[an error occurred while processing this directive] ""Susan Andersen""

 

Wild flings are supposed to be short-lived.

Socialite Victoria Hamilton had hers with a sexy Marine she knew only as Rocket.

But now her father's been murdered, her brother's on the lam, and the PI John Miglionni, whom her lawyer hired, turns out to be none other than the man she stole away from as the dawn broke over a Pensacola beach six years ago.

And he wants answers. About a lot of things.

But mostly about Victoria's daughter--the little girl with his dark eyes.

 

Hot & Bothered
reissued with a new cover on
May 26, 2009
ISBN: 0373774192

originally released
August 2004
Mira
ISBN: 0778320219

Book III in the Marine Series

""

Hot and BotheredSEE THE ORIGINAL COVER: The original book cover from when Hot and Bothered was first released in August 2004.

Getting Lucky Some people are slow learners. Okay, I’m a slow learner. For years I resisted writing connected books, because when I was through writing a story I was through, you know what I mean? I just wanted to move on to the next. So  when I finally decided to give a trilogy featuring three sexy Marines the old high school drop-out try I frankly didn’t expect much.

Just goes to show what I know. This has been so much fun! I may never go back to writing single books again. One of the greatest perks is that when I use a character who was included in a previous book, I tend to have a much better grasp on that character’s personality when I sit down to write his or her story. Far beyond my usual knowledge.

Getting LuckyAnd so it was with John, the Rocket, Miglionni. John was nothing more than a throwaway line in Head Over Heels. He began to take on life Getting Luckyin Getting Lucky. And when it came time to plot a story just for him, I knew exactly who this guy was. Talk about an unexpected bonus! I always have a fairly good grasp on my characters, but it usually takes me five or six chapters of solid writing to really nail them down. Rocket was so clear in my head it was almost scary.

More, it was exciting. I am totally in love with this guy-- and with Tory and Esme and Jared and PJ, as well. I sincerely hope that you will fall in love, too.

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The unabridged audio version of Hot & Bothered is now available through Recorded Books @ www.recordedbooks.com. (posted January 2006)

Hot & Bothered is named Borders Books Bestselling Romantic Comedy at the July 2005 Honors Luncheon at the Reno, NV, RWA convention. (posted August 2005)

Hot & Bothered is now available in large print (be sure to click on the large print option). (posted April 2005)

Hot & Bothered lands on the Borders Best of 2004 romance list!! (posted November 2004)

Hot & Bothered is named #4 on Amazon's Best Books of 2004 Top Ten Editor's Picks: Romance. (posted November 2004)

Hot & Bothered debuts on the Waldenbooks bestselling list at #2; on the USAToday list at #39; on the NYTextended list at #25. (posted August 2004)

Hot & Bothered spends an additional 4 weeks on the USAToday and Waldenbooks Bestsellers lists. (posted September 2004)

""

Hot and Bothered A classic plot line receives a fresh, fun treatment in the final book in Andersen's trilogy (Head over Heels; Getting Lucky) featuring hunky former Marine buddies who find love-or rediscover it-in unexpected places. A weeklong, no-last-names romance in Pensacola leaves John Miglionni with the determination to take a hard look at his life, and high-society architect Victoria Hamilton with memories of hot loving and a very real pregnancy.

Now, six years later, when Victoria's younger brother, Jared, disappears the night their father is fatally stabbed, Victoria hires a detective from Semper Fi Investigations to track down Jared and prove his innocence-only to discover the PI is her long-ago lover, John. Surprise daddyhood, concern for Jared and an awareness of their disparate backgrounds delay the sexual sparks between John and Victoria, but once the fire starts, there's no putting it out. Still, John and Victoria have to work through their issues of mistrust and uncover who really killed Victoria's father before they can have a future together. John's worries about his ability to be a good father and several likable, well-developed secondary characters add depth to this zesty novel, placing it a level beyond most of its competition.

Publishers Weekly (posted 7.15.04)

"Hot And Bothered has it all: suspense, steam and smart banter. Rocket is a remarkable hero, tough hard-edged but still kind and tender. We should all be as lucky as Tori!"

-- Catherine Witmer
Romantic Times BOOKclub
(posted 7.27.04)

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""



Hot and BotheredPROLOGUE:

Ford Evans Hamilton opened his eyes and blinked the blurry room into focus. Pain splintered through his skull and throbbed along his nerve-endings, and he lifted a cautious hand to probe the back of his head. It felt like an overripe cantaloupe.

What the hell had happened? Hearing muted voices, the clink of heavy crystal, his eyebrows drew together. Was there a party going on?

Images flickered and floated on the peripheries of his mind, and his brow cleared. Ah, yes. That's right. There was a party- the one he'd thrown to watch McMurphy squirm. Well, McMurphy and one or two others, but the point was he had guests and he'd come into the library for a box of cigars to go with the after-dinner brandy. And. . . Jared had been here, right? He scowled as bits of their argument came drifting back and he suddenly recalled the shove his son had given him as he'd stormed for the door. That boy was nothing but a blotch on the Hamilton name. Both his children were big disappointments.

The faint swish of fabric brushing the Aubusson rug snagged his attention. He turned his head, wincing as fresh agony stabbed like a series of icepick thrusts from cranium to tail bone. He was going to make Jared rue the day he was born. Peering sourly at the slowly-merging double image of the person kneeling by his side, he demanded, "What the hell are you doing here?" Then he brushed the question aside with an impatient wave of his fingers. "Never mind that." He extended his arm imperiously, furious that he hurt all over. "Give me a hand."

"Oh, I intend to," the person murmured. "I plan on giving you a helping hand straight to hell."

Then faster than Ford's confused mind could sort through all the facts, the razor sharp silver-handled letter opener that usually reposed on his mahogany desk flashed downward. And his heart exploded.

""

CHAPTER ONE:

"Come on, darlin'," John Miglionni murmured to the curvy little redhead. "Just let yourself go. You know you wanna- it'll feel so good."

He sucked in a pleased breath when she did as he urged. "Yes!" he whispered. . . and zoomed in the lens of his camcorder on the woman across the field as she quit glancing around and finally swung herself up onto the back of a quarter horse at least fifteen hands tall. His client Colorado Insurance would be ecstatic, since this would go a long way toward putting a serious crimp in the woman's multi-million dollar disability claim against them. The injury she had insisted under oath rendered her unable to ride her beloved horse was clearly fraudulent.

He kept his camera trained on her as she took the horse over the paddock fence and galloped across the high plains that spread out east of Denver. Once she was no longer identifiable through the lens, he packed up his equipment and headed down the road to where he'd left the dusty, beat up old tan pickup truck he was using for this morning's surveillance.

Forty-five minutes later he banged through the front door of Semper Fi  Investigations, grinning when his office manager Gert MacDellar jumped and slapped a hand to her bony chest.

"Good Gawd Almighty," she snapped, glaring at him over the tops of her rhinestone studded, cats-eye glasses. "You scared a dozen years off my life! And at my age, boy, I can't afford to lose a single minute, much less more than a decade."
Hot and Bothered
"As if you aren't gonna outlive us all, Mac." John hooked a leg over the corner of her desk, perching a bun on its solid oak corner. He handed her the camcorder. "Download this for the Colorado Insurance file. Then tally up the final invoice to include three and a half hours for today."

Her faded blue eyes, which were several shades lighter than her rigidly upswept hair, lit up behind the pristine lenses of her glasses. "You got her?"

"Yes, ma'am. Dead to rights."

Gert whooped and plugged the high-tech digital camcorder into its docking station. Downloading its contents with one hand, she pulled a short stack of pink While You Were Out slips from beneath a chunk of polished quartz with the other. "Here. You had a few calls."

John read the first slip, then slid it to the back of the stack. He handed the second message back to Gert. "Give this one to Les," he said referring to the engineer he'd recently hired to handle the increased spate of products liability cases that had been coming his way. Scanning the next message, he narrowed his eyes and looked back up, pinning Gert in place as he thrust that one, too, at her.

"You know I don't do domestic cases anymore."

"Well, you oughtta," she said unrepentantly, making no move to take the slip. "They pay very well."

"Yes, they do. They're also chock full of highly charged emotions and invasion of privacy problems, and frankly I'm not interested in sneaking around taking pictures of people having quickies. Now, if one of the spouses is hiding assets on the other, I'm your man, and I'll be more than happy to ferret them out. But if they just want someone to dig up dirt they can use to bury their partner, refer 'em to the Hayden Agency down in LoDo." He dropped the message slip onto the desk.

Gert huffed and gave her lacquered up-do a comforting pat, but she argued no further, and John looked at the last note.

And smiled. "All right, now this looks much more my thing. Give me a runaway any day of the week." Settling himself more comfortably on the edge of the desk, he gave Gert his full attention. "Tell me about this one."

She perked up, her disgruntlement forgotten. "Have you read about that tycoon down in Colorado Springs who got himself stabbed through the heart with a letter opener?"

"Yeah. Somebody-Somebody Hamilton, wasn't it?"

"Ford Evans Hamilton. His daughter Victoria is our potential client. Well, I actually talked to the lawyer, but you get my drift. Ms. Hamilton's seventeen-year-old half-brother Jared disappeared the same day Daddy bought the farm."

"The kid kill him?"

"According to Robert Rutherford, the attorney, Ms. Hamilton, or Evans Hamilton, or whatever she calls herself, swears young Jared isn't capable of that kind of violence. But he's been in trouble before, and he's definitely a person of interest to the police, so she'd like to locate him before they do. Apparently he has a tendency to give a lot of attitude when he's cornered or scared, and she knows that lipping off to the cops won't improve his situation."

Hot and Bothered
Having suffered similar tendencies as a youth, John could readily identify with the teenager, and he flashed his office manager a big, feral smile. "Then isn't it lucky for her that her lawyer called in the best." It wasn't couched as a question.

"Lord, you are the cocky one." Gert bared her own bright white dentures. "It's one of the things I've always liked best about you."

He laughed. "Aw, Mac, admit it, you like everything about me. We're so compatible, in fact, I'm surprised we haven't run off and gotten hitched by now."

Her puckered mouth looked as if she'd sucked a lemon, but John knew the flush tinting her cheeks stemmed from pleasure, not disapproval. She loved being teased, but he was much more likely to see her update her stuck-in-the-Fifties look sometime in the new millennium than ever hear her admit it.

As if reading his mind, she gave him a stern look over the tops of her glasses. "I swear you could go to a wake and end up flirting with the corpse."

He slapped a hand to his heart. "Why, Gert MacDellar, I'm crushed you'd think so. You know I'd only do that if it were female."

Her lips quirked, which was no doubt what prompted the impatient flip of her fingers that waved him off. "Get out of here, you fool. Go call that lawyer back and make us some money."

"Yes, Ma'am." He snapped off a smart salute. "I know how you love those billable hours." Then he rose from the desk and headed for his office to talk to a man about a case.

Victoria knew she had to get a grip. Sometimes, though, that was a lot easier said than done and, pacing the parlor of her late father's mansion, she freely admitted her emotions were in chaos.

At the small, quiet core of her, she was simply glad to be back. As much as she loved the hustle and bustle and history-soaked atmosphere of London, it wasn't home, and she'd never quite gotten past feeling like a dispossessed expatriate while living there. She'd only gone in the first place because her Aunt Fiona was there and, more importantly, because she'd needed to get Esme out of Father's range before he could screw up her daughter the way he'd screwed up her and Jared.

But as glad as she was to finally be home, the circumstances gave her no peace at all. Her father was dead. And not merely gone forever- which heaven knew would have been traumatic enough, given all her unresolved feelings for him- but murdered.

Damn him. Half the time he'd been such a bastard. Most of the time, really. But he'd still been her father, and no one deserved to die the way he had.

Yet, wasn't it just typical of him to go out in a blaze of notoriety? He'd never minded that for himself, with his increasingly younger wives, and his cut-throat business practices. But when she or Jared made even a fraction of the waves Ford Hamilton had, he'd given them no end of grief. The two of them had been expected to be good little Hamilton clones always, and there was a part of her that was so steamed her father had died on her before she could unload just once her opinion of his parenting skills.

Which of course made her feel guilty, which in turn rendered her so twitchy she could barely sit still for more than twenty seconds running. So here she was, waiting for her lawyer to show up with a private eye in tow. Dear Lord. Whoever would have guessed she'd live to see the day The Maltese Falcon intersected the life of an Evans Hamilton? Old film noir images of men in fedoras who referred to women as dames and legs as gams kept flicking through her mind

A bark of laughter that sounded dangerously close to hysteria escaped Victoria, and she slapped a hand over her mouth to contain it. Carefully, she regulated her breathing.

Hot and BotheredOkay, let's try not to lose it here. She focused on a priceless piece of art showcased on one of the sitting room's pale yellow, watered-silk-covered walls. Just don't think about any of this too closely. Take it minute by minute, and let the details blur. And if that smacked suspiciously of The Ostrich School of Coping Skills, so be it. The only way she knew how to deal with this mess was one problem at a time. Anything else was too overwhelming.

The telephone rang, and she started. Then, fed up with her raw, edgy nerves, she crossed to the small credenza and picked up the receiver. "Hamilton residence."

"Victoria, dear, is that you?"

The voice hiccoughed in and out in the tell-tale manner of a cellular phone about to leave its service range, but she was pretty sure it was her lawyer's. "Robert? Is that you?"

His voice faded out.

"I'm sorry, I can barely hear you."

"Oh. Hold on." Then suddenly his voice came through with crystalline clarity. "There, I switched to a new channel. Is that any better?"

"Much."

"I'm calling to let you know I won't be able to make our appointment with the Semper Fi investigator. I've been called into court. I apologize Victoria, but I want to assure you that I've talked extensively with Mr. Miglionni, and everything is in order. To get him started, you merely need to meet with him, tell him about Jared, and answer any questions he may have. You do have the number for my cell phone, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Excellent. If you think I might be able to answer any of the questions you can't, give me a call."

"I will. Thank-" The call abruptly disconnected. "-you." She blew out a breath and set down the receiver. "O-kay. Looks like I'm on my own."

Nothing new there. She'd been on her own most of her life.

It was about time, however, to be a little less reactive and get a lot more proactive. God knew she owed Jared that much, since she'd always felt that by leaving she'd sacrificed him to save Esme.

She took a firm grip on her emotions and walked to the sitting room desk, where she forced herself to sit. She began sorting condolence cards into one stack that could be answered by her father's secretary and into another requiring a more personal touch. By the time she heard the doorbell ring a short while later, she felt far more composed. Heading for the front entry, she smiled at the housekeeper when she saw the woman bustling down the hallway from the kitchen. "It's all right, Mary; I'll get it." Reaching the immense mahogany door, she pulled it open.

Bright afternoon sunlight poured into the foyer, blinding her and backlighting the man standing on the brick steps. The only thing she could tell for sure was that he was tall and lean. Not that seeing his features was necessary in order to give him her best social smile- she'd attended far too many upscale girls' schools for manners not to be second nature by now. "Mr. Miglionni?" she inquired softly. "Please, won't you come in?" Stepping back to allow him entrance, she extended her hand. "I'm-"

"Tori," he acknowledged in a husky tone that feathered down her spine. Her hand remained suspended between them for a moment when he made no move to take it.

Then she dropped it to her side, but it was the use of her nickname that knit her eyebrows together. Only a few of her closest friends, Jared, and Aunt Fiona ever called her that. Robert Rutherford must have somehow let it slip, however, so she smoothed her brow and gave the private investigator another polite curl of her lips. "Actually, I go by Victoria."

"Un-frigging-believable," he said hoarsely.

She didn't see why, and surely the vulgarity wasn't necessary. Nevertheless, she needed this man's help if she were to have any chance of finding Jared, she reminded herself. She took refuge once more in the lessons learned from years of etiquette. "I'm sorry- what must you think of me to keep you standing on the doorstep. Please, do come in."

He stepped forward and bent to set something on the floor. The strong lines of a tanned throat flashed briefly into sharp focus, and sunlight caught a sleek, black ponytail that unfurled over his shoulder with his movement. The thick rope of hair was so shiny it shimmered with blue highlights. Then he straightened and once again turned into an impenetrable shadow limed by the blinding sun. . . all except for the olive-skinned, long-fingered hand that he extended toward her. Just as she accepted the belatedly offered handshake, he took a forward step that rendered his features a bit less obscure.

And Victoria's stomach dropped with a sickening swoop. Flabbergasted, she stared up into the coal black eyes of the one man she'd never thought to see again. She snatched her hand from his warm grasp. "Rocket?"

Hearing herself say the only name she'd ever known him by, realizing the consequences that his presence could have for her, a lifetime's worth of composure vanished. Oh, God, oh, God, this was the last thing she needed. She had to get him out of here. She had to get rid of him before-

He swung the door shut behind him and for the first time jumped sharply into focus, all wide shoulders, dark skin, and flashing white teeth. She'd barely begun even the quickest of inventories, however, before he reached out to pull her into his arms for a quick, hard hug that lifted her Ferragamos clear up off the floor. Setting her back on her feet, he gripped her shoulders and stared down into her face.

Youhavetogo, youhavetogo, youhaveto-

"Damn, girl," he said, "it's good to see you again."

 

End of Excerpt.
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