BooksChatter: Sting - Sandra Brown

Thank you for joining us on the Release Celebrations for Sting, a Romantic Suspense novel by Sandra Brown (16 August 2016, Hodder & Stoughton, 416 pages).

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis and excerpt below. Read the first two chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

Author Sandra Brown will be awarding a Coach Tote with a signed copy of STING and a $50.00 Visa gift card (US/CAN) to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

Synopsis | Teaser | About the Author | Giveaway

Synopsis

When Shaw Kinnard encounters the incongruously elegant Jordie Bennet in a seen-better-days bayou bar, it’s not love at first sight. He’s there to kill her.

Instead, he abducts her, eager to get hold of the $30 Million her brother has pocketed from his badly bent boss. Now they are on the run from said boss—and the FBI. Jordie and Shaw must rely on their wits - and each other - to stay alive.

Miles away from civilization and surrounded by swampland, the two play each other against their common enemies. Jordie's only chance of survival is to outwit Shaw, but it soon becomes clear to Shaw that Jordie isn't entirely trustworthy, either. Was she in on her brother's scam, or is she an innocent pawn in a deadly vendetta? And just how valuable is her life to Shaw, her remorseless and manipulative captor?

Burning for answers-and for each other-this unlikely pair ultimately make a desperate move that could be their last.

With nonstop plot twists and the tantalizing sexual tension that has made Sandra Brown one of the world's best-loved authors, STING will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the final pages.

Teaser: Excerpt

Prologue

     Exactly twenty-two minutes before Mickey Bolden met his maker, he tossed a handful of popcorn into his mouth and said, “A woman walks into a bar.”
     Shaw Kinnard, hunched forward on the bar stool next to Mickey’s and, staring into his drink with every indication of boredom, gave the shot glass of tequila a couple of idle turns.“Yeah? And?”
     “And nothing.”
     “That’s the joke?”
     “No joke, and not a damn thing about this is funny.”
     As though he’d been popped with a rubber band, Shaw’s boredom vanished. His head snapped around to look at Mickey.
     The man’s eyes were no larger than raisins and half shuttered by pillows of fat, but Shaw was able to follow their tracking movement from one side of the beer joint to the other. Tempted as he was to take a look for himself, he stayed on his partner’s bloated face. In dread of the answer, he asked, “Any woman in particular?”
     “Particularly, our woman.”
     “She’s here?”
     “As I live and breathe.” Mickey dusted popcorn salt off his hands.“Currently at one o’clock over your right shoulder, claiming a stool where the bar crooks, so don’t turn around, ’cause she’s facing this way.”
     Mickey’s grin suggested that the two of them were engaged in easy conversation, when, in fact, Jordie Bennett’s unexpected arrival came as a jolt.
     “Well this sure as hell screws the pooch,” Shaw muttered. “She alone?”
     “Came in that way.” One of Mickey’s puffy eyes closed in a wink.“But the night is young.” His smirk only made him uglier, if that was possible.
     Shaw lowered his gaze back to his glass of Patrón Silver. “You think she’s made us?”
     “Naw. How could she?”
     “Then what the hell is she doing here?”
     Mickey shrugged. “Maybe the lady’s thirsty.”
     “She gets thirsty the day we hit town?”
     “Stranger things have happened.”
     “Strange things make me nervous.”
     “’Cause you don’t have the experience I do,” Mickey said.
     With unconcealed scorn, Shaw gave the other man a once-over, thinking that in this instance, experience amounted to a stupid and dangerous complacency. “I’m not exactly a rookie at this,” he said.
     “Then you should know to keep your cool if the plan develops a kink.”
     “A kink? This is a sheepshank.”
     “Maybe. But until we know better, I’m gonna look at it as a wild coincidence and not jump to conclusions that are probably wrong.Shit happens. Best-laid plans get shot to hell. Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow and improvise.”
     “Yeah? Well what if the flow floats you into an ocean of sewage?”
     “Relax, bro,” Mickey drawled. “Everything’s okay. She’s giving the place a survey, casual like, not like she’s looking for anybody in particular. Her baby blues skipped right past me, didn’t light.”
     Shaw snorted as he raised his glass to his mouth. “Because you’re butt ugly.”
     “Hey, there’s plenty of ladies that like me.”
     “If you say so.” Shaw tossed back the remainder of his tequila.As he returned the empty glass to the bar, he glanced toward the subject of their interest, who was presently thanking the bartender for the glass of white wine he was setting down in front of her.
     She was his and Mickey’s reason for being here. Here being the boondocks of south central Louisiana. Not here, a local watering hole, built of rusty, corrugated metal, unstably situated on the muddy banks of a sluggish bayou. If the establishment had a name, Shaw didn’t know it. BAR was spelled out in red neon letters that hissed and crackled as they flashed above the door outside.
     Inside, the place was smoky and reeking with the ripe odors of its rough, blue-collar clientele. Zydeco music blasted from the jukebox, which looked like it had ridden out twenty or so hurricanes that were dress rehearsals for Katrina.
     He and Mickey blended reasonably well into the joint’s general seediness, but this wasn’t the kind of place one would expect to see Jordan Elaine Bennett, known to family and friends as Jordie. Yet here she was. Drinking white wine, for godsake. Like that didn’t make her conspicuous in a place where the beer was bottled and hard liquor was poured neat.
     Mickey scooped another handful of popcorn from the plastic bowl and shoved it into his mouth. Talking around the charred kernels, he asked, “You’re thinking her being here is something besides coincidence?”
     “Hell I know,” Shaw muttered. “Doesn’t feel right, is all.” He bobbed his head in thanks to the bartender, who wordlessly offered to pour him a refill of tequila then, with accurate presumption, uncapped another long neck for Mickey.
     As he took a pull from the fresh bottle of beer, he squinted down the length of it toward the far end of the bar, where it formed an ell.He swallowed, belched lager fumes, said around the burp, “Could be she’s just cruising.”
     Shaw cocked his eyebrow in doubt. “For a man, you mean?”
     “Well, why not?”
     “She’s not the type.”
     Mickey chuckled and nudged Shaw’s arm with his elbow.“They’re all the type.”
     “The voice of experience speaks again?”
     Mickey gave a sage nod. “Hard to get? Total female bullshit, designed to make us work for it.”
     Shaw considered Mickey’s editorial, then picked up his tequila and shot it. Decisively he set the empty glass on the bar and slid off the stool, making sure as he stood up that his shirttail covered the grip of the pistol holstered on his belt.
     Mickey choked on his beer. “Where’re you—”
     “To test your theory, fat man.”
     “You can’t … she—”
     Shaw left Mickey sputtering.
     As he ambled along the row of bar stools, he was sized up by drinkers of both sexes. Women regarded him with either speculation or flat-out invitation. Disinterested, he didn’t engage, not even with a smile. Men gave him hard, cold, challenging stares, which he returned harder, colder, and more challenging. All looked away before he did.
     Shaw had that way about him.
     No one had yet worked up enough courage to occupy the vacant bar stool next to Jordie Bennett’s. Locals probably understood that she was off-limits to riffraff. In her opinion Shaw must’ve qualified as such because, as he got closer, he caught her eye, but briefly, before she directed the referred-to baby blues back down to her glass of wine. No change in facial expression, no shift in body language, not a flutter of a single long eyelash.
     Unapproachable was Jordie Bennett.
     With that face, that body, she could afford to be selective. No two ways about it, she could make just about any man’s mouth water.
     Which kinda sucked.
     Since Shaw had been hired to kill her.

Sting
Available NOW!

About the Author

Sandra Brown is the author of more than sixty New York Times bestsellers, including DEADLINE(2013), LOW PRESSURE (2012), LETHAL (2011), TOUGH CUSTOMER (2010), SMASH CUT (2009), SMOKE SCREEN (2008), PLAY DIRTY (2007), RICOCHET (2006), CHILL FACTOR (2005), WHITE HOT (2004), & HELLO, DARKNESS (2003).

Brown began her writing career in 1981 and since then has published over seventy novels, bringing the number of copies of her books in print worldwide to upwards of eighty million. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.

A lifelong Texan, Sandra Brown was born in Waco, grew up in Fort Worth and attended Texas Christian University, majoring in English. Before embarking on her writing career, she worked as a model at the Dallas Apparel Mart, and in television, including weathercasting for WFAA-TV in Dallas, and feature reporting on the nationally syndicated program “PM Magazine.”

In 2009 Brown detoured from her thrillers to write, Rainwater, a much acclaimed, powerfully moving story about honor and sacrifice during the Great Depression.

Brown recently was given an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Texas Christian University. She was named Thriller Master for 2008, the top award given by the International Thriller Writer’s Association. Other awards and commendations include the 2007 Texas Medal of Arts Award for Literature and the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

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