This Summer Read Won't Cool You Down

by Madelle Morgan

Summer Heat Warning: certain scenes are hot enough to heat up the Arctic!

Diamond Hunter, my geologist-in-peril romantic suspense, is set at a fly-in-only diamond mine in Canada's far north in July.

I decided to post an excerpt to bring it to the attention of Kindle Unlimited subscribers who are keen to try a new author.

Petra Paris has agreed to share her mine camp bedroom in exchange for bodyguard services from Seth Cooper, an undercover cop with the Diamond Protection unit.

In this scene, they share a bed for the first time.

“I won’t touch a hair on your pretty head. I’ll lie on top of the blankets.” When she began to protest further, Seth admitted, “My back will give out if I sleep in an awkward position.”

Sympathy dimmed the agitated lights sparking her irises. “Back pain is the worst. I’m not keen to sleep sitting up myself.” Petra made a decision. “Very well. We’ll share the bed for tonight only, due to the extenuating circumstances. Tomorrow night we’ll alternate.”

There wouldn’t be another night, but he didn’t want to rile her. Regret tugged briefly that he’d never see her again after placing her on a commercial flight the next day. His line of work meant personal relationships warranted no place in his life.

Too bad, though, in this instance. Petra, spirited and unaffectedly beautiful, lit an explosive chemical mix in his mind and belly that excited and occasionally frightened him. An undercover detective had no business allowing sexual attraction to interfere with his assignment. Petra’s safety, not her curvy body, rated his attention. End of story.

Petra extracted one of the pillows and plumped it into place on his side of the double bed. After shucking his boots and jacket, he purposely ignored her deliberate effort to create distance and instead dropped heavily into a comfortable position on his back, shoulder to shoulder. As he anticipated, Petra squirmed away from the light contact.

He deliberately readjusted his upper body, forcing her to withdraw to the very edge of the mattress where she remained rigidly quiet. To his pleased surprise she didn’t insist he move over. It reassured him to feel her safe and close. Perhaps she experienced a similar comfort.

After several minutes, a slight smile playing on his lips, he closed his eyes and relaxed in anticipation of a restful night.

“Who is Kate?”

The verbal jab convulsed his abdominal muscles. He’d never mentioned his ex-wife to anyone up north. His friends and co-workers back in British Columbia considered the divorce forbidden territory. No one dared raise the subject in his presence for fear of lighting a very short fuse. “What are you talking about?” he managed.

“Last night you called me Kate. Your exact words were, ‘Kate, come to bed.’”

“I must have been dreaming.” His firm statement broadcast a desire to end the discussion.

“Are you married?”

Dammit. He rolled onto his side away from her. “No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No. Go to sleep.”

A small hand seared the flesh on his forearm. “Seth, in spite of my, ah, participation in this little romantic show we’re staging, your girlfriend has nothing to worry about. A few kisses for appearances doesn’t make you unfaithful.”

Seth gripped the side of the mattress and ground out, “I’m not unfaithful. There is no girlfriend. Leave it alone, will you?”

“That’s a relief. Men gossip, you know. Eventually word spreads to the—”

Seth reversed his body to pin Petra’s chest with his. “I’m a single man. Got it? Kate is my ex-wife. We divorced two years ago. Three paroled drug smugglers I’d put away attempted to kidnap her. I couldn’t guarantee her future safety, so she left. Satisfied?”

The tightly controlled admission belied the ugly truth. He’d failed at the most important job a man had—to protect his woman. He’d given her the divorce she’d asked for and thrown in the house and the car, but guilt ate a hole in his heart he refused to ever let another woman fill.

“But they didn’t kidnap her, did they?” Petra persisted softly.

“No thanks to me.” Bitterness shook his voice. “She escaped when their car stalled.” He began to pull away. “She’s alive today because the perps forgot to fill the gas tank.”

“Wimp.”

The insult stung like a slap. “Excuse me?”

“A woman who’d dump the man she loved due to an attempted kidnapping is a wimp. Marriage is a partnership.”

“Our marriage put her life in danger. She did the smart thing by leaving.”

“Cluck. Cluck. Cluck.”

Dammit all to hell. He raised his upper body on one arm, rigid with a fierce anger that erupted from a dark place in his soul that didn’t bear visiting. The woman insisted on pushing his buttons.

Careful to rein in his temper, he replied evenly, “Any sane person in Kate’s place would have done the same thing. I didn’t protect her. Yes, she was scared. She had every right to be.”

“I would have stayed.”

The stalwart declaration speared his solar plexus like a needle into a balloon, allowing the anger to escape. A sheen of moisture glistened on serious burnt gold eyes staring up into his. She meant it.

He didn’t know what to say.

***

Have a wonderful July!

Madelle

About Madelle Morgan

Madelle Morgan is a Canadian author who writes romance with heat, heart and humor. Her new release, Caught on Camera, is a Hollywood wedding romance set in Muskoka, Canada—summer playground of the rich and famous.

Subscribe to her blog at MadelleMorgan.com and follow her on  Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, and Wattpad. 

Tanks for the Memories

by Madelle Morgan

This month's topic is the perfect opportunity to tell you about my heroine's tense "near death experience", and how it was derived from my years as a civil engineer in Canada's far north.

In the early 1980s I managed the construction of fuel storage facilities in remote Arctic communities, accessible only by air, by ocean during the short summer, or by ice road in winter. 

Large steel tanks stored gasoline, heating oil, and aviation fuel.

I gained a very healthy respect for the explosive potential of fuel. Actually, it is the fumes that ignite in a flash, sending the whole tank up in a powerful explosion. Very foolish teens regularly scaled fences to sniff gas from hatches in the tops of these tanks. If they decided to light a cigarette, well, that was a real death experience.

I recall receiving a phone call from a contractor who flew into a remote community to gas-free and dismantle a couple of old horizontal tanks.

Contractor: "Can't do the job."

Me, sitting in an office seven hundred miles away: "Why not?"

Contractor: "Tanks blew up before I arrived."

Because of extreme low outdoor temperatures, fuel pumps at each "tank farm" were located inside small insulated prefab buildings. Here's a photo of my 1981-82 tank farm project at Paulatuk, Northwest Territories, Canada on the shore of the Beaufort Sea.

Photo Credit: James Malone, June 1, 2010

In my romantic suspense Diamond Lust, the geologist heroine and her colleague Carter have been locked into one of these fuel dispenser buildings at a diamond mine in the Canadian sub-Arctic.

Overwhelmed by the scale of the fraudulent activities that encompassed diamond production from ore excavation through processing, Petra sank to sit cross-legged on the floor. “Horvath, Security, perhaps a dozen other employees must be in on the fraud. These smugglers covered all the angles. They will never let us live. We are so screwed.”

“Didn’t you notice the AN/FO over there?”

She followed the direction of his nod to a fifty-five-pound sack wedged between two pumps, the label indicating the trade name of an ammonium nitrate blasting agent. A wave of dizziness had her chin dipping to her chest. The smugglers planned one mother of an explosion. Ignited, the dispenser building and its fuel storage tanks outside would erupt into a cataclysmic fireball.

A white ignition cord dangled from a hole poked into the side of the packaging. When the white flashes behind her eyeballs faded, she knee-walked over to the sack, and with her teeth yanked out the cord and metal blasting cap on its buried tip with the intention of gently depositing it on the floor in a far corner.

“A lot of good that’ll do. They don’t have to enter this room to start a fire. They’ll open an exterior valve to flood the ground with fuel, or drop a match into a tank, or—”

“Enough, Carter! I need to think.” Why plan a massive explosion? If eliminating her and Carter were the objective, why wait? A small fire lit at the time they were dumped in the building would have killed them quickly. “They intend to create a major diversion,” she said slowly, “to give them time to escape in the confusion.”

Of course Petra and Carter are saved by the hero in the nick of time!

Don't be Fuelish

Before stepping out of the vehicle at a gas station, please leave cell phones and any device that can create a spark or flame inside the vehicle. Don't smoke! Even static electricity can potentially ignite fumes that have collected around the fuel pumps. Be aware. Be safe.

Bio

The spark for Madelle's debut novel, Diamond Lust, was the astonishing discovery of high quality diamonds in Canada's far north. She "mined" her northern experiences to write a romantic suspense about diamond smuggling. Diamond Lust is currently unavailable, but a second edition will be released by January, 2015. www.madellemorgan.com

My True Confession

by Madelle Morgan

What do you do when you’re a closet romance writer in a male-dominated profession and your first romance is published?

Back then I, a senior professional engineer and manager, had not informed my own employees, boss, colleagues nor industry clients that I wrote romance (and never intended to).

THEN  (drum roll…)

Soon after the print version became available, an amazing opportunity arose to sell copies of my debut romantic suspense Diamond Lust at my workplace annual charity fund-raising event. The offer included posters of my book cover plastered beside elevators throughout the 2,000 employee complex. Dozens of those employees were geologists, mining industry scientists and technologists — the ideal target audience for a novel about diamond mining in Canada’s far north.

BUT  (cue sad violin music…)

A manager needs respect, right? I’d acquired hard won credentials to counteract male chauvinism that had dogged me throughout my career. I’d been called Blondie, hit on in my younger, thinner days, and in two different jobs was assigned to a two man survey crew as a superfluous third until I proved myself, when I had exactly the same expertise as my male classmates. 

Madelle at 22

One summer I assisted two civil engineering professors with surveying and water samples in a remote area. 

One of them said to me, “I wouldn’t allow my daughter to do this work.” What did he expect the women in his classes to do with their degrees – sit at home and build bridges with Lego?

In 1987 I was the first woman in Canada to graduate from a civil engineering Master’s degree program in Construction Project Management. While searching for a new job, with five years of project experience and a construction boom underway, I was repeatedly fed the line, “We’re not hiring at this time.” At a very brief job interview a condo construction company executive asked, “What will you do with your child?” Apparently he’d never heard of daycare. I didn’t get the job.

Needless to say, for decades I only exhibited my logical, analytical left brain self at work in order to claw my way up the pay scale in line with male counterparts. I hid my creative ultra-feminine writer alter ego from co-workers. Meanwhile, naturally I incorporated occupational knowledge into my novels, as do other professionals such as MDs, forensic pathologists and lawyers who write commercial fiction.

Then my professional career and the opportunity to promote my romantic suspense novel at work collided. (Cue crashing cymbals...)

Dare I make my True Confession?

The excellent opportunity for Diamond Lust publicity was too good to miss.

(Ta da da DAH!) The Big Reveal of my romance writer persona to those in my professional life. I sold quite a few print copies at that charity book sale, including to men with whom I worked.

In the dark hours of second-guessing my decision — OMG, have the guys read the massage scene? What was I thinking? — I realized that the respect of those who “didn’t approve”, and indeed there were several, didn’t matter to me anymore. Besides, how many books had they published, eh?

At that point my two personas finally merged! I’m a romance author AND an engineer. To validate that, fans subsequently downloaded more than 100,000 copies of my free short story The Next Big Thing, which describes an engineer’s very sexy invention.

Do you think making my True Confession years earlier, instead of when early retirement was on the horizon, would have risked my professional credibility? What would you have done and why?

Postscript: Diamond Lust is only $1.49 in the Kindle and Nook Book stores, and $0.99 at Ellora’s Cave.