Hump Day Hook - Post 9

I am one of many authors who share excerpts from their books and/or works-in-progress every Wednesday on Hump Day Hook. If you'd like to read some more enticing author hooks, please follow this link.

My Hump Day Hook comes from my romantic suspense Dangerous Descents, Book One of my Love in the Labyrinths series to be released by Extasy Books in July.

Geologist Kent Dunbar is seeking assistants to accompany him on a caving expedition to Vietnam and he's not too thrilled with the applicants. But things are about to change...Rebecca Devereux recently got laid off from her job as outdoor adventure director after a VIP dropped dead from a heart attack. The only job she's been able to land since then is retail work at a department store and she hates it. She vows to quit her job and find some way to start over when a curious e-mail appears in her inbox...

Kent needed athletic, sturdy individuals accustomed to facing hardship. Instead he was faced with applicants he feared drank more martinis than protein shakes, had never lifted a dumbbell in their lives, or had a climbing resume that consisted of hefting their bellied bodies in and out of peoples' windows at night. That would work well when emergencies struck. The last thing he needed was some inebriate to step over the edge of a cliff on TV. To ward off what he worried would be certain disaster, he'd begged, pleaded, and basically bribed three friends to go along. At least he knew his buddies could hike 10 miles and scale 100-foot cliffs in a day without going into cardiac arrest. He rifled through the applications again, looking for the most promising candidates. He'd have to choose six of them...

Another batch of email dropped into his box. Kent scanned over the messages. Only one had applicant in the subject line--one sent by a Rebecca Devereux.

"Hmmm." He clicked on her application to review it. The full body photo she'd attached caught his eye first. Enormous glittering green eyes framed in long lashes gazed at him in a come-and-get-me way. He licked his lips as his eyes zeroed in on her body. Nice jeans. Could a woman with curves on every shelf hike through rugged terrain? He seriously doubted it, but his penis said give her the benefit of a doubt by expanding against the denim around his crotch.