The Bullet Catchers are back! Here’s another brief excerpt from First You Run, the latest release from Roxanne St. Claire launching a brand new 2008 trilogy of heart-stopping romantic suspense!

EXCERPT #2
First You Run

Miranda caught Dr. Rosevich following her gaze over his shoulder. Then Adam. Oh, great. She’d been caught checking out the stud in the back.

Focus, Miranda. Fo-cus.

"Nowhere on earth did zero matter as much as it did to the Maya," she read. "And this is why we can all ..." Slowly, she looked up. For effect. For a breath. Not to sneak a peek at Hercules. "...sleep comfortably on that fateful night in our not so distant future."

There were people who did not want her to go public with her theory. Whackos who thought The End Was Near and her research was not just wrong, but harmful. Lunatics who were working very hard to see her book sales tank.

Maybe their latest plan was to infiltrate her book signings with a broad-chested, long-haired, magic-eyed decoy to make her lose her place and feel stupid.

Good strategy. It was working.

She cleared her throat, and used her finger to keep her place on the page. Two more paragraphs, then she’d take another look.

She did, and this time, he shook back a mane of glossy locks the color of gold ingots, and the light caught the glint of in his left ear. Lifting just one side of his mouth, he stroked his chin, cocked his head and melted her with a stare of pure sex.

Unbelievable. He was flirting with her. And she...forgot what she was saying. Completely.

Covering with a slow sip of water, her brain produced only single, simple words.

Maya. Zero. Cataclysn’t. Publishing. Tenure. Everything that mattered.

"Much has been made of the Maya Long Count and the arithmetic that arrived at the end date of December 21, 2012." There. Back on familiar ground. No flirting with bronze-dipped gods. "But the discovery of a place-system notation that included zero was the real genius of this system, which was --"

The man who had coughed leaped to his feet, startling her into silence. "Much has been made because it’s true!" he yelled.

Behind him, a woman stood and joined in. "Of course it is," she burst out. "I’d like to hear what you say to the millions of people who think you are doing the world an enormous disservice by negating the possible astronomical impact, and I mean that in every sense of the word!"

"Millions?" Miranda filled the word with skepticism. "Then millions of people can stop worrying." She calmly returned her attention to the book. "The Maya calendar fixates on a particular point of time that modern scholars believe represented the creation of time according to complex Maya cosmology. However--"

"I can read Maya glyphs!" he declared. "And they say that the end of the world will happen during a cosmogenesis on December 21, 2012 and only a chosen group will survive!"

"That’s right!" This from another college student. "And people will die because of what you’re spouting just to get rich!"

The man in the back moved, ever so slightly, his posture changing from mildly curious to alert as his attention shifted from her to the hecklers.

She gave a self-conscious smile to Dr. Rosevich, and continued to read the next paragraph from memory, since the words danced around.

"So what if you’re wrong?" the one with the wild eyes shouted, completely overriding her.

A few more stood in the second row, very close to Dr. R, sending prickly discomfort down Miranda’s spine.

"That’s what you’re selling!" shouted a young woman, lacking the slick, intellectual gloss of most Berkeley students. "A false sense of security!"

"If you don’t mind," she said, but the words were lost in the outburst. In the back of the room, her long-haired bronze god was gone.

"I do mind!" Wild Eyes lunged into the aisle, bounding toward the front of the room and instinctively Miranda backed up and hit a wall of man, spinning around to come face to face with black-clad shoulders. Higher, she met amber eyes that had gone from flirtatious to dead serious.