Write It Up!: Rapid Transit / The Ex Factor / Brewing Up Trouble
Welcome to alternative dating…the tenth circle of hellIt started simply enough. The editor of Tess Magazine demanded an assignment about dating practices for the urban set. Something fun. Something sexy. Something that the three women working on the assignment could research and really get into.Suddenly, Julia is smitten with a stranger she meets while speed dating, Samantha's coffeehouse dating research is less engaging than the naughty e-mails she's been getting from her pen pal in Italy and Abby is busy dealing with her new roommate, an Irish photographer who looks like sex in pants. Needless to say, there's not much work getting done!So how do you write about relationships when your own love life has been less than noteworthy? Until now…
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PRAISE FOR THESE AUTHORS
ELIZABETH BEVARLY
“The very best in love and laughter.”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub
“Exceptionally engaging!”
—Publishers Weekly
TRACY KELLEHER
On The Truth About Harry
“Effectively mixes stirring sensuality with sophisticated humor and light suspense.”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub
On It’s All About Eve…
“Well-rounded characters, sizzling love scenes and witty dialogue.”
—Romantic Times BOOKclub
MARY LEO
“Warmth, humor, quirky characters—
Mary Leo always writes a winner!”
—Maureen Child, USA TODAY bestselling author
“Mary Leo’s stories are sort of like wearing Prada with your circa-70s striped toe socks…classy but fun!”
—Holly Jacobs, 2004 Romantic Times BOOKclub Career Achievement Award Winner
Dear Reader,
It’s hard to believe that the Signature Select program is one year old—with seventy-two books already published by top Harlequin and Silhouette authors.
What an exciting and varied lineup we have in the year ahead! In the first quarter of the year, the Signature Spotlight program offers three very different reading experiences. Popular author Marie Ferrarella, well-known for her warm family-centered romances, has gone in quite a different direction to write a story that has been “haunting her” for years. Please check out Sundays Are for Murder in January. Hop aboard a Caribbean cruise with Joanne Rock in The Pleasure Trip in February, and don’t miss a trademark romantic suspense from Debra Webb, Vows of Silence, in March.
Our collections in the first quarter of the year explore a variety of contemporary themes. Our Valentine’s collection—Write It Up!—homes in on the trend of alternative dating in three stories by Elizabeth Bevarly, Tracy Kelleher and Mary Leo. February is awards season, and Barbara Bretton, Isabel Sharpe and Emilie Rose join the fun and glamour in And the Envelope, Please….And in March, Leslie Kelly, Heather MacAllister and Cindi Myers have penned novellas about women desperate enough to go to Bootcamp to learn how not to scare men away!
Three original sagas also come your way in the first quarter of this year. Silhouette author Gina Wilkins spins off her popular FAMILY FOUND miniseries in Wealth Beyond Riches. Janice Kay Johnson has written a powerful story of a tortured past in Dead Wrong, which is connected to her PATTON’S DAUGHTERS Superromance miniseries, and Kathleen O’Brien gives a haunting story of mysterious murder in Quiet as the Grave.
And don’t forget there is original bonus material in every single Signature Select book to give you the inside scoop on the creative process of your favorite authors! We hope you enjoy all our new offerings!
Marsha Zinberg
Executive Editor
The Signature Select Program
Write It Up!
Rapid Transit
Elizabeth Bevarly
The Ex Factor
Tracy Kelleher
Brewing Up Trouble
Mary Leo
For David,
who made a rapid transit into my life and thankfully never left it.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetie
CONTENTS
Preface
TESS TRUESDALE, FOUNDER and editor in chief of the ultra-glam, ultra-bad-girl magazine Tess, basked in the glow of diffused lighting. She presided from behind her stainless-steel desk while the two other people in her office squirmed in vintage Arne Jacobsen chairs. Danish modern had never been so industrial, so sleek and so uncomfortable.
Tess smiled, content.
No one else did. Or had been. Both states being morphologically impossible for underpaid and overly cynical magazine writers.
“It was one of those karmic things, really.” Tess waved the tip of an onyx cigarette holder in a large loop. The mint-green cigarette at its tip burned slowly, a testament to her disregard for the no-smoking regulations in the building and her belief in the mantra she preached monthly to her devoted readers: “Go where no mother has been before, and where no father wants to know about.”
“I was enjoying a blissful moment on the deck off the master bedroom of Olympia.” Olympia was the “shack” in Southampton owned by Tess and husband number three, oil tanker billionaire Spiros Andreapolis. “Spiros was giving me a foot massage with the new Kiehl’s lotion that we wrote about last month, while I was sipping the perfect cosmopolitan. The sun was setting over the dunes, and there was silence, absolute silence—except for the occasional beep from the security system, of course. And that’s when the idea came to me.”
“That the social season had switched back to the city one week after Labor Day?” Abby Lewis ventured. One of the three senior writers on the magazine, Abby had just returned from a stint at Tess’s sister publication in Milan, Italy. Jet lag, not a heavy application of Bobbi Brown eye shadow, darkened her eyes.
