Winning the Boss's Heart excerpt and e-book giveaway. Hayson Manning

Hi everyone. 

How is everyone this fine Sunday. It's Monday here for me in Sydney. I'm herding the children out the door to school. What are you all doing? 

My second book releases tomorrow with Entangled Publishing. I'd love to share a snippet with you and I'd love to give an e-book copy to a person who leaves a comment. 

“Forty-Two?”

At the use of her nickname, she arrived back in the room with a thud. His eyebrows were raised. 

“What’s on your mind?”

Billie dabbed her mouth with her napkin to cover her lapse. “Well, Septimus, I was thinking about the periodic table and its positive benefits on mankind.”

For some reason he looked pissed off. Totally pissed off. “Funny, I didn’t take you to be the lying kind.” His eyes narrowed, and she had the distinct impression he’d just dismissed her.

Really.

Her spine straightened and her hands rested on the table. “You think I’m going to tell you everything that’s going on in my head at a given time?” She paused. “Actually, back that up. You think any woman is going to tell you what is going on in her mind whenever you please? There will be times she doesn’t want you to know what she’s thinking. Maybe she’d be thinking, ‘That guy standing over there, is one juicy specimen, and I’m mighty thirsty right now.’ There’s no way on this earth she’s ever going to tell Mr. Juicy she’s thirsty. She’d rather catch bubonic plague.”

His forkful of frittata halted halfway to his mouth. He put down the fork, sat back in his chair and regarded her. A smile spread across his face. Slow to start, it curled his lips, continued upward and settled in his eyes. It was the first time she could remember him looking approachable, real, and open.

“What?” she asked, obviously missing his joke.

“You think I’m juicy?”

What! “No.” Hell no.

Mason Christian has twelve weeks to flip something old into something new, and then he's getting the hell out of Footsteps Bay - a tiny New Zealand coastal town. Not even his temporary secretary and personal assistant--the feisty, luscious Billie McLeod--will deter him, but there's no denying she makes him feel alive. More alive than he's felt in three years...

Billie has one dream: save enough money to finish her degree. That's why she's agreed to work for hard ass, all-business-no-pleasure Mason Christian--a man who has every intention of destroying through modernization the town's most cherished historical home. Before she can say 'see ya' she's signed on the dotted line and is contractually bound to be Mason's forty-second assistant. But working with male perfection every day is awesome with a capital A--as long as they can stick to a hands-off policy that gets harder every day...