The Barbershop Girl by Evie Snow

Series: Evangeline’s Rest #3

Publisher: Exile Publishing

Release Date: February 27, 2020

Subgenre: Romantic Comedy

Ben Martindale needs cutting down to size…

You don’t become a notorious British celebrity without rubbing a few people the wrong way, so writer and comedian Ben Martindale has decamped to Australia until the media frenzy surrounding his latest scandal dies down. When he meets Amy Blaine, a perky blonde barber who dresses like a 1950s pin-up girl, he knows he’s hit the comedy jackpot.

Amy Blaine is used to being underestimated because of her appearance. But she knows the dedication it takes to run her own business and to have survived a difficult childhood. She doesn’t need anyone to validate her choices. When she first meets Ben, all she sees is a rich Englishman looking for someone to ridicule, but before long he’s convinced her differently, barraging her with a charm offensive that’s impossible to resist.

Ben begins to fill his weekly London column with snarky observations about Amy’s house, style, troubled family members and dramatic employees. It doesn’t occur to him that Amy, who is slowly letting her guard down for the first time in her adult life, might just be a little bit upset when she finds out…

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Excerpt

“Do you mind if we change the playlist?” Ben slanted Amy a sideways look. She’d been singing off-key karaoke for the past ten minutes and, amusing as it was, he’d reached his limit.

“Oh, sorry.” Amy’s cheerful smile dimmed momentarily.

“Anything else is fine. Just no more Elton John doing Disney. It’s an insult to my car.”

“That’s what you said about Gerald.” Amy nudged his arm.

“He’s an insult too. Thank God you didn’t bring him along or he would have been howling at all this noise.”

Amy snorted. “He loves my singing.”

“How can you tell?”

“He wagged his tail once. Be nice about my dog or I’ll make you drive back to Myf’s to pick him up.”

“Perish the thought. If I remember correctly, we weren’t talking about the dog, we were talking about your abominable taste in music. Disney?”

“It makes me happy. Come on, everyone loves The Lion King.”

“I don’t. Can’t stand it. It’s a tragic tale of death and woe overshadowed by a blatant marketing campaign. It says a lot that I’ve put up with it this long.”

“It says that you’ve been too distracted doing indecent things to your car accelerator to notice anything else. What d’you want to listen to then?” Amy flicked through her music selection. “Cos most of my stuff is like this. Lady Gaga—”

“No.”

“Taylor Swift—”

“Definitely not.”

“Britney Spears. Okay, I can already guess the answer to that one. This is all I have. I like happy music.”

“So do I. Britney Spears doesn’t make me happy. She makes me want to pre-emptively burst my own eardrums. No more ditties from ladies who flash their titties. Time to flick through my collection.” He was rewarded a few minutes later with a loud snort of amusement.

“Jay-Z, Dizzee Rascal, 50 Cent, Wu Tang Clan? Stormzy? Ben, you’re white, sweetie.”

“Sort of pink in some parts too,” Ben said blithely. He had a passionate love for most forms of music and refused to let a little thing like the fact he was white and middle-class get in the way.

“Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, Michael Franti . . . This is better.”

“How about something a bit louder? This is a very impressive vehicle and a very long stretch of road.”

“Okay. Hmm. How about . . . this.” The sounds of Bon Jovi filled the car.

“That is not in my collection,” Ben exclaimed in horror. Even as he said the words, he vaguely remembered Marcella adding a few songs that he had yet to purge. It seemed she was haunting him.

“Yes it was. Look at this! Poison, Cheap Trick . . . I never would have guess you had a thing for eighties cock rock.”

“I do not, and it can be purged right now.”

“Okay, then this.” The Foo Fighters fired up and Ben grinned.

“That’s better.”

Evie Snow is the pen name for a globe-trotting writing team comprising of Georgina (George) Penney and Tony (The Kraken) Johnson.

George does the actual writing and reads far too many books. In the past, she was well on the way to a contemporary history PhD when moving to Saudi Arabia re-introduced her to a love of writing fiction.

Tony manages plot wrangling and is in charge of caffeine distribution. He once spent twenty years working globally as a petroleum engineer and found the oil industry to be far stranger than fiction.

Together, George and Tony have lived in a bunch of countries including Australia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Brunei Darussalam and Scotland. They’re currently on a world-traveling adventure, writing books, seeing all the sights, eating all the food and patting as many critters as possible.