Today marks six days until my next book is released. That means I’m out of my mind with Stuff To Do, grabbing reviews, marketing, sharing the pre-order link, wearing a giant placard and pacing street corners while begging people to buy my book PLEASE buy my book because people expect money as payment for bills and not, say, baked goods or my eternal gratitude. 
So here’s today’s street corner placard dance. I bring you a snippet of The Firstborn, one of my favorites actually, when my heroine Sophia Brixton faces off against Lord Haughton, uncle to her nephew (and pompous meddler).
***
Finnian shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Up to this point, nothing had transpired in the way he’d imagined it would. And as for Sophia, she was too blunt, and too intelligent. And that was what worried him most.
He gestured towards the recently vacated table. “Will you be seated?”
Her shoulders pressed back. “I’ll stand, thank you.”
He cleared his throat. She was not going to make this easy for him. A point for her, since he doubted she had any idea what had brought him all this way. “The child—”
“George,” she said, interrupting him. “His name is George, after our father.”
“Of course.”
“No,” she spoke again, while his next words still danced on the tip of his tongue. “Not ‘of course’. Such a phrase denotes your being aware that our father’s name was George, or knowing what type of man he was and why we would choose to honor him in such a way. But here you are, darkening my doorstep nine months after his birth. A fact which proves to me that either you didn’t know about him before now, or you simply didn’t care.”
He inclined his head, yet dared not take his eyes off of her, not for a second. “My apologies. I assure you it was the former, and as soon as I discovered that my brother had a son—”
“And where is your brother? And why are you here in his stead?”
Finnian could feel his temper beginning to rise. Never before had he allowed himself to show anger in front of a woman, and yet she was the most infuriating creature he’d ever encountered. “He is in London. I assume.”
“You assume?” To his surprise, her mouth broke into a smile and a soft laugh emanated from the back of her throat. “In other words, you have about as much sway over the life of your brother as I have over my sister.”
“I’m not here to discuss my family,” he said, his voice taking on a note of warning he hadn’t even intended to be there.
“Oh, but I’m sure you’re here with the sole purpose of discussing mine. Or am I wrong?” A flash in her eyes countered the steel in his voice. “The mere fact that you’ve arrived today with a prior knowledge of not only both our names, our location, George’s existence, and no doubt a myriad other trivial items concerning our past and present life tells me that you’ve gone to great lengths to find out all you could before traveling here from…” She waved her right hand in a vague circle. “… wherever you call home. Which means, no doubt, that you wanted the upper hand in this discussion. Which also means that I will most likely not care for whatever it is you’ve come to tell me.”
Finnian fumed in silence. If the baby’s mother was even half as maddening as the woman standing before him, he wondered how David had survived with his manhood and his sanity intact. “I had come here with the intention of speaking to the mother of my brother’s child,” he ground out between clenched teeth.
“But she is not here,” she said, delivering the confession with the precision of a wielded weapon. “And she is not like to be anytime soon. And since your appearance here is most likely connected with George, then you will have to make do with speaking to me.”
“Very well.” He sighed. His confidence drained away from him, and the surety he’d experienced upon arriving here that the matter of the child’s welfare would be swiftly dealt with—and in his favor—had been skillfully chipped away by every word to come out of Sophia’s mouth. “Shall we?” He inclined his head towards the chairs that flanked the table.
“Of course,” she said, and slipped gracefully into the seat that he pulled out for her.
***