How to Misbehave (Camelot 1)

I didn’t set out to write this series. It just sort of happened. One day, I was musing about how cute Justin Timberlake is and how much I would like it if he mowed my lawn shirtless, as one does. The next thing I knew, I found myself plotting a novel about a pop star who visits his twin sister in the small college town where she lives and ends up having an affair with the woman who lives next door.

Now, don’t get too excited. I didn’t actually write that book. I thought I would, and I started working out the subplot for it. The Timberlake-ish hero has a sister, see, and the sister falls in love with the security guard who gets assigned to her when her idiot brother’s affair lands the town of Camelot on the front pages. I loved this idea! I got so excited about it, I sat down and wrote a few scenes for the subplot, and the next thing I knew, Ellen and Caleb had hijacked the entire book. The result is Along Came Trouble—Caleb Clark’s story, due out in March 2013.

While I was writing Caleb’s book, I gave him two sisters, one of whom shared his house and turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had anticipated. One thing led to another, and suddenly Katie had a love interest, a big secret, and a book of her own on the horizon. Katie’s story, Flirting with Disaster, comes out in June.

Amber and Tony actually came last. Because—world’s-most-obvious spoiler alert!—they are already married when the action of Along Came Trouble takes place, I decided I wanted to go back in time and tell their “how Amber met Tony” story. Thus, How to Misbehave.

I hope you get as big a kick out of reading these Camelot stories as I did writing them!

Acknowledgments

This would be an entirely different story if it weren’t for Serena Bell—and not a better one. Despite being in the middle of a cross-country move, she acted as a sounding board, cheerleader, and teller of hard truths during the weeks I was writing How to Misbehave. I think she might actually love Tony and Amber more than I do, which is saying something. Thanks, Serena. My life is richer and my stories better because of you.

I’m also grateful for the enthusiasm and critical eyes of Anna Cowan, Del Dryden, Jill Sorenson, and Meg Maguire, all of whom read the manuscript and offered suggestions. You guys rock. My agent, Emily Sylvan Kim, told me how much she adored this novella just when I needed to hear it. She has a talent for that. My editors at Random House, Sue Grimshaw and Angela Polidoro, did their usual marvelous job of polishing up the prose and suggesting improvements. They also made me very happy by not cutting any of the cock jokes. Love those two.

Giant smooches, finally, to my fans. I’m lucky to be able to do what I love every day, and it couldn’t happen without you. Thank you from the bottom of my sappy little heart.

Photo: Mark Anderson/STUN Photography

Ruthie Knox graduated from Grinnell College as an English and history double major and went on to earn a Ph.D. in modern British history that she’s put to remarkably little use. She debuted as a romance novelist with Ride with Me—probably the only existing cross-country bicycling love story yet to be penned—and followed it up with About Last Night, which features a sizzling British banker hero with the unlikely name of Neville. Her idea of a Christmas story, Room at the Inn, is included in the Naughty and Nice anthology. She moonlights as a mother, Tweets incessantly, and bakes a mean focaccia.

Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s

Along Came Trouble

Chapter One

“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.

The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.

No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.

They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.

Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged southern belle.

It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, and then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.

Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.

Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.

Enough, she thought. Enough.

But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her mascot hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.

Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of perennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed every plant she put in the ground.

It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.

Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.

So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.

It felt good. It felt great, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.

One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.