I Love Love Sampler

By Loretta Ellingsworth

This Sampler includes the first chapter of the first four books in the I Love Love Series.

Who doesn't love love? Not Flavia Smythe, editor extraordinare for a major publishing house. Not Aubergine St. Valentine, Queen of Romance, she lives love, writes love, reads love.

If you love love, this series belongs on your bookshelf.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Loretta Ellingsworth
• Release date: Aug 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386408314

Book preview

I Love Love Sampler

Books 1—4

by

Loretta Ellingsworth

Copyright © 2015 Loretta Ellingsworth

I Love Love Sampler is a work of fiction.

This sampler includes the first chapter of each of the first four novels in the I Love Love series. I hope you enjoy this peek into those books.

Loretta Ellingsworth

Ben Delicious

by

Loretta Ellingsworth

Copyright © 2015 Loretta Ellingsworth

Ben Delicious is a work of fiction.

Chapter 1—Ben Delicious

After a while all the bars in all the kinds of hotels where writers hold writers’ conferences tend to meld into the one sort of sparkly, beigey with browney accents and elevator music music decor of the national chains. The exception might have been the writer’s round table at the Algonquin hotel, but that wasn’t a writer’s convention sort of writer’s round table, it was a writer’s happy hour round table for a little band of writing writers and a few of their hope to be writing friends or hope to be reading under editors, but it was long gone into the gloam of history.

Better was the Hemingway writer’s journey tour, a tour through all the bars in all the European cities where Papa had held court during a time when if you changed publishers it was like moving from an old house to a new house. Unlike now when you didn’t really change publishers, just imprints, like moving from your dining room to your living room, or if you are that type of writer to your boudoir.

I love the sound of boudoir, it sounds so tacky sexy. I whispered it across the top of my perfect martini, made the 007 way, and then whispered it again, boudoir. It plumped my lips without creams or chemicals, or resorting to doctors. I sipped a tiny chilled sip of the martini, smiled at the bartender to tell him he was a talented genius, and whispered boudoir over the surface as I brushed it against my bottom lip for another tasting sip—inhaled a mouthful instead of a sip and nearly choked to death.

It was as if as I spoke boudoir some malicious genie pooffed a mirage of my boudoir delicious dream man to the other end of the bar where he perched nonchalantly on the stool, laid down his keys, his lighter and his cigarette case, looked up, smiled at me the sexy kind of smile that tugs a shy little dimple in the perfect accent and drew my gaze to his eyes, those green, green eyes that are the fruits of fevered authorial pens. I blinked and stared into my glass. Was it a magic crystal displaying my future? If I put my glasses on, would the dream shatter, the dimple fade, would he be gone? I looked up again, at least it wasn’t totally a mirage, he was still there. Take your glasses out, put them on, I told myself—but then the dream would shatter. The dimple was fading even now.

He twirled his finger in