Goodbye Arizona Read Online Free PDF Page B

was good. I liked the characters’ study, the tone, the plot. I could nearly hear the characters bantering in my head. I finished that book in two days.
    “The same night, I opened a new document and I started writing again. Looking back, I understand that the piece I was missing in my own work was a focus on people, more than action. What do the characters think? What do they feel? How would ordinary people react if they had to face extraordinary situations? They’re humans, not machines or superheroes. There may be a dozen ways to describe a fight. However, if I play with drama, add mystery, and a touch of lightness, that dozen grows to a hundred. It feels amazing. Once I started, I couldn’t stop writing. I probably beat a record.”
    “ Midnight Gold nearly did. It’s nearly nine hundred pages, Marcus! And Storm Watcher is nearly as long.”
    “And it’s good.”
    Deb laughed. “Yes, it’s very good.” She licked her lips. “I particularly liked chapters seventeen and thirty-four.”
    He gasped when her bare ankle slid up his calf. She wore safari shorts and a demi-sleeve top that kept falling past her shoulder. Her round, smooth, delectable shoulder…
    “Did you know Eden’s her agent?” he said.
    “Whose agent?”
    “Chloe Fielding’s.”
    Her foot moved higher, and he nearly choked on his water. Her face lit up, as if she knew he’d just gotten hard as a rock. Of course she knew. She enticed him on purpose, biting into her lip until he couldn’t think of anything else, drowning him in those undress-me eyes…
    Marcus upped the game. “Well, they say the best is to write about personal experiences. We had fun in Vegas…”
    He signaled for the check. Deb gawped. “You didn’t. You… Oh, God!” She buried her flaming face in her napkin when the waitress came by to clear their table.
    Marcus nudged her elbow. “It doesn’t matter, Deb. Come on, no one knows. Even you didn’t notice.”
    “Well, now I know. Every time someone mentions that bit, I’ll—”
    “You’ll think about us.”
    “Right now, the only thing I’m thinking about is kicking you very hard in a very sensitive place.”
    He winced in anticipated pain.
    Deb hissed, “I hope for your sake that you don’t have more surprises up your ‘amorous’ sleeve. And for the record, it was a Jacuzzi, not a pool, and you weren’t as good as your hero pretends to be.”
    His ego rebelled. “Let’s go back to the hotel, and we’ll see about that.”
    “This was not a challenge. Can we go now?”
    He threw a couple of bills on the table, wondering where the nice, intimate lunch had gone wrong. At least her ferocity had dampened the enthusiasm below his belt.
     
    The midday sun burned cactus and palm trees to the ground. The red sand of Arizona vibrated like fire. Inside the car, the atmosphere was two degrees below frigid.
    “Doesn’t the idiom ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ mean anything to you?” Deb said.
    “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to apologize for a sex scene between fictional characters.”
    “Oh, that’s rich. First I was a tramp, now I’m a clown.”
    “I never called you a—” He swerved at the last moment onto the access road to the resort. “This scene happens when the MFC realizes that making love with the right person is special. She had other lovers before. It doesn’t make her a tart. She’s not you, anyway.”
    Deb gritted her teeth.
    “I’m sorry if you can’t see that that particular moment in our life fit the intent in the book.”
    “That moment was ours, Marcus. It was private!”
    ‘So was my work, bad as it was…’
    He bit back the words before they started World War III. Marcus pulled on the hand brake, hard. “Do you have questions or not?” Her hostile pout dared him to grab her and shake. “Last chance, Deborah.”
    She grouched, “I already know where you pick up your ideas.”
    “All right. We’re done.” He grabbed the handle to open his door.
    Deb