MATZAH BALL SURPRISE

With: Laura Brown

Giveaway Alert!

I’m so excited to be on the Just Contemporary Romance blog today, thank you for having me! I wanted to share an excerpt from my upcoming romcom, MATZAH BALL SURPRISE. Writing characters with hearing loss is something I love doing, because I’m Hard of Hearing myself. In this scene I wanted to have a little fun, and used some of the comical situations I’ve found myself in as fuel. Live captioning is something that I use in many different ways, and speech to text apps always seem to have potentially comical, and sometimes embarrassing, errors that pop up! To help me work on this scene, I opened up my transcription app and spoke the words out loud, catching my app doing some pretty funky things. Read on to find out more!

***

He held up a thumb—no skin off his back—and eyed the new app on his phone. He switched to Gaby’s message thread.

Levi: Can you test something out for me? My friend gave me a new speech-to-text app to try, but I have no clue how well it works yet.

Gaby read, then looked at him and nodded. He opened the app, waited for the program to load, then showed it to Gaby. She bit her lip, eyes flickering upward in thought, and all he could focus on was that plump bottom lip dented by teeth.

He really wanted a taste. Could that be part of the ploy?

She started speaking, and thinking dots appeared on his app. He waited for words to show up, but nothing did.

Gaby had stopped, and he held up the empty screen to her. She frowned, then held the phone closer to her mouth, speaking again, and he got transfixed by those lips again, until words appeared on the blank app screen and forced his attention to shift.

Let’s see…not sure…what food…lucky as f**king.

Levi blinked, then blinked again. What the hell? He stopped paying attention to the app, looking at Gaby, whose lips still moved as if she talked about the sky, not…

He swallowed, the off handed suggestion crawling under his skin. But it couldn’t be right. Could it?

She stopped talking, eyebrows lowered, and he turned the phone for her to see. Her gaze roamed over the screen, then her lips burst open and curved and her shoulders shook. She leaned forward, laughing hard enough her cheeks turned pink.

So, she didn’t say f**king.

Gaby collected her phone, shoulders still bouncing as she typed.

Gaby: Wow, that program is bad, huh? I didn’t know what to say so I mentioned food. I believe that was the “we’ll have turkey not stuffing” line. While turkey can be lucky, I don’t put it on par with f**king. Chocolate, maybe, but not turkey.

He made the mistake of locking eyes with her. Something simmered below the good humor, and thoughts of chocolate and Gaby and very little clothing filled his head.

He closed the app. Time to focus on their mission.

MATZAH BALL SURPRISE, an adult romantic comedy

Gaby Fineberg just wants to get through Passover Seder without her “well meaning” family playing matchmaker. She needs a date, just for one simple meal—that includes singing, the history of her forefathers, and not one bit of yeast. The hot guy at her gym would be perfect. He probably hates bread, anyway, with a body like that. But when she finally works up the nerve to ask him, he doesn’t hear a word she said…

Levi Miller is Deaf and happily single. He doesn’t know why this beautiful woman is talking to him, but it’s clear she needs help—and suddenly so does he. When his bad-news ex shows up trying to rekindle their romance, pretending Gaby is his new girlfriend is an easy decision. But to return the favor? He has to convince her family they’re the perfect couple, when they can barely communicate without writing every word.

This Passover is starting to feel like the ten plagues might be coming back to haunt them before the weekend is over...one hilarious misstep after the next 

AMAZON

a Rafflecopter giveaway