Reading a romance novel – an excerpt from Ten Years and Then… #MFRWHooks

So this is an excerpt from early in “Ten Years and Then…” before Daniel and Nora properly meet, but they’ve already been noticing each other across campus.  In this excerpt, Daniel learns a little bit more about Nora (including her name):

Daniel crouched down to get a closer look at the bottom shelf. Every good find he’d made at Turn the Page—a used bookshop right off campus, just down the street from the Green Lantern Café—had come from the bottom shelf.

He guessed that most people simply didn’t look there, so anything really good got overlooked. It wasn’t surprising; kneeling on the concrete floor was painful, and they didn’t sweep or dust nearly often enough. But sometimes it was worth it. Like now—a copy of The Hobbit in perfect condition. He’d read it before, of course, but his copy at home had disappeared, probably borrowed and then lost by his sister.

He was about to stand up and bring his prize to the register when he heard a voice. Her voice.

She was just on the other side of the aisle. She was talking to someone. A friend, maybe? Her roommate? “Yeah, it’s trash. But it’s fun trash. Please buy it? Or I’ll even buy it for you. I want someone to talk about it with, okay?”

On the other side of the Fantasy/Science Fiction shelf was Romance. Daniel could name a few of the biggest romance authors because both his sister and mother read them, but he’d never actually looked at any of the books himself.

The girl continued badgering her companion. And then she started reading aloud. It was definitely trash, and he wasn’t sure he’d call it fun, except that it was because of how she was reading it. She was even doing character voices. He balled his hands into fists to try and keep himself from laughing. It was very difficult; this girl was hilarious.

She stopped after five minutes, halfway through a love scene—just before things got R-rated, he assumed—and her friend, or whoever she was, finally gave in. “Fine, Nora! I’ll read it! But you have to promise to let me pick something halfway decent for you to read in return.”

Nora!

He finally had a name to match the voice, and the laugh. And now he knew she wasn’t merely funny. She was beyond funny. Hilarious didn’t even really cover it.

He didn’t know what she looked like, but after everything he’d heard from her, that almost didn’t matter.

But what could he do with her name, and everything else he knew about her? He already knew she was a Journalism major, and most likely a freshman. That meant she’d have most of her classes in Addison Hall, and—unless she was local to Albany—she’d live in the freshman dorm, Morris Hall. It wouldn’t be difficult to meet her, knowing all that. But what would he do if he did? What would he say?

He wished there was a book somewhere on the dozens of shelves in this store that could tell him that.

I didn’t want to pick an actual book/author and call it “trashy” but there is a specific book I had in mind for this scene.  As weird as it sounds, though, I don’t know which book.  Back when I was a kid, my mother read romance novels.  Some of them were Harlequin books, of which she always had about a zillion laying around the house.  But she also read books from bigger name authors, including Sidney Sheldon.  And I specifically remember being 12 or 13 and picking up one of her hardcover books and flipping through it, and landing on a very steamy scene in which the heroine (a heiress of some sort, who somehow ended up an international criminal, I think) was having a flashback to her time in a Swiss boarding school and the moment when she discovered, to put it delicately, some alternative uses for the hand-held showerhead in the bathroom.  THAT is the scene I pictured Nora reading aloud in the used bookstore.  But I don’t remember if the book actually was by Sidney Sheldon or someone else, and I’m definitely not using Google to try and figure out which exact book it was based on a description of the scene!

You can find “Ten Years and Then…” on Amazon, at a list of other ebook retailers, and on Audible!

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