Sneak Peeking Inside #GirlGoneNova

Do you like snippets and/or excerpts? I have a love/hate with them because I read and then I click the buy button and somewhere my TBR (to-be-read) pile cries out as another book hits it. Lol 

I read somewhere that we should not fear our TBR or its size, even if we don’t have enough life left to read all those books. I didn’t have time to click through and read why it is okay to have more books than you can read. I just took it as a positive (and also ironic lol). 

So please weigh in with your pros and cons of excerpts. And then, lol, I hope you will press on and read my…excerpt. 

I’m working Project Enterprise #9! Wow, I remember when it was just one book and I had no plans to keep going. And then I stopped at #5. And then I decided to reboot the series and here I am, working on #9! If you’ve read Girl Gone Nova, I hope this excerpts will make you smile and remember a happy memory (boy, do I hope!). And if you haven’t read it, I hope it will inspire in you a desire to check out it out!

If you need more info, there is also my “Why I Wrote” you can check out.

Okay, first, here’s a little about Girl Gone Nova: Project Enterprise 2: 

Impossible missions, an irritating male, time travel and…love? Doc never saw that last one coming?

Doc—Delilah Oliver Clementyne—a covert genius and badass, is sent to another galaxy to do her usual impossible. But her high stakes mission is quickly complicated by a war, an encounter with wife-hunting aliens, and not one, but two bands of time travelers.

The only way it could get worse? If the heart she didn’t know she had starts beating for the bad guy…

Helfron Giddioni—the Leader of half a galaxy—is the guy most of that galaxy would like to shoot. So when he crosses paths with the most dangerous woman he’s ever met, he should fly as far away from her as he can get. Not go looking for her when she disappears. 

When war looms on the event horizon, he’s just a little too happy he and Doc have to work together to save the galaxy—in the past, the present, and possibly the future. 

Don’t miss out on this award-winning adventure of two people who should never have met, attempting the impossible in time and space—and in the intergalactic relationship zone. 

Doc’s been invited to a party on the Gadi homeworld, but someone is a party pooper. Take it away, Doc: 

Cordite burned into her nose bringing Doc awake and into a low-profile crouch. She eased a weapon free from concealment, ears straining for threats in darkness lit by a half-hearted fire. Nothing immediate presented itself, but her gut refused to stand down and her senses twitched like live wires in water. Something bad had happened. People were down. Stuff was on fire. It took a few seconds to orient her memory, to reconstruct where she was, what had happened and why she was on alert at the cellular level.

What light there was showed her the remains of the lovely Gadi reception hall. Moans filtered in between the soft crackle of fire somewhere off to her right. Her brain noted aches and pains in a variety of places, and smoke stung her eyes and lungs, but it was a low-level concern, all energy channeled to her stretched out senses.

No one had told her to come to the party armed, but no one had told her she couldn’t. Truth was, even if they had, she’d still be armed. It was SOP—standard operating procedure—to expect the unexpected.

She extracted her infrared monocle. Not everyone could split their vision, but her brain liked it. It pulled more data from the combo of IR and real-time viewing. With the IR in place, she surveyed her surroundings again. Heat signatures popped out of the haze, all of them prone, bodies and rubble tumbled together.

She would have been one of those bodies, but she’d realized she couldn’t stop the attack and hit the deck before the blast. Still got her bell rung, of course.

She needed to find the General and not just because of his rank. He’d be one of the few wearing a radio. She wasn’t officially military, so she didn’t have one, though the Doolittle should be monitoring the contingent and seen the explosion on their sensors. There’d been at least one medical officer dirt side, but he’d been the one trying to push the bomber out of the hall. No way had he survived the blast.

Her brain needed more to do, so she set it to work estimating the general’s current position, calculating trajectories and blast radius. Seemed a good idea to assess for structural integrity concerns, so she threw that into the mental mix, too.

She had a medical degree in her pocket, but black ops resisted going offline. It was a bit like having multiple personality disorder, but without the forgetting part. No persona ever completely left the building, preferring to jostle for attention inside her head, but if black ops didn’t want to go back in the queue, maybe it shouldn’t. Doc knew to trust her gut.

According to her calculations, General Halliwell had to be somewhere off to her left. Doc started that direction, pausing when a body in her path stirred and muttered something. She crouched next to him, but before she could do more than check his pulse, a change in the air current proved black ops had been wise to stick around. Her IR-free eye met the wounded man’s gaze, a finger to her lips silenced whatever comment he’d planned to make.

Her backup weapon slid into her left hand as she went ghost. Both weapons were already silenced. She knew not to attract attention when she shot someone.

It was easy to locate the source of her unease. They were the only ones upright and moving. The bogeys split into two groups of two, using some kind of hooded light that extinguished any lingering doubt they were a rescue party. The lights passed over each body just long enough for an ID. They were hunting. Didn’t take many of her brain cells to determine two possible targets. Doc decided to go hunting, too. She attached herself to the team heading in the direction that should lead to the general and saw his prone figure when they did.

“Finish him off and let’s get out of here,” one of them, a male, said, looking back over his shoulder. His eyes widened as his gaze connected with hers, his mouth started to move.

Doc’s silenced weapon ended that move. The other found a target dead center of bogey number two. She turned before either body hit the ground. Thanks to her IR, she spotted team two. Didn’t look like they’d found what they were looking for yet.

I hope you enjoyed the excerpt. Doc was one of the most interesting—and challenging—characters I’ve ever met inside my head. I was afraid no one would like her but me. Lol Thankfully,  my fears were unfounded, as evidenced by this review from Midwest Book Review:

“Jones is adept at creating kick-butt women characters who can give as good as they get. Doc is mentally quick and physically lethal. She’s a woman who has never felt like she fit in until she meets Giddioni, whom she is instantly attracted to. But that doesn’t stop her from doing her job, even if it means battling the Gadi leader and his minions. The action is nonstop, the suspense gut-wrenching, and the plot rollicking fun.”

I hope you’ll give Doc a try if you haven’t already. And if you’re already a fan of Project Enterprise, you don’t have too much longer to wait! I don’t have a solid release date yet, but a new book is coming!

Perilously yours,

Pauline