Winner of the Golden Leaf Award for Best First Book
What the readers are saying –
I love this book! FOR THE LOVE OF THE DAME is a charming ride, with every page full of wonderful, warm moments that make you smile all the way through. Miriam Allenson has just shot to the top of my auto-buy list! – Lani Diane Rich, New York Times best-selling author of The Fortune Quilt
A brilliant new voice in contemporary romance, Miriam Allenson writes characters that leap off the page and into your heart, bringing love and laughter with them. – Nancy Herkness, best-selling author of the Wager of Hearts series
Hilarious, sexy, heartwarming . . . a fabulous debut! Miriam Allenson hits it out of the park in her debut novel FOR THE LOVE OF THE DAME. Sofia and Car are proof that when opposites attract, sparks fly. – Lisa Ann Verge, author of Senseless Acts of Beauty
Excerpt –
Car knew making Sofia run after him sucked. He was sorry he’d done it. That didn’t stop him from wanting to strangle her. “I think we better get something straight. We’re going to be stuck together for the next few weeks. Neither of us is too happy about it. But if this is how it’s going to be, you complaining and me explaining, you and I are going to be two unhappy pups.”
She’d been looking down-in-the-mouth, but that brought a gasp of outrage from her. She planted a hand on her lip. “Pup? You are calling me a baby dog?”
“I did not. . .”
Car gritted his teeth. Swiveling around, he laid his hands and his forehead against the Hummer, cold in the night air. “I’ll make you a deal. I won’t call you a pup if you don’t. . .”
He gathered himself, remembering how she’d said his name. . . “Call me Creese-toe-fur.”
“I do not understand. Creese-toe-fur is your name.”
“It’s. . .” He turned his head to stare down into her eyes that had sucked up the black of the night, eyes that fascinated him, even as he contemplated her murder. He took a breath, and said, “You’re not saying it the way most people do.”
She raised one eyebrow. “That is because I am Italian.”
He took another deep breath, filling his lungs, as if with ballast. “How about you go along with the program and call me Car like everyone else does?”
She tightened her lips. “Now there is a program?”
“Call me Car. Please?” Was that him pleading? He hadn’t pleaded with anyone since he was a kid.
“I will think about it.”
She would theenk about it? Well, hallelujah. He opened the Hummer’s door and stepped back. “Okay, then let’s go.”
She didn’t move, looked at the seat, looked up at him, and back at the seat. Not the seat. The threshold. Which is when he got it. With those short legs, that tight skirt, and those ridiculous high heels, there was no way she could get in without help.
On an exhale, he put his hands around her waist. With one motion, he lifted, and plunked her down on the seat.
“Why did you lift me? I am too heavy. I weigh too many kilos!”
He stood in the lee of the door, stunned, like somebody had clobbered him upside his head with a bat. The ugly dress didn’t matter. The hair, vised back in the no-nonsense old-lady bun, didn’t matter. The crazy talk didn’t matter. He pulled out the seat belt so she could fasten it. “You’re not too heavy,” he said over the wailing, which had gone from a mixture of English and Italian into full-blown Italian.
His hands weren’t on her anymore, but he could feel the heat of her body imprinted upon his palms. The scent she wore, like the roses that bloomed outside Chicago’s Wrigley Field, drifted around his head. He wanted to pull her off the seat, out of the truck, into his arms, and bury his face in the juncture between her shoulder and her neck, the better to take her scent deep into him.
