Isabel Sharpe - All I Want...

Krista? Seth took a few steps forward, letting his eyes get used to the dark. The figure on the bed rolled over and moaned. One bare shoulder appeared, followed by a perky nipple.

Krista. What the hell was she doing in his cabin?

For a crazy instant Seth imagined her engineering the shared room to make her fantasy of sex with a stranger come true. Just as quickly he realized that was impossible.

So was he in her cabin by mistake? Did he have the wrong key? He certainly had the wrong bed!

This was nuts. Where could he go? He had no other key, it was midnight, the weather sucked and the office was deserted.

He was stuck.

This was completely…totally…entirely…

Hmm…interesting.

A red-blooded male and a hot-blooded female trapped in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of a dark cozy cabin.

Maybe Christmas had come early after all!

Dear Reader,

The inspiration for this book was the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Who can resist the idea of a woman who falls in love with a mysterious sexy stranger she meets only in the dark? Of course, Harlequin Blaze is the perfect place to detail that kind of introduction. Add in a WRONG BED scenario, and the heat is on.

I loved introducing shades of gray into my heroine Krista’s black-and-white life, and having her sensual energy seduce the hero out of his loner existence. Add in the magic of Christmas in a great town like Boston, and the story took off.

Wishing everyone the joys of the holiday season!

Isabel Sharpe

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To Nancy Warren,

who has listened endlessly, advised wisely,

smacked me when I needed it

and been an unfailing, true friend

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Tuesday, November 29

THE MINUTE AIMEE Wellington enters stage right in the new musical Sweatshock, all interest exits. Oh wait, no, hang on, not all interest! There’s the can’t look/must-look fascinated horror of watching a speeding train heading for a stalled busload of nuns and orphans.

Has this woman or anyone handling her ever heard of the following concepts: Voice lessons? Acting lessons? Clue lessons? Pinocchio was less wooden. Adelaide from Guys and Dolls less nasal. The Invisible Man had more stage presence.

Could they not find one actress in Boston who could carry a tune, read lines with something approaching natural delivery or look like she was part of the ensemble instead of a wiggly, sexual meme-me prop?

Oh, right, sorry, what was I thinking? It’s not about talent. With Aimee Wellington it’s never about talent. It’s about money. It’s about a chain of department stores that made her family fortune. It’s about a father’s decision to let her at that fortune way before she was mature enough to handle it. It’s about getting famous by being infamous.

What happened to getting the best cast possible? Is the public that celebrity-crazed?

A sad state of affairs. From my seat, watching Aimee’s two-expression acting and listening to her off-key whiny singing, I was very tempted to haul out a miniature dart gun and shoot her with a tranquilizer. Surely whomever they have understudying her would be less painful. Heck, put me on the stage!

And get real!

KRISTA MARLOW READ through her latest blog post again, crunching thoughtfully on natural-sea-salt potato chips she shouldn’t be crunching on, thoughtfully or not, if she wanted to keep her weight at a healthy level. She’d started by bringing a sensible serving size out in a little red plastic bowl, one of the ones she and her sister used to have backyard picnic lunches in as kids, which she wouldn’t let her mom throw away. But after three sensible serving sizes, she got tired of getting up and down—and even more tired of being sensible—so she brought the whole bag in and balanced it on the stack of papers and novels teetering on her desk.

Sometimes potato chips were necessary. This was one of those times.

Aimee Wellington drove Krista crazy. Not only because Krista’s sister, Lucy, who could sing, act and dance circles around Aimee, had also been up for the part of Bridget in Sweatshock after Krista had practically dragged her to the audition. But just on principle. There were too many image-created idiots ruling showbiz—voices electronically enhanced and pitch-corrected, bodies surgically altered to some artificial ideal of perfection. And don’t get her started on teenagers selling sex before they should be having it themselves.

Okay, so she sounded like someone’s grandmother. And yes, she’d lost her virginity in her teens. But she wasn’t out there pushing the experience on everyone else’s kids. It hurt to see talent such as her sister’s being wasted. To see her working a brainless office job, performing lounge gigs at night only a handful of white-hairs went to see, while no-talent prima-donna princesses rose to the top, like scum in a stockpot.

Krista’s personal pilgrimage was to chip away at glossy facades, to point out in her blogs, Internet articles and pieces for the Boston Sentinel or any print media she could sell to, how people were being fooled by so much crap, into thinking crap was good. Her editor kept hinting that a staff reviewer was retiring soon, but Krista wanted to be like an octopus, tentacles spreading her message in all directions.

Call her crazy, call her a visionary, call her obsessed, but she wanted to leave her mark. Start some movement back to quality and a more natural rhythm to people’s money-and-time-obsessed existences.

She’d started her own blogging Web site, Get Real, where she regularly skewered whatever artifice came to her attention. This new overpackaged, overprocessed gimmicky food product, that new undeserving star, this new over-the-top vacation destination which resembled a theme park more than a hotel. The Christmas holiday season had sparked a whole new crop of outrage over rampant commercialism, pressure to spend and compete, consumption-crazed children and ho ho ho, goodwill to all men, now get the hell out of my way before I ram you with my shopping cart.

Jeff Sites, a regular columnist at the Boston Sentinel, had mentioned her rants in one of his Local Life columns and her Web site hits had gone off the chart.

Happiness.

The more people who stopped and thought about what crap they were supporting with their hard-earned dollars, the more she hoped they’d vote with their wallets and demand quality. Or keep their wallets in their pockets, stay home and sing songs with their kids or play with the overload of stuff they already had. Leave the merchants and marketers scrambling for something else with real appeal.