This week we'll be featuring a selection of delicious and delightful excerpts from our books. A lucky commenter at the end of the week will win a set of books from ALL the authors in e-format.
Just leave your email in the RAFFLECOPTER draw below - and you can earn extra entries by leaving a comment on the blogpost, too.
Today's featured author is JULIE MOFFETT and her book NO WOMAN LEFT BEHIND. Please enjoy the excerpt, pop the book on your wishlist if you're tempted, and don't forget to enter the Rafflecopter draw below.
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My mother's life goal has been to see me, geek extraordinaire Lexi Carmichael, happily married. So bringing my first boyfriend, Slash, home for dinner has me hyperventilating. Things get a lot worse when bullets start flying over our corn chowder.
Now the entire alphabet soup of government agencies want my help finding the man behind the attack--Johannes Broodryk, a cyber mercenary I foiled on my last case. He wants revenge and he's taken something of mine to ensure I'll play, so it's game on. But the government has its own agenda, and Slash is not on board with the plan. Things are a bit bumpy in paradise.
Although I'm more comfortable with computer code than commandos, I've been assigned a team of Navy SEALs to help bring Broodryk down. The question is, will they survive me long enough to solve his cryptic puzzles and save the day?
Chapter One
For a geek girl like me, having a boyfriend is a lot like texting. They both require precise input and appropriate response. Unfortunately, I’m not good at properly expressing my feelings in person, let alone in a text message. Emoticons scare me. I mean, what exactly is a pig in high heels or a smiling cactus supposed to signify? It’s totally outside the scope of a geek girl’s knowledge. Plus, no matter how hard I try it all seems to go south anyway because I usually end up in autocorrect hell.
Not that I’ve ever had to worry about texting, or a boyfriend, or texting a boyfriend, until now. My name is Lexi Carmichael and my teen crush was a comic book figure. Computer genius and circuit engineer Ace Argento (aka Code Man) was the absolute best. He didn’t count on guns or bombs to save the day, but relied on his superior intellect to outwit Byte Bandit and stop his fictional computer virus from infecting the Internet. Given that Ace was perpetually unavailable, not to mention fictional, I figured I’d never have to worry about navigating relationship dynamics. So, instead of hanging out at the mall with girlfriends and talking about guys, I hung out in chat rooms and discussed the latest SDN controllers and bypass protocols. My social life was completely virtual, and I preferred it that way.
Then, somehow, at the age of twenty-five, I stumbled into my first real relationship. In a series of events that surprised everyone—but especially me—I finally graduated from a comic book crush to a flesh-and-blood boyfriend. It turns out there are significant perks to having a real boyfriend, including delicious home-cooked Italian food, a guy who doesn’t fall asleep when I start talking about enterprise-level security metrics and some totally excellent I-didn’t-know-you-could-do-that-on-the-dining-room-table sex. Yep, being a girlfriend does have its rewards. Except now that my parents have caught wind of the fact I’m no longer single, they’re pressuring me to bring said boyfriend over for an evening of dinner and conversation.
That’s worrisome because my father is an attorney for an exclusive, high-priced firm in Georgetown. His masterful interrogation skills could make the leader of North Korea confess to wearing woman’s underwear…even if he didn’t. My mother is a former Virginia beauty queen who sits on the boards of several national charities. She has long despaired at my lack of social skills and, to my dismay, has appointed herself the task of finding me a husband. They’re pretty good parents, and they’re both proud of my position as the Director of Information Security at a cyberintelligence firm, but they haven’t ever been quite sure how to handle me!
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