It’s been quite a while since I shared some ‘Opening Lines’ with you, so today I’m putting that right.
Put your feet up, grab a cuppa, and enjoy the first 500 words from my recently updated #eroticromane, Digging Deep.
Based (loosely!!!) on my own adventures as an archaeologist in searing hot Tunisia many years ago, this novella was immense fun to write.
Blurb
Dr Beth Andrews’ first foreign excavation, which she co-runs with the American archaeologist Dr Harrison Harris, gets off to a shaky start.
Thanks to the jealous interference of Harrison’s ex, an overzealous student, and a broken mosaic, Anglo-American relations are pushed to the limit, while Beth’s erotic and romantic expectations are similarly tested.
Love and lust really can cloud even the cleverest person’s judgement!
FIRST FIVE HUNDRED WORDS…
Irritably adjusting her wide-brimmed hat for the third time in as many minutes, Dr Beth Andrews felt the sting of the African sun sear the back of her neck through the tresses of her long, ginger hair.
She never dreamt she’d miss the stubborn, muddy clay of the British earth she was used to hunting through in her search for archaeological data, but the uncooperatively fine white sand of North Africa was enough to try the patience of a saint.
Throwing down her brush in overheated exasperation, Beth thought fondly of her excavation trowel. Her tool of choice had been rendered obsolete in the face of so much sand. A job that was, by necessity, slow was reduced to a snail’s pace as the metre by metre square of the Roman bath house site in which she worked backfilled in on itself with every sweep of her light bristled brush.
It had been a dream come true for Beth when she’d been selected to lead the University of Wales’s excavation team, digging the sprawling Ancient Roman city of Lepti Major on the outskirts of Sousse in Tunisia. The chance to uncover stunning mosaics and city roads that hadn’t been trodden for 1000 years was an opportunity she’d had no intention of letting pass by.
The fact she’d be sharing responsibility for the site with her archaeological hero, the unimaginatively named Dr Harrison Harris from Colorado, an American academic who’d been the subject of many of Beth’s private fantasies since she’d fallen in love with his work, not to mention the black and white photograph of him on the back cover of his books, in her first year as a student, was neither here nor there.
Flicking her gaze covertly towards Harrison, Beth tried to subdue the slight increase in her pulse rate by recalling what Linda, the site’s previous supervisor, had said about working in Africa’s extreme temperatures.
Scalding by day and freezing by night.
Linda had warned Beth that her freckle-spotted, sensitive flesh would loathe being fried during the day and frozen at night, just as much as her archaeological brain would relish the challenge of constructing a city from its remains.
Beth hated the fact that Linda had been right. She’d never been rendered so sweaty, not to mention so blotched with extra heat-induced freckles, in her life. There couldn’t have been a centimetre of her body that hadn’t got a fresh cluster of beige dots on it. After only a week under the sun, it was becoming a struggle to hold on to her generally calm approach to life, and Beth was finding that her temper, which rarely flared in the UK, was on a permanently short fuse.
What got to her most was that none of her colleagues seemed to be suffering at all. They were all happily tanning as they worked, and sleeping off their exhaustion with ease at night, when the temperatures plummeted, and she was too cold to nod off.
As her first…
***
If you want to find out what happens next, and feel not just the heat of the desert sun rise, you can buy Digging Deep from Amazon (all territories except the US and Canada), including Amazon.co.uk.
Happy reading!!
Kay xx