Sneak Peek at My Work in Progress

Below is an excerpt from the manuscript I am currently working on. Feel free to comment.

It's all very complicated, he said.

Don't patronize me. It's not that fucking complicated, you just don't want to tell me. And that's fine. I really don't give a shit anyway. The point is you're looking at jail time. Years of jail time. If that doesn't bring things into perspective nothing will.

But I didn't do anything, he wailed plaintively.

And since when does that matter? She was sick of this back and forth, beating around the bush bullshit. He was as full of double-talk as ever. Some things never changed.

They sat at the polished mahogany bar of a popular Mexican restaurant in mid-town. He nursed a beer and munched on chips and queso while she swirled her Riesling. The French president silently mouthed a New Year's speech on the tv above the bar. The wine was good but did little to lighten her mood. She hated it when people lied but even more frustrating was when they lied to themselves.

Lucy Miles didn't know how to lie. Well, that's not exactly true. She knew how to lie; it's just that she wasn't very good at it. Lucy was an in-your-face kind of chick and didn't give a damn about what most people thought. She had only been there 10 minutes and was already planning her exit. She thought about ducking out when her companion went to the men's room but it just wasn't her style. She passed her card to the bartender and turned up the wine glass, drawing the stare of the businessman across the bar.

Even without her sometimes questionable manners, it was hard not to notice Lucy. She was striking at 5'11" with big doe-y brown eyes and bone-straight chocolate hair swinging just past her shoulders. She favored pencil skirts with thigh-high slits and stilettos that accentuated her long legs. She wore prescription glasses with a dark, square frame that gave her the look of a naughty librarian. She had a way of looking over them that could both petrify and exhilarate in the same glance. Her complexion was fair, thanks to her red-haired grandmother, and she slathered on SPF 30 moisturizer morning and night to keep it that way. Years before she'd thought a "healthy" tan looked great, but these days, with the threat of wrinkles and skin cancer looming, she'd decided porcelain was her ideal hue.