Dakota Franklin Guest Post PLUS a giveaway

Today, Dakota Franklin returns to Cookie's Book Club with a special guest post and a giveaway!

Following Dakota's post, enter to win one of five prize packs featuring Ruthless to Win, Omnibus One, a three book set, and Triple Threat Thrill, also of the Ruthless to Win series.

Plus, enter to win more books in the Cookie's Book Club Annual Christmas Giveaway, on now!

“I married my husband for his money. 

I have been very happy with my husband’s money.”

Dakota Franklin

You won’t believe how much trouble that innocent joke got me into. And it isn’t even true. The truth is much more romantic, but is too long for a quick joke. Still, you and I have a moment, so I’ll tell you the truth.

Actually, I was a modest sort of heiress, and was expected to earn my way as an engineer too, and Ferry was a poorly paid university professor in Italy. Not that any of it mattered to him.

It was pure chance that I met Ferry. The administrators had a panel of academic advisers and like the male chauvinist pigs they were (Italian men over 50 — what else?) they let the boys choose first; when it was my turn, the “real engineers” were gone and I was left with Ferry, not an engineer but a mathematician. It was one of the luckiest incidents of discrimination that ever happened to me, not only personally but career wise.

I’d made one impulsive marriage while I was still an undergraduate, and regretted it immediately because the man I married clearly wasn’t ready to leave his mother. We proceeded straight from Vegas to our divorce.

I was determined not to make another mistake. Also, I was a clever little girl, and wanted a clever child; there are more than enough idiots in the world without deliberately breeding more.

Enters Ferry. He was ten years older, my academic counselor for my Ph.D. Ferry was, and is, handsome, clever, elegant, sensitive and witty. He makes women laugh; he made me laugh.

There was a problem though. Ferry wasn’t interested. A tall, handsome, Austro-Hungarian-Swiss with a tenured professorship in mathematics at a distinguished university? Why should he want a short “lady engineer” with spectacles? There was hardly a day when some elegant, beautiful, sophisticated woman didn’t wait for him in an expensive coupe outside his office at the college.

Ferry found me a job with Rolls-Royce Aerospace in England to do my practical work. It was long way from him but I didn’t just pine and fade away. Out of sight is out of mind, and I wasn’t having that. So I made a plan, and executed it with military precision.

I’d work late Monday through Thursday so that I could knock off early on Friday, and take the plane to Italy. By the time Ferry left his office after his last tutorial, there I’d be somewhere along his route so that he could catch just a glimpse of me. If he went out shopping, there I was in his peripheral vision. If he went to the laundry, I was just pulling out of a parking space. His favourite table at his favourite restaurant faced a window onto the street and I would of course manage to walk past. If he went to the soccer, there I was when the crowd parted. Of course, I took care to be just far enough away for him not to recognize me.

In the normal course of events I turned in my dissertation and Ferry as my counselor  invited me to meet with him in advance of the viva, the oral examination. The meeting was in a restaurant over dinner.
My heart sank when I walked in. Ferry had brought one of his elegant lady friends with the smart cars and Versace style to chaperone the meeting with a student. What a disaster!

He introduced her as his sister! Then he sat staring at me wordlessly. That wasn’t like Ferry at all. His sister explained that I looked just like the girl that Ferry had been dreaming of so vividly that he saw her everywhere…

“Good golly,” I said in my best innocent American style, “he can describe this girl he’s fallen in love with in his dreams? And she looks like me? Gee.”

Well, between the sister and me we had Ferry surrounded, in the nicest way possible, of course. The sister took me to Versace, and to her optician for contact lenses, and her hairdresser, and turned me into the smartest Italian woman you could dream to meet, a regular pocket rocket, if a bit lippy, and Ferry and I married, and bred a beautiful and intelligent daughter.

And my joke about Ferry’s money? Well, that came true too. Ferry turned out to have a knack for oil pipelines, and made such a fortune in the Russian oilfields we now have to live in Switzerland, where I’m very happy with my husband, my daughter, my job — and my husband’s money!

Copyright © Dakota Franklin

About Dakota Franklin

"The Queen of Racing Scribes"
(John Houlton)

Dakota Franklin was born in Palo Alto, CA, the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of automobile engineers. It was therefore predictable that she would become an engineer. Her mother, a teacher, didn't believe in putting children in boarding schools, so Dakota travelled the world, wherever her father consulted. By the time she was ten she could swear fluently in every European language, and carry on a conversation in all the major ones.

After college at Stanford and MIT, and further postgraduate studies in France, Germany and Italy, she worked on jet engines for Rolls-Royce, for Ford and Holden (GM's Australian branch) on high performance vehicles (HPV), then joined her father and grandfather in the family consulting business, where she has specialized in high performance machinery. She has since worked on contract or as a consultant with all the major automobile makers with a racing or HPV profile, and in powerboat and propellor plane racing. She insists racing regulators around the world love her, whatever they may say behind her back!

Dakota started writing in 1996 when a painful divorce coincided with a testing incident that put her in hospital for several even more painful months. After a false start which resulted in having to trash three complete novels, she finally acquired the right creative writing guru, and started creating the series RUTHLESS TO WIN.

She lives in Switzerland with her husband, an inventor, and drives or flies to the motor cities for her current consulting projects. She has one child, a teenager who travels with her and whose eclectic schooling has turned her into a linguist, just like her mother, but who has no intention of becoming an engineer.

Dakota says, "I'm finally happy. Fulfilled may not be too large a word."

Dakota at CoolMain Press 

Dakota on Facebook 

Dakota on Twitter  

Buy Dakota’s books at:

iTunes 

Smashwords (all formats incl Kindle)  

Kobo 

B&N

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Enter the Giveaway

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Enter below to win one of five prize packs featuring Ruthless to Win, Omnibus One, a three book set, and Triple Threat Thrill, also of the Ruthless to Win series.

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