She wouldn’t trade this man for anything …
Bree looked over and saw that Charlie was in fact staring. His eyes never leaving her, never wavering.
She was acutely aware that he could have glanced down to the tops of her pushed-up breasts, to her barely covered thighs. If he had he would have noticed the intermittent tremors, the pink skin she felt sure was not just on her cheeks but the tips of her ears.
It was unbearably sexy, that stare, his dark eyes so large, unblinking. As if he could see more than his share, more than she wanted him to.
As every second ticked by, the heat intensified, until she couldn’t take it any longer.
“I’ve got a window in my bedroom,” Charlie finally said, his voice—still low and rumbly—moving through her like distant thunder. “I want to take your dress off slowly. Let it fall down your body.”
He reached for her. “I’ve been wondering for hours what’s underneath …”
Dear Reader,
My first true love is New York City. It sounds crazy, but I’ve been mad for Manhattan since the first time I went there as a kid. My father’s from New York, so we’d fly out from California regularly. Later on, I had friends who were commuters, spending half their time in NY and the other half in LA. I visited at least once a year, and knew my way around like a native.
So, when I came up with the concept for It’s Trading Men! (why didn’t they have this when I was younger?) I knew it was a New York tale. Ask any single woman who lives and works in the city, and she’ll weep as she explains how difficult it is to find the right man in all the hustle and bustle of skyscrapers and subways.
Heroine Bree Kingston is a sweet girl from a tiny town in Ohio who had the guts and gumption to go solo into Manhattan to find her dreams. She never imagined she’d one day end up in the bed of Charlie Winslow, the blogging king of Manhattan, but that’s where she finds herself, during Fashion Week, no less! But chemistry this sizzling and a match this perfect was way too good to last, right?
I hope you enjoy the fantasy and fun of CHOOSE ME. Look for more trading card men stories with Have Me in May 2012 and Want Me in June 2012.
I love hearing from readers and can be reached at [email protected]. And come visit www.blazeauthors.com
Happy reading,
Jo Leigh
About the Author
JO LEIGH is from Los Angeles and always thought she’d end up living in Manhattan. So how did she end up in Utah, in a tiny town with a terrible internet connection, being bossed around by a house full of rescued cats and dogs? What the heck, she says, predictability is boring. Jo has written more than forty novels and can be contacted at [email protected].
Choose Me
Jo Leigh
To Birgit, for her enthusiasm and support.
And to Debbi & Jill, who rock. Hard.
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Bree Kingston
Assistant copywriter at BBDA Manhattan
Studied Advertising and Fashion at Case Western University
Lives in Manhattan
Born on March 22
BREE KINGSTON HAD BEEN IN Manhattan for five months and twelve days. This was her third visit to the St. Mark’s Church basement kitchen, where she and sixteen women she barely knew were exchanging ten days’ worth of frozen lunches. She’d gotten invited by Lucy Prince, whom Bree had known for four days. Lucy wasn’t part of the exchange. Not anymore. She’d moved to Buffalo with her fiancé, thereby freeing up the foldout ottoman bed that Bree slept on in the one-bedroom apartment she shared with three other girls. Bree’s rent was a steal at seven hundred per month. The stove at the apartment had been nonfunctioning for as long as anyone there could remember.
Technically, this was her sixth visit to the kitchen. She had gotten permission to come to the communal church basement the evenings before the exchanges to prepare her lunches. Sixteen portions of veggie lasagna and medium-heat chili this week packed in small freezer-to-microwave containers, all ready to be handed out during the semimonthly trade.
Although it had sounded odd when she’d first heard about the group, Bree suffered from both of the two major maladies that came with living the Manhattan dream: no decent single men to date and no money.
She’d anticipated both. Since she’d spent most of her twenty-five years planning her escape to The Big Apple, she’d read every article, blog and book about the subject, saved her money like Scrooge as she’d worked her way through college, and even had a decent savings account set aside for emergencies. Bree was in this for the long haul.
Finding the lunch exchange had been a brilliant stroke of luck. Fourteen of the sixteen were also single, worked in the East Village and all of them knew where to find the best happy hours, the cheapest dry cleaning, cell service that actually worked and where not to go on a date, assuming one ever had a date.
Even better, she’d actually made her first real New York friends.
“Attention ladies!” Shannon Fitzgerald, a natural redhead wearing a fantastic knockoff dress Bree had noticed first thing, had needed to shout to get everyone to listen. All of them were standing around a rectangle of tables, their lunches in front of them in neat little stacks. Everyone had brought their own cooler bag with ice packs on the bottom. In a moment, they’d move from pile to pile, an elegant assembly line of working women, all of them under thirty-ish, all of them wearing something dark on this December day. All of them except Bree. She had chosen a yellow-and-black plaid skirt and jacket, emphasis on the yellow, handmade from her own copycat pattern. Which would have looked very nice on Shannon, now that Bree thought about it.
“Hush,” Shannon said, and in a moment, the room fell silent. “Thank you. I have had an idea,” she said.
It wasn’t just a sentence. Not the way it was said. No, all the words were IN CAPS and bold, like a headline. The IDEA was going to be good. Exciting. Way more than just a new frozen lunch recipe.
“For those of you who are new—” Shannon nodded toward Bree “—my family owns a printing press. Fitzgerald & Sons on 10th Avenue and North 50th.”
Bree had seen the place. It was huge.
“We do trading cards. Mostly sports, but now everybody and their uncle wants them. Artists use them as calling cards, Realtors do the same. They’ve got them for Twilight, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and we just finished a ginormous order of official Hip-Hop trading cards.”
Shannon paused, looking around the room. Then she smiled. “No one, however, is using trading cards the way they should be used—to trade men.”
Bree blinked, shot a look at her closest friend, Rebecca Thorpe, only to find Rebecca staring back. They raised eyebrows at each other and Bree was grateful all over again that she and Rebecca had clicked at that very first lunch exchange, despite their obvious differences. Bree was from a little town in Ohio and had a huge middle-class family. Rebecca was an attorney, the only child