Too Hot To Handle by Robin Kaye

Before I began writing Too Hot to Handle, a scene jumped into my head and refused to leave until I wrote a book about it. The scene was of Annabelle Ronaldi waking after a night of way too much champagne with Dr. Mike Flynn. She jumped out of bed screaming—and not in a good way. The woman looked as if she’d scene a ghost.

I had no idea who Mike looked like or why Annabelle was so freaked out about the whole thing. Okay, I imagine waking with a total stranger would be a tad upsetting, not that I know from personal experience, of course. But I would think it would be more of an Oh-my-God-what-have-I-done? kind of thing instead of a scream bloody murder, hop out of bed and wonder if the naked man next to you is an axe murderer type scenario. In other words, her reaction seemed way over-the-top to me.

I “knew” both Annabelle and Mike from Romeo, Romeo. I knew that Annabelle was, um, difficult and I knew there was a reason for it; I just didn’t take the time to find out what that reason was. The second I began writing the ‘Ghosts don’t have sex, do they?’ scene, all my questions were answered. I knew Mike was a dead-ringer for Annabelle’s deceased fiancé, Chip. The challenge then became how to allow Annabelle to deal with all the feelings she’d repressed for the two years since Chip’s death, while beginning a relationship with Mike—a man who is essentially Chip’s double with different eye color, a broken nose and larger…feet. The other thing I had to tackle was that since Chip’s death, Annabelle lost her ability to paint. She’s an artist unable to do the one thing she loves. She put all her passion for art into her work as a manager for a Westside art gallery, helping other artists achieve the dream she always coveted. Still, her creative outlet was as lost to her as Chip was. As she slowly dealt with her loss, her ability to love Mike and her ability to create returned, leaving her to deal with the guilt that always comes after moving forward.



Here’s a sneak peak at the opening scene!

Ghosts don’t have sex, do they? Annabelle Ronaldi wasn’t one hundred percent sure of the answer. Floating between sleep and wakefulness after a night of way too much champagne, she figured she’d either had mind-blowing sex with the ghost of her dead boyfriend, Chip, or his double. She crossed her fingers for the latter.

She’d only slept with two men. The chances she’d increased that number by fifty percent beat the hell out of the odds of her waking with a ghost—especially when she thought about it in a semi-sober state. A state she hadn’t been in the night before.
She had to admit her relationship with Chip would have been a lot better if he’d been half as good in bed alive as his ghost was last night—if in fact it was Chip’s ghost sleeping beside her. Which brought her back to her initial question regarding the ability of ghosts having sex—really, really good sex.

Annabelle opened her eyes and screamed. Loud.

The guy asleep next to her awoke and sat straight up as she jumped out of bed. “My God, you’re real.” Yep, definitely real, and very much alive.

He stared at her with such heat; she was surprised she wasn’t incinerated. Which, under the circumstances, would be preferable to standing there like an idiot. An idiot wearing nothing but a blue garter. She ripped the sheet off the bed leaving him naked, only he didn’t look like an idiot. On the contrary, he looked…big and um…happy to see her. Very happy.

Annabelle was speechless.

“Belle…” He scooted toward her. She backed up until she hit the dresser with a thunk. Belle? Chip never called her Belle. If she hadn’t almost totally dismissed the whole ghost question as a possibility, being called Belle would have cinched it.
“Hey, take it easy. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Mike…Mike Flynn, your brother-in-law’s best friend, we met at the wedding. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No kidding.” He didn’t seem like the ax murderer type, not that she knew what that type looked like, but she was pretty sure it required an ax, and he didn’t have one or anywhere to hide one either. She found herself staring at…him. Probably not the polite thing to do. Annabelle took a deep breath, and moved the direction of her stare past his washboard abs, and nice chest, straight to the eyes of Chip’s double. He looked almost exactly like Chip, a/k/a Christopher Edmond Van Dyke Larsen, except for the eye color, a slight bump on his nose, and the size of a certain appendage.

“Hi…um”

“Mike. Mike Flynn.”

“I knew that.” You’d think she’d offered to sell him the Brooklyn Bridge and he wasn’t buying. “I’ve never done this before…”

“This meaning brought home a nice guy, had mind-boggling, earth-shattering, world rocking sex?” He winked at her. “Yeah, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t make a habit of it either--especially the part where the beautiful woman can’t remember my name. Aside from that, I can’t think of a more pleasurable morning.”

Annabelle’s wish to disappear wasn’t happening so she had no choice other than to deal with…whatever this was.

(From chapter one of Too Hot To Handle © Robin Kaye and Sourcebooks Casablanca 2009)

Writing Too Hot to Handle was a true learning experience. It was at times gut-wrenching but in the end Annabelle was in a better place, and so was I.

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