It is an absolutely gorgeous September day here--started off cool, warmed up a bit, but there's a breeze, and the sky is a pretty blue with just a few whisps of cloud scuttling by every now and then. I really debated breaking out the soup pot today, but it isn't quite cool enough yet. I am going to fire up the oven later to make a meatloaf for hubs, though. Maybe in another week or two, it'll be cool enough for me to have the soup pot simmering on the stove all afternoon. Yesterday would have been a good day, but I went with a friend to a Scottish festival until the wind and rain got to be too much. Haha.
So instead of making soup today, I'm finishing up the weekend chores and looking at my revisions (yes, again, or still) while enjoying the day with windows open and good music playing. I'm in that period when I think (again) that fall is my favorite season, even though I know when we hit April, I'll think it's spring (again), and I'm okay with that.
Before I get back to revisions and then dinner prep, I have a snippet for you this week from Protecting Medusa.
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Philomena parked beside her mother’s house. She’d arrived first, and she needed to get dinner on in a hurry. Once Jason got home, she’d be too distracted to focus on cooking.
She went in the back door, balancing a grocery bag while she reset the alarm, then hit the light switch with her elbow as she continued into the kitchen.
She took her mother’s cast iron skillet from its hook over the counter and put it on the stove, turning the heat to high and dropping in some ground beef before she shed her coat. As she put away the rest of the groceries, the meat began to sizzle.
She rolled up her sleeves and dug a spatula out of the utensil drawer, but froze when she heard a creak from upstairs. She waited, then shook her head. It was a hundred year-old farmhouse.
She stirred the beef in the pan, adding chopped onions she’d picked up at the store--not out of laziness but because she knew she needed to move quickly after three days away and with an excitable six-year-old on his way home. She could take time tomorrow to do her own prep work for dinner.
The sound came again from upstairs. She set the spatula on the spoon rest and turned the flame under her pan down to low, then tugged up the hem of her long skirt to pull her dagger from its leather sheath on her thigh.
A loud thud reached her ears, and her heart beat faster.
Dear Gods, someone really was in the house.
She crept up the back steps, keeping to the edges where she knew her weight wouldn’t make the stairs creak, the smooth handle of her long knife comforting in her sweat-damp hand.
More thumping, accompanied by running water.
She frowned when she got to the top of the steps, wincing as something hit the porcelain bathtub, followed by muffled cursing.
She stuck her head around the corner, but the partially-closed bathroom door at the other end of the hall blocked her view. All she could see were shadows.
Two people? In her mother’s bathroom? She wished she’d grabbed the phone on her way up so she could call the police. No, she should’ve called before coming upstairs. Too late now.
More thumping and a crash.
Her jaw clenched, and she stepped into the hallway, her pulse pounding in her ears.
“I’ve called the police,” she lied, moving slowly along the hall. Frigid air drifted toward her. Either the bathroom window was open, or something was seriously wrong with the furnace. She frowned, holding tighter to her knife.
A dark blur went out the window, and her eyes widened. It was quite a drop to the ground, even with all the snow mounded below from the big storms so far this winter.
When a large, naked man with a gun went to look out the window, she froze in the middle of the hall, her dagger shoulder high.
Naked.
She swallowed, and then he turned around. Her lungs stopped working.
“Hello, Philomena. Have I ever told you how much I love a woman who can handle a blade?” He caught the edge of the door and pulled it wide open.
She’d know that voice anywhere, and that face, even if she’d only seen him in photos. Ryder Ware, Jason’s father.
And wow, was she seeing him in person.
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I've been sneaking in some reading time during the week when my brain is too fried from the day-job to concentrate on revising Freeing Medusa, and as the weather shifts more into autumn, it'll be nice to cozy up with more books (the new J.D. Robb, Passions in Death, is waiting on my desk right now). Has Mother Nature finally relented where you are, too, so it feels more like fall? And are you reading anything great this week? I'd love to hear about it!
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