The Wrath of Dimple, book three in the Samantha Lytton series, is almost upon us! It drops from Totally Bound on July 4th, everywhere August 3rd.
Pre-order is happening
RIGHT NOW my lovelies!
To whet your appetite, dear readers, I present...a sample from
The Wrath of Dimple. It has everything -- hospitals, angst, Ghostbusters. Enjoy!
THE WRATH OF DIMPLE
You know those moments that are so surreal, so nightmarish, that it
seems you're trapped in a Lady GaGa video being forced to communicate
with a spider wearing a dress made of bees, except you don't speak
spider or bee? Or GaGa for that matter. That's what it felt like the day
soon after New Year's when I arrived at the hospital, my best friend
Ellen clutching my cold, stiff fingers, to hear the terrifying news.
The tall doctor whipped off her no-nonsense glasses with one hand and
held a chart with the other. "Ms Lytton, I'm Doctor Mehta," she began in
the grave voice one delivers spider-strewn news with, "I'm afraid your
husband-Mr
Ballitch?-is-"
"Dead!" yelled Ellen.
"Oh my God!" My knees buckled, and I collapsed into the chasm of horror that had suddenly replaced the floor.
"What? No!" The doc knelt down to my pathetic level.
I whipped my head up, hope flaring in my fluttering heart.
"Don't worry-he's just in a coma!" she finished with a smile.
They helped me into a plastic waiting room chair, and the doctor said
more words to me about Sam. My brand new husband. We were supposed to
leave for a honeymoon tomorrow, but now he'd experienced a 'blow to the
head', had been 'found in the street', and lay in a coma-Just a coma! No
big whoop!-induced by the doctors to reduce swelling in his brain.
Damn it, I loved his brain. It was one of my favorite parts of him.
"His name is pronounced 'Ball-itch'," lied Ellen. The witness protection people had a wonderful sense of humor.
"So, it's not a natural coma," Ellen said to me in the faux-happy tone
one might use with a deranged cat. She petted my hair. "It's better,
because the professionals are controlling it. Right, Doc?"
Dr Mehta made noncommittal utterings designed to not get herself sued
when things took a catastrophic turn for the worse. I'm pretty sure that
doctors nowadays refuse to verify anything whatsoever, including their
own existence on this plane.
What she'd said finally began to seep into my synapses. No. No, no, no.
Sam and I had a good life together now. No more criminals chasing. No
more doubts nagging. And we had a cat. A beautiful black cat named
Captain Taco. "I don't want my Taco to be raised in a single-parent
household." The sobs came now like a tsunami.
Dr Mehta pursed her lips and stepped away from me and my wailing. "Do
you need a sedative, Ms Lytton?" Her voice became softer, simpler. "Are
you confused?"
My bestie waved her away and held me in her arms while I cried. The
world had become a black hole, and its vast emptiness loomed on every
side. I clung to Ellen, and she let me get mascara all over her cashmere
sweater-that's love. She cuddled me close for what seemed like hours,
until my body was an empty, aching husk. It was like Jesus had punched
me in the soul with a fist made of tanker trucks. I told Ellen that, and
she said it sounded like a country song.
After the crying had trickled, and the dry heaves had stopped, Ellen
rubbed my back. "The doc says you can see him in a little while. The
neurologist is with him now."
I pushed against Ellen's shoulder and swiped at some of the snot on my
face. "Why did you say it that way? 'Dead!' Like you just won the
Sam-hating sweepstakes?"
Ellen had always disliked my ex-art thief, and not just because she didn't enjoy penises in general.
"I mean, sure, I dreamed of this day," Ellen began with a swish of her long, brown hair.
I fell over onto the bank of waiting room chairs.
"Don't put your face on those! Or your hands. Ugh, Lytton, come here."
She held me again and said, "I'm kidding, of course. I don't want Sam to-"
I stiffened, and she didn't repeat the horrible 'd' word.
"-be in a coma or anything else. I want him to continue screwing up your otherwise ideal life for decades to come."
My life
had been ideal for the last two years. My film career was amazeballs. I'd become a superhero with my own spoofy franchise-
The Ovarian Hellion: The Sword of Cockmore.
It had debuted this past summer with record-setting box office and
fabulous reviews. Sam-now on the straight and narrow-and I had lived a
blissful life free of criminals, men with guns and stolen art. I brought
home the bacon, and he'd rediscovered the painting he'd given up long
ago. And he was good. Damn good! Kind of in the Kandinsky or Pollack
school-all strong lines, splatters, wild colors and passion. He would
come to me from an afternoon of painting, covered in smudged rainbows
and sauntering all sexy, frustrated artist-like…
Fresh tears sprang to my burning eye sockets. "He was trying to get a
gallery show for the spring." I slid back down, my muscles physically
incapable of doing anything but twitch and regret.
Ellen let me lie there this time-she patted my hip and wondered aloud where the bar was.
After a couple of hours, during which I stared into space, and Ellen
tried not to act bored by cracking dumb jokes at me, they finally let me
see him. Hope and dread combined in my gut to form a confusing new
emotion that felt like kittens bathed in sewer sludge.
I entered the white room full of whirring machines and nearly buckled
again. Sam's head was bandaged like Boris Karloff, his eyes framed by
purple circles. The neurologist said he'd taken a blow from a blunt
object to the medial cranial area, then landed in the street on his face
not ten blocks from our apartment on the Upper East Side. I asked Dr
Brains what the prognosis was, and he danced a soft-shoe, complete with
spins- "Well, it's difficult to say-we hope that there may be some,
perhaps, improvement of a sort-but, of course, dying and/or death might
occur. We'll try to bring him out of the coma tomorrow-the apocalypse
could happen is all I'm saying-no guarantees!"
I leaned over Sam, his beautiful hazel gaze shut away, giant tube things
snaking out of his arm, his hair-what they hadn't shaved-as pointy as
my insides.
"I'm the only one who's supposed to hit you, baby," I said. I had a long
history of accidentally assaulting Sam. Most of the time, he deserved
it.
Dr Brains did not find the humor in my joke. He shot me a stare of alarm
and took that moment to tell me the cops wanted to talk to me.
Cops. Hospitals. How many times had I performed this scene? I needed to
start burning sage to chase away evil spirits. Wait, I lived in New York
now-I needed some damn Ghostbusters to get rid of whatever demonic
wraith prevented us from being great. I thought I'd left my
Lifetime
movie days behind me. I opened blockbusters now! But being a movie star
didn't stop the bad shit, it just helped the bad shit occur in a cushy,
private room.
An Italian-looking older man shuffled in wearing a brown suit that I'm pretty sure was prized off Lenny Briscoe.
Right behind him followed, "Nicolette!" I cried.
Ellen ran to the room's doorway but stopped in her tracks at a pointed eye-flick from her fiancée.
"Ellen, Samantha," Detective Nicolette Fitzgerald said smoothly. "I'm sorry this has happened," she said directly to me.
This, naturally, caused my tears to bubble up. Her brown gaze shone with
sympathy, and I couldn't believe that I'd be receiving the help of
my-practically once removed or something-sister-in-law, the cop. She
said, "This is Detective Pirelli, my partner. Joe, this is Ellen, my
fiancée, and her friend, Samantha Lytton."
"That cock and swords movie was hilarious," Joe told me. "Made me want to run around in pajamas all day."
The Ovarian Hellion wears a sensible outfit of pajamas and sneakers to
fight injustice in, because she was written by a woman. I wished I had
that outfit right now-it's the uniform of everyone in a depression
medicine commercial. "Thanks," I said. "What the hell happened to him,
Nicolette?"
Nicolette sighed. "Well, a passer-by found him around midnight, just
lying in the street, bleeding from the head. The assailant left Sam's
wallet in his pants and didn't appear to take anything. I have a
feeling-"
She laid on
feeling because she knew that Sam
used to be an art thief. However, she couldn't tell her partner that
because Sam was in witness protection.
"I mean, I think this was personal." She paused, almost didn't shake her head, and asked, "Does Sam have any enemies?"
I laughed. She raised her eyebrows. I raised mine higher. A recounting of Sam's enemies would take all day and require a chart.
What was I allowed to tell her in front of old Joe here? Before she'd
arrived, I'd called Sam's handler with the US Feds, but nobody had
responded to tell me what the hell to say. "None that I know of
currently," was what I told Nicolette now. That was as safe an answer as
any. I told them he'd gone out to an art opening last night, alone, as
I'd had a date with Ellen for her final wedding dress fitting. We'd had a
private appointment with one of Manhattan's more snooty dress shops. My
ass still had lip prints on it. When I'd gotten home, Sam hadn't been
back from the event yet. I'd begun worrying around one a.m. when he
wouldn't respond to texts. The cops had called at two.
Joe asked, "Do you have any idea why he'd have been wearing a ski mask?"
"What?" I tried to keep the suspicious shriek out of my voice. I failed.
His eyes narrowed. "He was found in a full ski mask. Is that normal for him to wear in the cold?"
"Yes." I smiled and nodded. Then I did it again, because that's normal,
right? A fucking ski mask? "Yes, yes. His face is…delicate."
Nicolette seemed unconvinced of my husband's chap-prone skin.
The detectives wrote stuff down-not that I had much to tell them. If Sam
had gotten into new trouble, I possessed no knowledge of what it might
be. He couldn't have, though. He'd promised to leave his life of crime
behind him. For me.
But why the hell had he been wearing a ski mask? There was one possibility…
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