The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

If you’d like to find out more about the thirty-six questions you can read The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0146167297234003

Now Available from Carina Press and Ainslie Paton

A master jewel thief meets his match in a daring romance of love and larceny.

Read on for an excerpt from HOODWINKED HEARTS

Gorgeous. Cleve Jones toggled the control and adjusted the camera hidden in Greville’s Auction House eleven thousand miles away in Geneva. From his villa in Ubud on the island of Bali, he now had a clearer view of the hunk of rock known as the Sweet Celestia, and it was an even more brilliant stone than he’d been led to expect.

It would make a fine asset to his patron’s collection of priceless possessions, and in another few hours, when this publicity circus event shut down and the auction house was closed for the night, it would be his. And very shortly after that, there’d be a large sum of money that would more than cover the expense of this heist, deposited in an untraceable Cayman Islands bank account that Cleve just so happened to have the unique iris recognition for.

All that and he’d not bothered to put on a shirt, or shoes.

Funny how these things worked out.

Professor Donald Harp had always said Cleve had the talent to become the kind of man who didn’t roll out of bed in the morning for less than a few multi-million, but Cleve had never quite believed it.

He was a kid from nowhere with nothing but a gift for persuasion, who’d bluffed his way into Harvard by impersonating a member of a distant branch of the famous Kennedy family. He’d surprised himself by getting as far as Professor Harp’s Ancient History class and was happily soaking up the privileged Ivy League atmosphere and the flirty smiles of the gold class babes while he waited for his fake tuition payment to start stinking, and the moment where he’d go from living in his car to hoping it would start so he could make a clean getaway.

The professor had sniffed him out quicker than he could say Alexander the Great loved his horse Bucephalus, and instead of turning him over to the authorities—and a no doubt shamefully long stint in an incarceration facility not of his choosing—had offered Cleve a deal.

The professor was in need of an apprentice, and since Cleve was in need of a regular diet that didn’t come from dumpster diving, a roof over his head, and a way to channel his talent for deception that ensured he stayed on the right side of a jail cell, they shook on it.

He’d always thought the trade-off of security for nefarious deeds would eventually lead to a Greek tragedy. He was no student of history, but he listened to police scanners and read court transcripts and true crime novels, and happy endings were a myth.

He’d been right, but not in the way he’d imagined.

And now, ten years after the death of his mentor, that made him a man who genuinely didn’t bother getting out of bed for less than a few million, except for the odd occasion when the temptation to stay between the sheets was worth its own weight in another kind of gold, the kind shaped like a desirable woman.

It’d been an annoyingly long time since he’d forgotten about work and spent the day in bed.

“Oi, she’s a bit of all right.”

It was a shame Brandon Bartley hadn’t decided on a lie in. It was a shame Brandon Bartley was a thing in Cleve’s life at all.

“Sweet Celestia is the largest vivid pink diamond in the world—she is more than a bit of all right.”

It was a shame Brandon Bartley was still breathing. The man has shown such promise as a thief, but turned out he was just a common garden-variety bagman, useful for collecting the rent as it were. Not at all what Cleve was looking for, because Cleve was looking for a partner to share the load, to go for even bigger paydays, in exactly the same way the professor chose him.

The problem was he was simply awful at picking the right accomplices. Brandon was his fourth not-rotten-enough-in-the-right-way apple.

“Hah, not the rock, mate.” Brandon tipped his chin at the screen. “The dolly bird.”

Cleve had been aware of the movement in the room on scree

n. The photographer’s assistants bustling about while the gum-chewing photographer herself barked orders, the furniture being moved in, the PR flak furiously typing on his cell, and the girl.

“‘Ard up like you bin, gov, fought you’d be all ova vat.”