy. You post, and your name goes in the pot for a randomized drawing.

But there will also be some true contests including I-Team Trivia and the “Get Out of My TBR, Get Into My Bed” I-Team Reading Challenge.



Today marks the launch of the “Get Out of My TBR, Get Into My Bed” I-Team Reading Challenge.

This contest has two tiers.

Tier One is for I-Team virgins: If you’ve never read the I-Team or you’ve got Reece, Julian, Marc, and Gabe sitting somewhere in your dusty TBR pile and need to dig them out, this is your chance to catch up — and be rewarded with a free, signed copy of Breaking Point, Zach’s book. Hey, you know you need to lose your virginity at some point, right? Who better to lose it to than Reece, Julian, Marc and Gabe? Egads, just thinking about it that way made my heart skip a beat...

Tier Two is for I-Team veterans: You’ve read the books and fallen in love with the heroes. Maybe you’ve got a favorite hero. Maybe you helped cast the I-Team books or participated in our last round of I-Team Trivia (which was tons of fun, by the way). This is your chance to re-read the series and win your own signed ARC (advance review copy) of Breaking Point.

Here’s how you participate:

1. Sign up for the challenge by posting here and tell us which tier you’re in — virgins or vets.
2. Read or re-read the series (in order: Extreme Exposure, Hard Evidence, Unlawful Contact, Naked Edge).
3. Keep me posted on your progress. When you’re done, your name goes into the pot for a signed copy of Breaking Point.
4. Drawings for both the virgins and the vets will be held on April 15, giving you lots of time to read the book before the Spoiler Chat event, where readers and I get together in a chat room to discuss the book in detail.

Those who participate in the challenge are more likely to win at I-Team Trivia, too, so you’ll have an advantage over everyone else. Plus, you’ll have all things I-Team fresh in your mind when it comes time to read Natalie and Zach’s story. Think of it as foreplay...

Sign up below! And spread the word.

To help whet your appetite, here’s another excerpt:

From Breaking Point:

“This isn’t working!”

Zach raised his head and glanced up to where Natalie was bent over a mesquite branch, trying to rub out the car’s left tire tracks, her hair tied back, the AK she’d insisted on carrying slung over her shoulder like an ugly purse. “Put more muscle into it.”

“Easy… for you… to say.”

It was hard work, and he supposed having two X chromosomes made it tougher. Then again, none of this had been easy for her.

You’ve been hard on her, too, MacBride.

Yeah, he had been.

He’d done well enough when he’d been in chains and needed her help, but for the past few hours all he’d done was issue orders. But she wasn’t a SEAL. She wasn’t a deputy U.S. marshal, either. And she sure as hell wasn’t an enemy combatant or a fugitive. She was an innocent civilian, a young woman who’d suffered more than her share of tragedy, who’d witnessed a massacre, who’d been kidnapped and assaulted, who’d been forced to kill. She deserved his respect—and some damned human kindness, if he could manage it.

Yet, his first priority was getting her safely home again. And that meant staying focused on the objectives, which, at the moment, were evasion and escape.

Driving the Tsuru down into the arroyo had been a bitch. Zach had made Natalie get out of the car just to be safe, and for a few seconds he’d thought he was going to roll the damned thing or get stuck in the sandy, dry bottom. But the vehicle was now concealed beneath a concrete bridge, hidden from anyone who might drive by or fly overhead. Once its tire tracks were wiped out, it would take an expert in cutting sign to know they were there.

Or that was the theory, anyway.

He walked slowly backward, swishing the branch across the sandy soil as he went, careful not to fall down the steep bank as the ground became softer and less stable. He was about to warn Natalie to watch her step, when he heard her gasp. He looked up in time to see her tumbling toward him.

He reached out, stopped her fall. “You okay?”

She sat up, nodding. “I’m a little dizzy, but I’m fine.”

He took one look at her face and knew that wasn’t true. She was flushed, but she wasn’t sweating. “You’re dehydrated.”

She looked puzzled. “I’m not thirsty.”

Not good.

He’d seen men die from the heat in Afghanistan as medics struggle in vain to save their lives. He knew that dizziness and lack of thirst were not good signs.

“Let’s get you into the shade.” He drew her to her feet, slid an arm around her waist, and guided her over to the car and into the passenger seat, taking the AK from her. He propped the rifle against the car, then reached into the back seat for a bottle of water, ripped off the cap and pressed it into her hands. Too bad there were no powdered electrolytes to go with it. “Drink. A few gulps, then regular sips.”

While she drank, he touched his palm to her forehead, relieved to feel that her skin was neither clammy nor feverishly hot. She was definitely dehydrated and on her way to overheating, but she didn’t have heat stroke. Not yet.

You pushed her too hard, you dumbshit.

She looked up at him. “Were you a paramedic in your past life or something?”

“No.” He dug through the crap in the back seat for the first aid kit, then pulled out a cotton wash cloth. “But I do know a few things about first aid.”

“That’s a good skill for someone in your, um… line of work.”

“You got that right.” He would’ve loved to hear what line of work she thought he was in, but this wasn’t the time. “Quit talking, and keep drinking.”

You’re giving orders again.

He grabbed another bottle of water and dropped to his knees beside her, pouring out enough water to thoroughly wet the washcloth, then pressing it against her forehead and cheeks, hoping to bring down her core temp.

She sighed, her eyes drifting shut. “Oh, that feels good.”

A bolt of heat shot through his belly straight to his groin.

His mind knew her response hadn’t been sexual, nothing seductive intended, but his body apparently didn’t. He drew his hand back, knowing he was in trouble. But then she turned her head, exposing the side of her throat, and he couldn’t resist.

He pressed the cool cloth against that sensitive area, watched goose bumps appear on her soft skin. She sighed again, the sweet sound making his own temperature rise. Slowly, she tilted her head back to allow his hand to pass beneath her chin, then turned her face toward him, her eyes still closed, her mouth relaxed.

By the time she opened her eyes, his lips were almost touching hers. And for a single, slow heartbeat, he stayed that way, unable to speak, his mouth so close to hers that he could nearly taste her, his gaze fixed on hers.

What the… ?

He jerked back, dropped the wet washcloth in her lap, his brain searching for words. “I…You… You can probably handle this yourself.”

She looked up at him. “Thank you. For helping me.”

“I need to get back to hiding our tracks.” He stood and walked away, his abrupt retreat startling a few swallows out of the mud nests they’d built in the bridge’s life-giving shade. “Keep drinking.”

He walked back into the blazing sunshine, grabbed his mesquite branch and rubbed furiously at the tracks—which now included the soil disturbed by her fall down the embankment.

What the fuck was wrong with him?

That Zeta bastard must have shocked him one too many times, because only fried brain cells could explain what had just happened. He’d almost kissed a woman he was charged with protecting—while administering first aid, no less.

That kind of mouth-to-mouth is against the rules, and you know it.

Okay, so he hadn’t technically been assigned to protect her, which meant that the rules didn’t technically apply. In fact, her being with him was purely coincidence and had nothing to do with this case. But he did not get mixed up with women while on the job. He did not develop feelings for them, and he certainly did not get physical with them. That wasn’t marshal service policy; that was his own personal policy. And he never broke his own rules.

Maybe it was just the situation—the two of them being thrown together like this, forced to work together to stay alive, sharing the dangers of a survival situation, his being injured, her being vulnerable. He knew from his years in combat how walking that line between life and death could make two people bond. A bit of pheromone had probably gotten mixed in with all the adrenaline. Simple enough to explain.

And how many of your SEAL teammates did you try to kiss?

Ignoring that stupid question, he stood back, his gaze moving over the embankment, searching for any sign he might have missed—a shoeprint, an overturned rock, obvious swish marks. Satisfied, he walked backward under the bridge, rubbing out his footprints as he went and assuring himself that he’d done just as thorough a job of rubbing out any inappropriate impulses he might have had toward Natalie.

When he reached the car, she was sound asleep, her lashes dark on her cheeks, her lips relaxed, an empty water bottle perched in her slender fingers. A sensation of warmth spread inside his chest.

Oh, MacBride, you are in such deep shit.

He slid quietly into the driver’s seat, felt her forehead and was relieved to find it cooler. Then he settled his rifle at his side, took the empty bottle from her, and, helpless to stop himself, watched her sleep.

Sign up for the I-Team Reading Challenge by posting a comment below. And keep us all updated on your progress. Remember: The deadline to finish is April 15!