Gaming for Keeps

By Seleste deLaney

Pen Holloway's done with men-in real life. Guys in game are so much less drama. But when her partner from Heroes of Fallen Gods invites her to the convention of the year, she panics. What if he's another jerk? What if he's not?

Cal Burrows is living his dream of being a spy. One of TRAIT's misfit spies, but still a spy. It's the perfect job... until an arms dealer with a taste for blood invades his not-so-secret geek haven. All Cal wanted from ConDamned was to meet his on-line girl. Now, with the threat of mass murder looming, he's forced to choose between keeping his mission a secret and protecting the girl of his dreams.

Despite their attraction, Pen can't help but suspect Cal's hiding something. She also can't shake the feeling he's not as much of a stranger as he seems.

Each book in the Agents of TRAIT series is STANDALONE:
* Gaming for Keeps
* Conning For Keeps (novella)
* Fighting for Keeps
* Dying for Keeps

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781622661411

Seleste deLaney

At a young age, Seleste deLaney discovered the trick to not being afraid of the monsters under the bed was to turn them into heroes. Since that time, she’s seen enough of human monsters that she prefers to escape to fictional worlds where even the worst demons have to play by the rules and the good guys might end up battered and bruised (or dead), but they always win. And really, isn’t that the way it should be?She resides in the Detroit area with all her favorite monsters (nice ones—some are furry and the others call her Mom) and is hard at work on her next book. In those rare moments when she isn’t battling terrorists, vampires, or rogue clockworks, she can be found all over the Internet, where she loves to interact with readers.

Book preview

Pen Holloway’s done with men—in real life. Guys in game are so much less drama. But when her partner from Heroes of Fallen Gods invites her to the convention of the year, she panics. What if he’s another jerk? What if he’s not?

Cal Burrows is living his dream of being a spy. One of TRAIT’s misfit spies, but still a spy. It’s the perfect job… until an arms dealer with a taste for blood invades his not-so-secret geek haven. All Cal wanted from ConDamned was to meet his on-line girl. Now, with the threat of mass murder looming, he’s forced to choose between keeping his mission a secret and protecting the girl of his dreams.

Gaming for Keeps

Seleste deLaney

Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Seleste deLaney...

Conning for Keeps

Fighting for Keeps

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Seleste deLaney. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

2614 South Timberline Road

Suite 109

Fort Collins, CO 80525

Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

Ignite is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Libby Murphy

Cover design by L.J. Anderson

Cover art by Shutterstock/fotorince

ISBN 978-1-62266-141-1

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition June 2013

To the Wallers

You all welcomed me with hugglepounces and drunken celebrations and taught me what gaming was about at its heart. You became my virtual family and I learned more from the lot of you than I can express.

Ale and whores for everyone. Much love always.

Chapter One

Crushcrushcrush

Death shone in the troll’s black eyes as it lunged at Megara. She ducked the attack and slipped around behind the beast, hoping like hell the magic users had its attention now that she was out of the way. The damn thing was fast for its size. As soon as she could, she swapped weapons, pulling out a wickedly curved blade as long as her forearm. Magic danced on its surface, casting the metal in a blue glow. She plunged the dagger into the troll’s back and ice crystals frosted the air as the damage lit up the melee window on the screen.

Holy crap! Eleven hundred and thirty points of damage! Take that, you ugly fuck. Penelope wanted to celebrate, but her character’s attack hadn’t been strong enough to kill the troll. And now, nothing anyone else did was pulling its attention away from her. Her hit-points dropped with every thrashing of the beast’s club.

On the screen, Megara sliced at the troll again, but as a rogue, her strongest attacks were those that used her stealth skills. In front of the thing? She might as well have been singing Soft Kitty to it for all the damage her dagger was doing. With a click of her mouse, she switched back to Spicer’s Stabby Dagger of Doom for the higher DPS.

She hit it more often, but Pen watched Megara’s hit-points sinking lower and lower as the troll swung a club at her head. Not good. Come on, guys, what are you doing?

Sadly, she had a pretty good idea. Aaron was playing Maksamar, his healer, tonight, and he would let her die over and over again as long as the group let him get away with it. Somehow he thought that was a good way to teach her what a bad idea it was to break up with his ass. Scowl firmly in place, she punched the key that would—hopefully—help her dodge the next blow from the troll. She just needed to survive the fight, and then Aaron wouldn’t have the distraction excuse. At least Lohonas was helping. He’d cast a slow heal on her as soon as she backstabbed the troll and he’d been battering the monster with everything he had since then.

Lohonas tells Group: Hey, Darling, can you get just out of range of his club and run him in circles around us?

Oh, that sounded like a really horrid idea, one just destined to draw more baddies on them. But she did so like the way he called Megara Darling when they were in group. For a second, she chewed on the nail of her right index finger—her mouse nail, the only one that ever met her teeth. She had to make a decision or she’d die for sure. Finally, Pen dropped her hand to the keyboard, blew out a deep breath, and typed.

You tell Group: Sure thing, Handsome.

She might have the disdain of their healer, but Lohonas wouldn’t let her die even if he couldn’t bring her back from the brink at the moment. He always had her back, just like she had his. People in her guild had started whispering about Meg and Lohonas as an in-game couple—complete with comments about a wedding by the huge waterfall where the sea dragons played—which was probably a decent chunk of what chapped Aaron’s ass. She was pretty sure he was the one who’d started the rant about marrying across guilds.

Like a good little soldier, Pen moved Megara out of range and then ran. She still had the troll targeted and watched as its hit-points slowly drifted lower and lower.

Lohonas tells Group: Good job, Darling. Maks, can you heal her for crying out loud? My touch still hasn’t popped, so I’m a little bit useless as anything more than muscle right now.

Maksamar tells Group: With the running around, I can’t get a target on her. Hey, cutie, can you stay in range?

Pen bristled, wishing she could stab Maksamar/Aaron, or at least his avatar. Cute had been Aaron’s word of choice to describe her when they were together. She’d never liked it much, but the joke had really been on her when he’d cheated on cute with hot and gorgeous. At the same time. They were twins, and their names were pretty much interchangeable. Now Aaron called her cute just to piss her off.

It worked.

Besides, the range thing was a bullshit excuse. She was running around them in as tight a circle as she could manage. Whatever. The troll was almost dead. Another circle and…

Fuck! Just like she’d worried, she picked up another mob. A low-level spider wouldn’t be a big deal except…there went the green highlight around her screen-name. Poison. Lovely.

You tell Group: Can anyone cure poison? Like…now would be good.

As soon as the troll blinked out, she spun Megara around and stabbed the spider. She managed to wander a couple steps closer to the group and then fell onto the ground—the game equivalent of passed out and dying.

Lohonas tells Group: Maks?

Maksamar tells Group: Where IS she?

Penelope shoved away from her desk, the leg of her chair banging against Worf’s hip. The Newfoundland raised his big black head and let out a low rumble. Not a growl, more of a doggie WTF?

Hey, you’re lucky it wasn’t a wheel over your tail. Not my fault you nap so close. After scratching his shaggy head for a few seconds, she glanced back at the screen, hoping her life force wasn’t bound too far from where she died. Long corpse runs sucked, especially when she shouldn’t have died in the first place.

She blinked at the screen. Not dead.

Her gaze drifted to the chat window where her group was yammering about the loot and who got what. Maybe she and Aaron were moving past the stupidity at last. It would make being in the guild with him a tiny bit more comfortable. Considering he’d been the one who started her playing Heroes of Fallen Gods and invited her to be a member of Crimson Blades of Eternity, she’d dealt with more than her fair share of grief since they split up. She stuck around because it was easier than trying to start over getting to know new people. There were far worse guilds out there. The devil she knew and all that. A full health bar was still a full health bar, and she wasn’t about to argue about how stupid he’d been acting earlier. She scrolled up to catch up on the chat.

Lohonas heals you for 15,000 points.

Not Aaron.

Of course not. She should have known better.

Lohonas always kept her safe, though. He was a paladin from the Fourth Wall, a different guild the Crimson Blades raided with sometimes. After the breakup, she’d thought about asking if she could join the Wall, but felt stupid running from her problems. But Aaron hadn’t stopped being a problem, and now Lohonas was coming to the rescue again. For that many points, his life-touch must have popped at just the right moment. The spell basically brought her back to full health.

Every time he had to use it on her she felt guilty—especially if it was because Aaron was being an ass. She could only hope Lohonas wasn’t off to a Waller

Reviews for Gaming for Keeps

[ca8bookwyrm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Any time I am asked (or when I do the asking) to review a book, I somehow feel that I need to spend more time on my write-up than I do when I review a book for fun. That is the case with my latest review. I finished reading Seleste deLaney’s GAMING FOR KEEPS a couple of days ago, and instead of jumping into the review with the enthusiasm fresh from reading the book, I decided to sleep on it.

The next day, my enthusiasm hadn’t changed. I figured maybe I still needed more perspective, and gave it another day. Still no change. What that tells me is that this book really is that much fun.

So, the basic premise is that a couple of people who have played an MMORPG together but have never met in person go to a convention hoping to meet each other, and end up hitting it off in person as well as they do online. The conflict? He is a real-life spy, and there’s a psycho planning to kill a bunch of people at this convention. He has to figure out how to stop the bad guy, save the girl, and still keep his secret. Unfortunately, she has bad experiences with online dating, and is very leery of secrets.

I went into this hoping it would be as fun as it actually was. I was expecting a lot of geeky references, and I got them. (I’m sure there were several that I didn’t catch, too, since I haven’t played an MMORPG before. I do play RPGs on the computer, but I play solo instead of online.)

The one thing I was expecting that I didn’t get was more of a fantasy/paranormal element. Both the good guys and the bad guys are 100% human. No vampires, no demons, no elves – except of the role-playing kind. Normally, I prefer paranormal fiction. Straight fiction without that fantasy element doesn’t interest me as much. However, between the RPG and the spy stuff, this was pretty close to fantasy without actually adding anything paranormal.

The lack of fantasy creatures didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the book at all – if anything, it made me enjoy it more, because it was all fresh. There were no hidden magic powers waiting to save the day. No evil spells or curses the bad guy wielded which made you wonder how the normal-seeming good guy had any chance at all. It all made sense in the world we already know, so I wasn’t pulled out of the story to decipher the mechanics of a plot device.

This is already a pretty long review, so I’m going to add a few bullet points of things I particularly enjoyed:

• The sex-in-the-shower scene. Without going into details, I can just say that I’ve had experiences very similar to this one. It made me laugh, and it made me believe. Nicely done.

• I loved the description of the costumes. There weren’t many of them, as the costumes weren’t part of the story apart from when they were on the main characters, but they were fun to read.

• In-game descriptions. Awesome stuff. You can tell Seleste has played before. Even though I don’t play MMOs, there are enough offline RPG similarities that it resonated with my experiences.

• Geek references. I’m only just getting into Firefly (I know, bad geek girl) because I lacked TV service when it aired, but I loved the quotes they threw around. Same with LOTR.

(For full disclosure, I received a review copy of this ebook from the publisher. But I only begged to be sent a review copy because the book was not yet available for purchase.)

[melhay_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Penelope started playing this game with her ex-boyfriend, who'd team (guild) she is still part of. But Aaron doesn't help her in-game. A man with the screen name Lohonas does. He's always got her back, even if he is from another guild. Lohonas has get in-game morals and team support. If Pen could meet one person from online, Lohonas would be him. But people aren't as they seem online. Aaron had proved that. ConDamned, a gamer, book, and comic convention, is coming up and Lohonas asks Pen if she's going to maybe meet? Nervous, Pen says yes. Cal is looking to relax at ConDamned, but his boss at TRAIT needs him on the job at the Con. Cal also is ready to work in the field again, or he thinks. All he has to do is find the code and break it, letting the others on his team know so they can stop the bad guy. And not lead on he's a secret agent. When Cal meets Pen, all he wants is to spend time with her and keep her safe.The novella is from both Penelope's and Calvin's POV. It's neat how in the story the gamer persona did show through and match with their actions and real personality. Seeing their chat, I like Lohonas's personality. And he's not forcing her to meet him. If they happen across each other, they do. If not, it wasn't meant to happen. Hahaha! Pen is great. She's got spunk. I loved her strength and at the bar with the drink she chugs. She's quick with her retorts, and pending who her bather is with she's a hoot.The story is quick. But conventions are only a weekend, so there isn't much time to waste. I liked that they had a semi-relationship prior to meeting, makes the relationship feel a bit stronger for me. The relationship grows with seeing the thoughts of both Pen and Cal. The danger of a threat to all at the Con comes to life toward the end of the story. And sparks an even deeper connection with Pen and Cal.So enjoyed this sexy read. This is one that is a one sitting read. You want to keep reading Cal and Pen. Not to leave them be until the story ends. Even then, I wanted the weekend to keep going.Cal is every girls, geek or not, dream come to life. But if you are a geek girl, yea you'll appreciate and love him deeply. Oh, I enjoyed this one. I think even if it was a full length novel, I'd want more of this couple. I was left happy, pleased, and not wanting the weekend to end. I'm always wishing for more from this author, Seleste.

[claudiagc-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As I'm not that much of a gamer myself I felt a bit lost at times with all the inside jokes and gamer speak. But definitely a very cute and enjoyable book.

[cindy.warner · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Only after inviting a girl that he met in an online MMORPG to meet him at a gaming convention does Cal Burrows learn there is danger afoot at the convention. As a spy, he has been enlisted to get hold of a code that a terrorist is sending through at the convention so they can find out what he’s up to. He can only hope that her hesitation in accepting his invitation will convince her to stay home.Penelope Holloway is drawn to the online persona of the man who invited her to the game convention. Her first relationship begun online and ended badly, and while she is hesitant, Pen not only is curious about her online friend but she has enjoyed going to the convention in the past. After a case of mistaken identity, she decides her friend is a jerk as well before accidentally meeting up with him in the bar and finding out later who he is. Except she never suspected he was a spy or that her life was going to be in danger at the convention.Gaming For Keeps was a pure delight to read. The characters were likable (I always find the geek characters are people I would enjoy hanging out with). The pace was face, the sex was hot and the action kept me on the edge of my seat. If you’re worried that the novella length won’t give you a full story, leave that worry at the door. This is the perfect length.ARC provided by publisher for honest review.Posted by Cindy at 2:06 PM No comments:

[lcrabtree-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, I’ll start by saying this was a little too geeky for me. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good story but all the references to Firefly and other TV programs I’ve never watched put me off a little.

I read a book for the romance, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before somewhere, and I enjoyed the spark the characters had. The way they don’t realise they know each other (even if it is through a game) but are drawn to each other right from the first contact. They clicked right away and there’s a scene involving a shower which made me smile.

I did enjoy it; Pen was hands on when it came to defending herself and Cal being slightly geeky made a change to the usual books I read where they’re attractive, tattooed and arrogant.

It’s definitely for those who enjoy comics, online-gaming, cosplay and conventions.