Excerpt from Winning Streak, Las Vegas Sinners Book 3, coming later this year:Tonight__ ensemble was typical Madden. Dark and faded but expensive jeans, a fitted, black Vegas is For Lovers t-shirt and some Doc Martin boots. Okay, those were a little unusual. __e__e not going for a hike in the desert, are we?___ot exactly.___hat is __ot exactly_? I__ not a pee-behind-a-tree kind of girl.

I want something real. Something that leads to something more than sex.

What good were fate and fortune anyway? If there was some sort of plan she was supposed to follow, it was unreadable to her and impossible to stick to. She was tired of fate, which was probably just a made-up concept invented by humans to feel like something or someone was guiding them anyway. God, spirits, cookies, whatever. She was so sick of buying into the idea that there was actually meaning behind any of this. It was just her, blind and alone, making a mess of her life on her own, thank you very much.

She loved him, and she was going to do everything she could to get him back. She hadn__ come this far just to walk away. He was the love of her life, dammit. The man she wanted to marry. The world had reversed its orbit to bring them back together, for Pete__ sake, and she wasn__ going down without a fight. Fate could only do so much; the rest was up to her.

MOTHER TIME: Every New Year is the same. Every day, every second is too for that matter. But when we deliver them in secret, when another year just begins as a matter of fact, it's easy to fail to appreciate what a miracle it is to have more time. So, I suppose, it feels different right now because this time you're paying attention

MOTHER TIME: We all get the exact same 365 days. The only difference is what we do with them.