A quick Excerpt from the beginning of the Moon's Kiss: 3, Fertile Fields. We're going from the jungle to small town America and soon everything will be changing!
The sun was
beating down over the field as Gabby started to get ready for the day. She flipped the sign to OPEN and looked out
over the field of strawberries.
Glad I’m not picking them, the college girl thought. The strawberries
weren’t quite ready, not yet. When they were, there would be people out to pick
them, and she and Tom would be helping to package the new product. But right now, they were just ripening, the
red and green colors gleaming in the light.
And that meant it
was time to wait for someone to show up and buy their products. Mornings were
always dead—most of the usual customers were either at work or at that college,
show only the odd traveler showed up at the stand, at least until the afternoon
and early evening.
But, she got paid,
and it helped ensure nobody came by to help themselves from a field full of
strawberries, even if they weren’t fully ripe.
That’s who I am. Gabby, overstuffed college
student and strawberry guard. She sighed, looking at her reflection in one
of the metal storage units. Strawberry
(hah!) blond hair, green eyes, and a body that was…
Well, not fat, but with a little too much in the
way of curves and belly for most guys to see her as great looking. Or even good
looking. She was, at most, cute, the
kind of person you looked at and dismissed in favor of the high-breasted,
flat-bellied cheer captain walking down the street in her uniform because she never had to worry about having a
paunch.
Oh, sure, they had
to diet and exercise, but so did Gabby, but that never helped her. She could starve herself, exercise until she was red in the
face and she still had all of her weight go the wrong places. Gabby sighed and reached down and pinched her
belly.
Still way too
much.
“Hey, Gabby!”
She started at the
voice behind her, squeaking and spinning around. Tom was standing at the
entrance to the building, grinning at her response. “Sorry, did I freak you
out?”
“N-no!” Not more than usual. Tom was… Hot. Good looking, buff, his black hair
and blue eyes going great with his tough build. The kind of guy that Gabby
would love to date if only she could get up the courage to ask him.
But well, Tom
probably wasn’t interested in someone like Gabby.
Nope, he could get all the girlfriends he wanted. Hell, he probably
already had all the girlfriends he wanted back at college.
And he didn’t want
Gabby.
“Hi Tom,” Gabby
finally said. “How is everything?”
“Well, my class is
going well, that is for being a slave-TA,” the graduate student chuckled. “You?”
“I’m not there yet,”
Gabby said. She shook her head. That was another thing—Tom already had his BA, and Gabby was merely in her
second year of college. So he didn’t just have the hot girls mooning over him,
he had girls who were in graduate school mooning over him. Gabby sighed. “I
have to finish my calculus, and hopefully not fail it. Again.”
“Ha!” Tom said. “Wait
until you hit high-level chemistry. Then
you can get your anger out by blowing up the lab.”
“And paying for
it,” Gabby said, brushing an errant lock of her hair over one ear. “So,
anything to do today?”
“Nah. No
harvesting, and since it’s the middle of the week, I don’t think we’ll get many
people in. You know what that means.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said, looking at her books. “Study
time.”
“Study time,” Tom
agreed. “But I do have a few friends who may be driving by.” He gestured at
some of the bagged fruit. “Promised them a few bags of strawberries and cleared
it with the boss.
“Oh.” Gabby stared
down at the bags. “Where are they from?”
“Down from some
experimental farm in South America,” Tom said with a chuckle. “Liam was
supposed to be there for a bit longer, but something came up and so he’s back.
Supposedly, he’s moving to a little farm town out in the boonies.”
“More than here?”
Gabby asked.
“You’d be surprised,”
Tom said with a chuckle. “I—” he stopped. “Well, it looks like we have some
customers.”
Gabby looked over
at the car pulling into the dirt parking lot. She knew that car.
Fuck.
Fertile Fields, the Moon's Kiss, Book III, should be out before the end of the week!
