Las Vegas story Archives

Partners was a thrill to write. But, between you and me, I never felt so stressed as I did when I created this story.

I wanted to join in a box collection (that has long since been unpublished) and the leader of the group, who had a lot more success as a writer in those days than I did, was a perfectionist.

She wrote romantic suspense and therefore we had to produce something that would work with her stuff. And… I knew she would be reading every word before allowing it to be accepted.

I’d never written that genre before and had no idea what I would write about. All I had was two months to get it written, a vivid imagination, and a good memory of Vegas which is where I set the story… oh yeah, and a huge need to be accepted.

I laugh now when I think back to that time. I didn’t fully understand her directions, so I actually wrote a full-length book called “Roll the Dice” where in the first few words the heroine is pissy because the hero shot her. After I sent it to the collection leader, I lived with pins and needles for days, praying to be accepted. Of course, I wasn’t because I hadn’t paid attention. She had specified that this book be a short introduction to the actual series… a character-reveal so to speak.

Holy macaroni, all that work in such a short time, and it wasn’t to be used. Now I had four days to write this short story and get it to her. Since she had been very complimentary about the first book, I stayed up the next few nights and got it done. I called it “Partners”.

In the earlier first story I had created, I visualized a female detective who had a hard-on for a certain type of male, and of course I made sure her new partner was the exact kind of man she disliked the most. Since her previous partner had quit working due to being assaulted by a serial law-breaking rapist, she decided she’d accept whatever idiot they forced on her.

After all, every bit of her energy had to go into catching the son of a B who’d hurt the one woman she’d cared about for years. The person who’d had her back many times and knew her inside out.

Just because the bald, blue-eyed, purse-carrying cowboy hottie got to her, she’d suck it up. Turns out, he had a vendetta to get the same guy for reasons of his own.