Click cover to buy on Amazon! He’s sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
She’s spray bleach, spreadsheets, and check lists.
Will their relationship hit the charts, or break hearts?
When the normal life Ray has always dreamed of unravels, she finds herself falling for a drummer, coming to terms with her unconventional childhood, and inevitably discovering that normal was never really in her best interest.
Excerpt:
The loud clanking of a spoon against a cereal bowl roused Ray from her second slumber. Her nausea was completely gone, but it felt like somebody shoved a few dozen hat pins into her skull. She opened one eye, and found herself staring at someone’s bare feet.
Ray had a thing about feet. Feet were disgusting appendages. Especially hairy guy feet. The Birkenstock trend nearly made her mental. She never even let her husband touch her with his feet. But these feet were different. They weren’t hairy or calloused, for one thing. They were clean, for another, and the right one had a dragon tattooed along the side of it.
“Did you clean my kitchen?”
Ray sat up, squinting with the pain of bright lights and hat pins stirring in her cerebrum. She dug into her purse for the ridiculous aviator shades she’d bought at the last gas station and put them on. Looking up, she saw that the feet were attached to the drummer boy from the band in the bar. Wavy brown hair tucked behind his ear, cobra tattoo hissing on his chest, he wore nothing but a pair of faded jeans. Funny, had she seen this guy in the supermarket last week, she’d have crossed the aisle to avoid him. This morning she couldn’t take her bloodshot eyes off of him.
“Sorry about that. I’m psychotic.” She rubbed her temples, the effort of speaking causing more hat pin sticks. “It’s just, I got up to take some Advil, and I stepped on some Cheerios and so I tried to sweep up the crumbs, but the crumbs were stuck because the floor was sticky…next thing you know I’m scrubbing your floor. It just snowballed. It snowballed and thank God I started to feel sick or I would have moved on to the bathroom, started changing sheets while you were still sleeping in them, who knows. I clean when I’m stressed. It’s my process.”
He smiled and shook his head, shoveling another spoonful of Cheerios into his mouth.
“I’m Ray, by the way,” she said, removing a bobby pin that was poking at her scalp near her temple. Holy crap, maybe those aren’t imaginary hat pins in my head.
“Were your parents hoping for a boy or something?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’m Van,” he said, in between bites.
Van. A flicker of excitement stirred in Ray’s stomach. Might she have stumbled upon somebody else whose parents were too high in the seventies to properly name their child?
“Were you conceived in a van or something?”
He did a combination laugh-choke. “Uh, I have no idea. My first name is Jeff, last name Vandermark. Van’s just a nickname. It’s easier since there always seems to be at least three other Jeffs in any given room.”
Ray sighed. A fun nickname given by friends. She couldn’t relate to that.
“You hungry?” he asked, pointing his spoon at his bowl of Cheerios.
“A few hours ago I swore I’d never eat again. Think I’d better hold off.”
He smiled slightly, and got up to pour himself another bowl. Ray sucked in a breath. When he passed by she got an eyeful of chiseled obliques, angled perfectly, pointing toward the Promised Land. What is wrong with me? Escaping lunatic husband, thirty bucks to my name, dead car, remember? Not the time to drool over drummer boys.
“Thanks for letting me crash here last night. I’d get out of your hair, but I have no idea where my car is. I mean, I know it’s at a bar somewhere in Portland…”
He laughed into his spoonful of cereal and nodded as he struggled with a swallow. “Right. Let me finish eating and we can go see about your car.”
What others are saying about Middle Eight:
"Middle Eight is a smart, adrenaline-filled romp that will have you turning pages well into the night. Ray is one of those heroines you wish you could hang out with: cool, sexy, witty and unflappable. Even when she's being put through the ringer, you know she'll come out on top in the end. Add mellow rock star Van and a quirky cast of supporting characters to the mix and you'll be hooked. Just don't expect to put Middle Eight down once you get started."
~ Gray Martin, author of Trophy Wife
“Middleton rocks the charts on humor with MIDDLE EIGHT, a delightful romp where a straight laced woman stalked by a deranged husband, meets her rock and roll prince charming and ends up on the cover of dicey tabloid for an act she never thought she was capable of.”
~Susan Stec, author: The Grateful Undead, Dead Girls, Purgatory, and Dark and Deadly series
Middle Eight is now available as a paperback or ebook.
Buy links: ebook or paperback on Amazon, also at iBookstore and Barnes & Noble.
Coming soon:
Middle Eight Goodreads paperback giveaway &
Middle Eight Blog Tour with $25 Amazon GC giveaway
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