The Eleventh Hour Ice Prince, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Serendipity

Hi, I'm Jessica Freely, and my new release, The Ice Prince, wasn't always The Ice Prince.

It was originally entitled Out of the Box, which went great with the story I thought I was going to write when I proposed it in June. You know how these things go. You do a little research and you find out that your fabulous idea for how to solve a story problem just isn't going to work, and then you come up with something new and the story goes in a different direction than you'd planned.

Out of the Box was like that. When I zigged, it zagged, and as a result, I did a lot of work on it in the revision phase. In fact, at one-thirty in the morning of the day it was due, I rewrote a crucial scene and finally achieved the sense of emotional catharsis I'd been aiming for all along. Talk about bringing it in under the wire.

I won't spoil things by telling you which scene it was, but I will say that once I wrote it, it became obvious to me what the title of the book should be.

The Ice Prince is just out from Loose Id today:
http://www.loose-id.com/The-Ice-Prince.aspx

Below is a never-posted-before excerpt from The Ice Prince. But first, you might also like to know that I have a free ficlet about the main characters, David and Seth, entitled Raspberry Chocolate-Chip Scones, available exclusively on my newsletter group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jessicafreely


Blurb:
Together David and Seth have forged a life full of love, friendship, and scorching hot sex. But secrets from David's past could turn it all into a frozen wasteland unless he can break his habit of silence. The Ice Prince is a sequel to Hero and Rust Belt.

Excerpt:
Haverstock Bookshop was dead. All morning long, not a single customer entered the store. As the minutes ticked by, David fancied he could hear the money for the shop’s overhead -- the heating, the electricity, hell, his salary -- trickling down the drain. He surfed the Internet, looking at Web sites for other small independent bookstores, hoping to glean some pearl of wisdom that would enable him to save this place. It wasn’t much help. A lot of the sites were antiquated, even by his standards, and several were defunct.

“This is too depressing,” he muttered and exited the browser.

He felt like he needed to move around, so he started cleaning. While dusting, he found a loose shelf in the romance section. He went into the back room to find a hammer and nails.

It was Mr. Haverstock’s day off. David's footsteps scuffed on the concrete as he walked down the aisle between the tall metal shelves, trying to remember where he'd last seen the toolbox. He found it resting on an empty box near the hinged steel door that opened onto their loading dock.

He opened the toolbox. There was a box of nails and one of screws, and a screwdriver and a wrench, but no hammer. Huh.

David went back to Mr. Haverstock's office. He searched the file cabinet and the coffee area without success and then went to the desk. He opened the top drawer but only found a hodgepodge of pens and pencils, erasers, a ruler. No hammer. He tried the next drawer. Ledgers and notebooks. The third one held, inexplicably, a coffee can full of old matchbooks. He pulled open the final drawer, one of those deep ones made to double as a file cabinet. Inside sat a brown paper bag with a bundle of cloth in it. No hammer.

"This is pointless," he muttered. "He must have taken it home for something, I'll just fix the shelf tomorrow." But then, just as he was about to shut the drawer, something in the bag caught his eye. The gleam of metal.

He put his hand on the bundle of cloth. It was red. Thick red wool. He lifted it out of the bag and unfolded it. It was a letter jacket for Finney High. The metal he'd seen was from a pin. A little tack pin with a crest and the words Class of 1956. It sat on the breast of the jacket, just above the letter, which was for track. On the other breast, the name Carl was stitched in cursive writing.

Finney was where David had gone to school and his parents before him, as well as, evidently, Mr. Haverstock. Wow. The thought of Carl Haverstock running track boggled his mind. But he'd been a teenager once too. Huh.

So why did he have his jacket stashed in a grocery bag in his desk drawer? Why wasn't it at home in his closet, protected by mothballs?

That was none of his business. David was suddenly aware he was going through Mr. Haverstock's stuff like a snoop. Never mind he hadn't started with that intention. He was snooping now. And snoops always got what they deserved. They found out stuff they didn't want to know. In a hurry, David folded the jacket to put it back in the bag.

And froze.

Scaramouche stared up at him from the bottom of the bag.

Or more precisely, the image of Scaramouche looked up at him, darkly handsome, hand-painted, and visible through a cutout in the finely tooled leather of his father's collector's edition of the Sabatini novel of the same name. Feeling as if he were floating above his body, watching, not controlling events at all, David reached in and took the book out.

The other two were there as well. The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood. All fine-quality collector's editions over fifty years old and handed down to David from his dad. The books David had given Mr. Haverstock to sell in order to pay for Seth's lawyer.

He hadn't sold them.