Elizabeth Bevarly - Write It Up! - Rapid Transit / The Ex Factor / Brewing Up Trouble

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

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For David,

who made a rapid transit into my life and thankfully never left it.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Sweetie

Rapid Transit Elizabeth Bevarly Rapid Transit

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Ex Factor Tracy Kelleher

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

EPILOGUE

Brewing Up Trouble Mary Leo

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

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.

“That salt air can be ruinous for a girl’s complexion?” suggested Samantha Porter, another of the senior writers. Draped in a chair next to Abby, she wore a golden Versace ensemble, the tight pants hugging her pencil-slim hips and the top negligently open to a bejeweled clasp just above her belly button.

Tess flicked the burning end of the cigarette into the Venetian glass ashtray. “Ooh, I just love it when you girls talk nasty. It means I’ve been the proper mentor after all. Still—” she paused “—I have my moments of inner reflection, and not just after having a colonic irrigation.

“You see,” she went on, “it occurred to me how lucky I was with my marvelous good fortune, and that there must be something I could do—we could do as an organization—to help others achieve some of this kind of serenity.”

“We’re going to sponsor a Fresh Air Fund kid to stay at Casa Olympia next summer?” Abby asked. As if.

“Of course not. I have white rugs. I couldn’t possibly have children. No, I realized that what we needed to do was to help other women obtain my lifestyle.”

Tess sat up straight, all business. “What I’m talking about, darlings, is opportunity. We’re going to show women the quickest, hippest ways to find the right rich mate.”

“You think if we knew the quickest, hippest ways to find the right mate, the right rich mate, we’d be sitting here?” Samantha asked.

Tess placed her buffed elbows on the desk and positioned her chin on entwined fingers. “No one ever really leaves Tess and all it stands for.” She let that pronouncement hang in the air. Then she zeroed in on Abby. “You will delve into the world of ex-dating.”

Abby coughed into her hand. “Do you mean extreme dating, as in tandem hang gliding on the first date or making out on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro?”

“No, Abby darling, that’s ‘ex’ as in former. From what I’ve gathered, it seems there are women out there who go to great lengths to help hook up their former beaux on this Web site, a kind of online matchmaking service that provides dating recommendations stamped with a type of Good Ex-Housekeeping Seal of Approval. I’m sure you’ll find out all about the particulars.”