5
" Want a sandwich?”
Mac shook her head. “I’m going to have dinner with Gage when he gets home.”
Who said anything about dinner? This was more like an appetizer. That was another perk that came with being a werewolf. She could eat whatever she wanted and not have to worry about extra calories ending up where they shouldn’t.
Khaki set everything on the counter. “I asked Xander flat-out when I went over to his place last night. He insisted he liked me just fine, but I knew he was lying. I could tell he was really uncomfortable around me. He was tense and on edge the whole time. Which is nothing new. He’s like that all the time around me. I think he finds me irritating and a nuisance.”
Mac gave her a dubious look. “If you say so. But either way, you’d better be careful. If being with Gage has taught me anything, it’s that werewolves are extremely affected by certain pheromones. If you go walking around lusting over Xander, he’s going to pick up on it— and so is every other guy on the team. Then things will get really complicated. I learned that the hard way. Those guys can pick up on arousal like it’s barbecue and they aren’t shy about letting you know it.”
Khaki groaned as she grabbed a plate from the cabinet. “Oh, God. I never thought about that.”
“Yeah. And it gets worse.” Mac shook her head. “If I’m even slightly aroused and Gage picks up on it, he gets crazy horny— like he-can’t-control-it horny. What do you think is going to happen to if all the guys on the team pick up on the fact that the one and only female werewolf on the team is aroused? You’ll find yourself getting chased by fifteen out-of-control, horny werewolves going crazy with lust. And while there are some women who might find that entertaining, something tells me you wouldn’t.”
Khaki set the plate on the counter with a thud. “Oh, crap. What the hell am I going to do?”
Mac offered her a small smile. “Take a lot of baths? "
― Paige Tyler , Wolf Trouble (SWAT: Special Wolf Alpha Team, #2)
6
" A weathered black and silver Dodge pickup towing a small motorboat pulled up behind us, and Alex circled back to greet the driver. I couldn’t see who sat behind the crusted and dirty windshield, but Alex stood at the driver’s window and pointed down the block where the boulevard disappeared into floodwater.
The truck pulled ahead, maneuvered a deft U-turn, and backed toward the water. Alex motioned for me to follow. By the time I lurched my way to the truck, he and the pickup driver were sliding the boat down the trailer ramp. Sweat trickled down my neck, and if I hadn’t been afraid of being poisoned by toxic sludge, I’d have made like a pig and wallowed in the mud to cool off.
I kicked at a fire hydrant, trying to jolt some of the heaviest sludge off my boots, and heard a soft laugh behind me. With a final kick that sent a spray of brown gunk flying, I turned to see what was so funny. I needed a laugh.
A man leaned against the side of the pickup with his arms crossed. He was a few inches shorter than Alex, maybe just shy of six feet, with sun-streaked blond hair that reached his collar and a sleeveless blue T-shirt and khaki shorts. His tanned legs between the bottom of the shorts and the top of sturdy black shrimp boots were scored with scars, bad ones, as if whatever made them meant to do serious damage.
He’d been grinning when I turned around, flashing a heart-stopping set of dimples, but when he saw my eyes linger on his legs, the grin eased into something more wary. "
― Suzanne Johnson , Royal Street (Sentinels of New Orleans, #1)
7
" The millions of vacationers who came here every year before Katrina were mostly unaware of this poverty. French Quarter tourists were rarely exposed to the reality beneath the Disneyland Gomorrah that is projected as 'N'Awlins,' a phrasing I have never heard a local use and a place, as far as I can tell, that I have never encountered despite my years in the city. The seemingly average, white, middle-class Americans whooped it up on Bourbon Street without any thought of the third-world lives of so many of the city's citizens that existed under their noses. The husband and wife, clad in khaki shorts, feather boa, and Mardi Gras beads well out of season, beheld a child tap-dancing on the street for money and clapped along to his beat without considering the obvious fact that this was an early school-day afternoon and that the child should be learning to read, not dancing for money. Somehow they did not see their own child beneath the dancer's black visage. Nor, perhaps, did they see the crumbling buildings where the city's poor live as they traveled by cab from the French Quarter to Commander's Palace. They were on vacation and this was not their problem. "
10
" He looked like every glossy frat boy in every nerd movie ever made, like every popular town boy who’d ever looked right through her in high school, like every rotten rich kid who’d ever belonged where she hadn’t.
My mama warned me about guys like you.
He turned to her as if he’d heard her and took off his sunglasses, and she went down the steps to meet him, wiping her sweaty palms on her dust-smeared khaki shorts. “Hi, I’m Sophie Dempsey,” she said, flashing the Dempsey gotta-love-me grin as she held out her hot, grimy hand, and after a moment he took it.
His hand was clean and cool and dry, and her heart pounded harder as she looked into his remote, gray eyes.
“Hello, Sophie Dempsey,” her worst nightmare said. “Welcome to Temptation. "
― Jennifer Crusie , Welcome to Temptation (Dempseys, #1)
13
" ...at Newsweek only girls with college degrees--and we were called " girls" then--were hired to sort and deliver the mail, humbly pushing our carts from door to door in our ladylike frocks and proper high-heeled shoes. If we could manage that, we graduated to " clippers," another female ghetto. Dressed in drab khaki smocks so that ink wouldn't smudge our clothes, we sat at the clip desk, marked up newspapers, tore out releveant articles with razor-edged " rip sticks," and routed the clips to the appropriate departments. " Being a clipper was a horrible job," said writer and director Nora Ephron, who got a job at Newsweek after she graduated from Wellesley in 1962, " and to make matters worse, I was good at it. "
