Friday, June 7, 2013

[Book Spotlight] Unattainable by Leslie P. Garcia


Impossible love...


Unreachable. Dell Rosales gained her nickname, "inalcansable," or "unreachable,'" the old-fashioned way, earning it with every new rip in her heart.

Unwanted. Dell returns home to salvage her father's ranch by opening the place to a group of girls with problems and pain not unlike her own. With her outlook on love soured - perhaps beyond salvation - she clings to Becky, the tiny little girl whose own mother preferred a life of drugs and men to motherhood.

Unwinnable. Former DEA agent Jovani TreviƱo has seen that the war isn't winnable: people keep dying. Drugs keep killing them. But pleas for help from the DEA make him agree to one last battle for the good cause - checking out heiress Dell Rosales, whose ranch on the Rio Grande provides a perfect spot for traffickers to cross if she allows them to.

Unattainable. Suspicions, passion, and their respective pasts draw Dell and Jovi into a tumultuous relationship that both must avoid. Love seems distant, foolish to seek - unattainable. When an epic flood threatens not only Dell's ranch but the surrounding area, will anything survive?

EXCERPT:

“I can use the other desk,” he offered, waving a hand at the room’s second desk,
unused in years except to hold an unorganized collection of old magazines and clutter.
“And there’s no need to feel uncomfortable in your own office.”

 She regarded him thoughtfully. What he said was perfectly reasonable, but there had been something in his voice, some shadow of…something. Impatient with herself, she decided she was imagining it, due, no doubt, to Karla’s unexpected confidences. Stalling, she stretched—and knew she wasn’t imagining the way his eyes swept across the thin, blue fabric of the knit top she was wearing. She ignored the unspoken interest in his eyes and went on.

“I’m hardly ever here. It would be silly, really—although it would look better.” She
hesitated, trying to find a way to ask about the words on the yellow paper without
seeming nosy. “Do we have business contacts in Houston already?” she asked after a
moment.

His lips twitched. “I do,” he answered, and then laughed out loud. “Why do the words
‘control freak’ suddenly come to mind, Ms. Rosales?”

“What do you mean?” she asked indignantly, flushing a little, because she realized her
annoyance must have shown in her eyes in spite of her determination to mask it.

“You need to delegate, but you don’t like turning anything loose. You still want to be
in charge.” He shook his head at her. “Maybe we can’t deny our heritage, Dell. I don’t
know old Don Lionel, but you probably just did him proud.” Ignoring the anger replacing
her annoyance, he pulled the scrap out of his pocket and waved it between them like a
flag. “This actually is a business acquaintance of mine—nothing about the work I do
here. Well, except that I had a job offer with a Houston company. I turned it down.”

“Hmmm.” Dell tapped a finger on her knee, leaning forward a little. “And just out of
curiosity, since we’ve established that I’m nosy and controlling, what does la
inalcanzable mean?” She held up a hand as Jovi started to answer. “Don’t tell me what it
means—we both speak Spanish. Tell me why it’s written here on this paper.”
Jovi straightened in his chair, and his eyes bored into hers. For a moment, she thought
he wasn’t going to answer. “La inalcanzable.”

He hesitated, but his eyes met hers unflinchingly. “It’s what I called Griselda--what I still call her, sometimes, when I remember. Is anyone more off limits than the boss’s wife?”  His mouth twisted as he pocketed the note. “Satisfied, Dell?”

“Perfectly,” she returned crisply, and stood up. “Let’s look over the horses. I’ve
reached a decision about some of them.”

His eyes swept over her again appraisingly, and when he stood up, she was struck
again by how tall he was. He towered over her, and she was tall, even in the low-heeled
sandals she’d worn today. She thinned her lips, willing herself to discard her vague
apprehensions about the man. “Follow me,” she ordered, in her best control-freak voice,
and walked out of the office.

“My pleasure,” he murmured sardonically, giving her an insolent shrug when she
turned to glare at his double-edged reply. “Hey, I’m just the hired hand, jefa. You lead, I
follow.” He laughed as her frown became more pronounced. “There’s a lot to be said for
following women bosses.” Shaking his head at her, he waved down the hall corridor.
“After you.”

Clamping her lips together, Dell turned and walked toward the first stall, conscious of
Jovi’s eyes on her with each step she took.

Bio

            “Everything you enjoy was written by someone.”  That’s a credo I drum into the heads of my south Texas first graders, and something I’ve always believed absolutely.  Books, obviously, songs, movies, video games--to some extent, all started with words, and words are a writer’s tools.
            My writing career began in first grade, when my principal hung my Christmas story on the bulletin board at Mt. Carmel Elementary in Douglasville, GA.  My first sale came later that same year, when a children’s magazine called Kids sent me $1.50 for an awful poem about dolphins, but strengthened my resolve to succeed.  Eventually.
            My most current release, Unattainable, is my debut novel with Crimson Romance, and represents one of those joyous stops along this road I’ve followed all my life—the road of a writer, which doesn’t always go anywhere, but can never end.
            Unattainable is set in south Texas, a place where cultures meet, clashing sometimes but also melding into memorable traditions, customs and people unique to the storied banks of the Rio GrandeLa Llorona (The Wailing Woman) is also specifically a story of the Rio Grande, with its loose retelling of the century old legend of a murderous mom.  I’m especially proud of my Llorona anthology, with its mix of current fiction with treasured legend, poetry, and an essay on Casey Anthony and her kindred spirits.
            Gone are the days of youth when I wanted to preside over the family’s roadside amusement park in rural Georgia; I traded those crazy years for a more pragmatic life in Laredo, Texas surrounded by four “personal” children, 9 grandchildren, and 20+ “loaner” children every new school year.  And a beagle with more attitude but less virtue than  Charles Schultz’s Snoopy. 
            Writing?  Think of it as a survival skill.  I always have.


My Main Links: 

My Facebook Author’s Page: www.facebook.com/LeslieP.Garcia


Twitter: @LesliePGarcia

Website (this sort of is my web site until I find a host I actually like and have time to keep up with--right now I don’t exactly have one!) : http://wp.me/P1UMZo-4   




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