Tipsy (29 page)

Until it isn’t.

Suddenly, just the slightest touch or a
single glance from Max has her heart doing somersaults. Suddenly,
the lackluster relationship begins to spark, and Charlotte finds
herself tied in a knot of desire.

But she has no idea about the tricks
being played right under her perky little nose.

Turn the page for Chapter
One of
Tricks
.

Sneak Peek of
Tricks

By Cambria
Hebert

1

Tucker

My mouth felt like it was packed with
cotton. You know that dry but slightly sticky feeling? My tongue
moved and it brushed against the roof of my mouth, and the cotton
came with it.

I grunted and opened my
eyes, only to immediately shut them again. I wasn’t ready for
morning.
Shit, how much did I drink last
night?
My body was still heavy with sleep,
my limbs not wanting to cooperate.

One of my arms was flung wide and I
pulled it in to rub a hand over my sleepy face, hoping it would
wake me up a little more. I knew I needed to get up… I just
couldn’t think of the reason.

Something shifted beside me
and I felt the covers lift and drop. The soft sound of footsteps
reached my ears. It wasn’t a something. It was a
someone.

I went home with someone last
night.

Opening my eyes again, I glanced to my
left in time to see a woman wearing nothing but a pink thong step
into the adjoining bathroom and quietly close the door. Well, now I
remembered the reason I went home with her.

Her ass was luscious.

Vague memories of last night filtered
through my hazy, beer-soaked memory of skin against skin and a low
seductive laugh. What was her name again? Veronica? Violet? Shit, I
hadn’t a clue.

Tossing away the covers, I swung my
legs over the side of the mattress and looked down. I was buck-ass
naked. I looked around for my clothes, which were lying in a pile
near the door of the bedroom.

Must have been in a hurry to
get naked.
I smirked. I was always in a
hurry to get naked. Especially when I was with a woman with an ass
like that.

I glanced back at the closed bathroom
door as the toilet flushed and the tap water turned on. That was my
cue to leave. I had on my boxers and jeans before the door
opened.

Rushing out the door with shirt in hand
seemed a little immature, so I turned. And, man, did I get an
eyeful. There was no way in hell her boobs were real. They were too
perfect. Large round, creamy globes sat high atop her chest. They
gave way to a flat stomach with a light-reflecting stud in her
bellybutton. The pink thong was still in place but left little to
imagination, and her long, tan legs stretched all the way to the
floor.

Her hair was dark, her features exotic,
and her lips were full.

Even drunk, I had great
taste.

I motioned with my chin, a
little
what’s up
gesture, and draped my T-shirt over my shoulder.

“
Leaving so soon?” she
asked, padding across the carpeting toward me.

I didn’t even pretend to not look at
her chest. Shit, this had been a one-night stand. She could think I
was a dog all she wanted. Hell, she’d be right.

‘
Course, she clearly wasn’t
the type of girl to be offended by my wandering eyes. She walked
right up to me, wound her arms around my bare waist, and pressed
those perfect tits right up against my chest. Then she rubbed
around like she was a cat and I was her scratching pole.

“
Don’t you want to stay for
breakfast?” she purred.

“
Much as I’d like to, I
can’t. Got somewhere to be.”

The woman whose name might or might not
be Veronica pulled back and sashayed her ass across the room to a
wooden nightstand by the bed. She bent at the waist, giving me the
perfect view of said bottom as she scrawled something on a piece of
paper.

I considered staying longer, but if I
did that, she’d think this wasn’t just a one-night stand. Girls
were complicated like that. If our night stretched into morning,
they got ideas. Ideas that maybe they would be the one to capture
the guy no one else could. They would read something more into
morning sex than the sex that occurred late at night when both our
tongues tasted of beer.

I might sleep around, I might like a
variety of ladies, but I never gave false hope where there was
none. I might be a dog, but I wasn’t an ass.

Sweet cheeks (I had to call her
something) swayed her hips back across the room and held out a
scrap of paper to me. “Call me,” she said, flipping her hair behind
her shoulder.

I glanced at her chest one more time,
then stuffed the piece of paper in the front pocket of my
jeans.

She leaned up and pressed her lips to
mine, slipping her tongue between. I kissed her back quickly and
then slowly pulled away. Reaching around, I palmed her ass. “Thanks
for last night,” I said and walked out of her bedroom without even
looking back.

By the front door, I found my shoes and
leather jacket and quickly finished dressing before stepping out
into the cold morning air. I wasn’t going to miss this cold. I was
actually looking forward to moving on, trying something
new.

A thin layer of frost covered the
windshield on my truck. Instead of getting out and scraping it, I
blasted the heat and let the engine idle, letting it melt on its
own. While I waited, I pulled out the already crumpled piece of
paper I was just given. Smoothing it out, I looked down, my eyes
skimming over the number I was never going to call to look for her
name.

I laughed and crumpled the paper back
up and tossed in on the floor of the truck.

Rachel.

Damn. I hadn’t even been
close.

Ready for more? Tucker and
Charlotte’s story will be available in early 2014!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

(Note from the
Author)

Dear Diary,

I went to the store today and wandered
around for hours and ended up buying three bottles of nail polish
and some nail art decals so I could do my nails like all those
pictures I have seen on Pinterest.

Oh wait. This isn’t my
diary.

But you know that little tidbit above
describes perfectly my attention span while I was writing this
book. Yes, I know. I just practically called myself out in my own
book. But hey, I’m nothing if I’m not honest. And I think we
established several books ago that my “acknowledgements” were going
to be more of a note from me about what I was up to and
experiencing while I wrote each book.

So what does this have to do with nail
polish?

Just the fact that this poor
book has experienced just about every single type of writer ADD
that a book could possibly suffer. I actually got the idea for this
book YEARS ago. I’ve been sitting on it because it never felt like
a right time to sit down and write it. I had this idea before I
wrote
Heven & Hell
. In fact, I would go out on a limb to say that this was one
of my first book ideas. Now, I have a lot of ideas. A lot of them,
sadly, come and go. But the best ideas, the characters who beg to
be given a book, stick around. This book did just that. It sat and
waited for its turn until I realized it would fit perfectly with
the
Take It Off
series.

So Julie and Blue were born. I just
love the name Blue.

Anyway, I intended to
release this book before
Text
. It was originally due to be the
fourth
Take It Off
novel. Halfway through writing this book, Honor and Nathan
literally took over my mind. At first I fought it. I remember
whenever I was running or driving or cooking or doing whatever I
did, I was constantly thinking up new book ideas. Characters were
springing themselves on me left and right. It was frankly
maddening. I’m the kind of writer who likes to write one book at a
time. I don’t like to have multiple projects going. I like to give
my characters their own attention, their own unique voice. For me,
I feel like if I’m writing two or three books at once, then the
voices are going to overlap whether I want them to or
not.

So I fought all those storyline ideas.
I fought the voices. I wrote them down… I ignored them.

They won anyway.

Honor would not be pushed
aside. So… I opened up a new doc and started
Text
. I wrote until it was done. Julie
and Blue were on hold.

So after I finished
Text
I came back to
Tipsy
. Interesting factoid
here… I was so indecisive on the title of this book. It was
originally going to be called
Tangled
(‘cause you know she’s a
stylist and hair gets tangled and she gets tangled in crime). But
there are a lot of books out with that title already. So then I
changed it to
Tame
,
because one day I was washing my hair in the shower and thought to
myself,
Shampoo your crazy hair good and
tame that crap!
Then I was all like, ooh!
That’s what I’ll call it.

Seriously.

I shouldn’t title books while washing
my hair in the shower.

I had
Tipsy
on my list of possible titles
for the series and I knew I was going to use it, but I had planned
on using it for another book. But then Julie started saying that
word. As in, “You can’t get tipsy off a person.”

And that’s how this book got its title.
Julie picked it.

Anyway, back to my interesting story. I
know you are totally into this.

So after I changed the title
three times, stopped halfway to write
Text
and then came back to
Tipsy
… I started writing.
And then another set of characters totally started pestering
me.

They pestered me enough that I wrote
the prologue and the first chapter.

Yep.

I am officially insane.

Then I closed that document and told
myself I. Would. Finish. TIPSY.

This is where the nail polish comes in.
And the baking. And the cleaning. And the social media
stalking.

Yep. I pretty much did everything but
write.

Except clean my bathrooms. I’m still
putting that off. Ha ha ha ha.

The days rolled by and then one day, I
looked at the calendar and realized time was no longer on my side.
I had deadlines. It was time to get real.

And so I finished. I hope
you like the end result.


After all that, I figure I probably
need a mini break… Oh look, something shiny….

*wanders away*……

See you next book!

Cambria Hebert is the author
of the young adult paranormal
Heven and
Hell
series, the new adult
Death Escorts
series, and
the new adult
Take it Off
series. She loves a caramel latte, hates math, and
is afraid of chickens (yes, chickens). She went to college for a
bachelor’s degree, couldn’t pick a major, and ended up with a
degree in cosmetology. So rest assured her characters will always
have good hair. She currently lives in North Carolina with her
husband and children (both human and furry), where she is plotting
her next book. You can find out more about Cambria and her work by
visiting
http://www.cambriahebert.com
.

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