Heated Rush
Given the choice between sticking flaming skewers up her nose and attending her own parents' thirty-fifth anniversary party without a date, Annie Davis would, without hesitation, reach for the lighter fluid and a match. Instead, she was reaching for her checkbook. Wondering just how far she could go—how much she could spend—to ensure she avoided a fate worse than burned nostrils.
"Twenty-five hundred, that's all I can swing," she murmured, reminding both herself, and her friend Tara, who sat beside her at an empty table near the back of the hotel ballroom. Twenty-five hundred was about as much as she could stretch it and still make her bills, as well as eat next month.
Tara, who occasionally helped out at Baby Daze, Annie's successful day care center, had come only to this charity bachelor auction for moral support. Her aspiring actress's checkbook wouldn't allow room for a guy auctioned off in a Salvation Army parking lot, much less one at Chicago's glamorous Inter-Continental Hotel.
If she were honest, Annie's couldn't bear the strain, either, and her savings account was strictly for emergencies only. Sheer desperation had driven her here tonight. Despe ... read full excerpt from: Heated Rush ebook
