This story formerly titled On the Cross-town Bus
How far will Wendy Parker go to relieve her craving for sex in public? You might just be surprised. Follow Wendy and her boyfriend, Rick, as they venture to Seoul, South Korea for a business meeting, but find so much more. Wendy recounts her time with Rick getting to it on various forms of public transportation and in public locations.

Excerpt:
"You're welcome," were the only rational words I could get out before the stream of gibberish that followed.
"I Guess I'm just tense. I've never been to Seoul, or anywhere outside the United States for that matter. I'm tense about the meeting. I've never had such a large account before. I wonder if I will have to drop other accounts if I get this one. I don't know if—"
"Shh." Rick put a finger over my mouth. "Don't worry," he said. "You're a great artist. That's why I took the job as your agent and business manager."
Rick leaned in and kissed me. His lips fell soft on mine but I still melted into him, feeling my body relax into his touch. I thought, at that moment, we were one in mind and body. I thought I could stay with him forever. His kiss ended but his hands remained along the lines of my jaw. He held me as if he was holding a cracked egg over a tightrope, and I felt completely safe in his care.
"Now, let's take care of that tension," Rick said as he lifted the armrest and motioned for me lay across him.
"What are you thinking?" I said. "You think some cuddling is going to ease my tension about the meeting?"
"No, but a little massage under the blanket might help," Rick said, as he fluffed the blanket over me, trapping me momentarily in a layer of cold cabin air.
The air quickly warmed as the blanket, and Rick's hands, settled on me. I felt his hands brush across my neckline, slowly tracing the line of my collarbone to the outside of my shoulders. Then, he slowly glided his hands up my neck and into my hair. The next thing I knew, he was gently massaging my temples. My head suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds as I sank deeper into his lap. I closed my eyes and imagined pale blues and pinks floating in clouds above me. I always felt my emotions as colors. I guess it is just the artist in me.
"There. Feel better?" Rick said, in a hushed voice, as he continued to massage my temples, moving two fingers of each hand in slow deliberate circles.
I felt movement, and then Rick's lips on my forehead. I sucked in my breath and arched my back upwards. It was not the kiss that caused the reaction, but the feel of Rick's hands moving down my neck and under the blanket, brushing over my breasts through my blouse. I was certain it was an innocent touch, but my reaction was immediate. Something about the thought of laying across Rick's lap exposed, even within the darkness of the cabin, for any passenger to walk by and see his hands on me. My skin pinched across my nipples. They seemed to extend against my bra so quickly, I wondered if Rick could feel them as he innocently brushed his hands across them.

A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension between privacy and publicness that is transforming how we form communities, create identities, do business, and live our lives.Thanks to the internet, we now live—more and more—in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. New tools let us share our photos, videos, purchases, knowledge, friendships, locations, and lives.Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis.In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.Based on extensive interviews, Public Parts introduces us to the men and women building a new industry based on sharing. Some of them have become household names—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. Others may soon be recognized as the industrialists, philosophers, and designers of our future. Jarvis explores the promising ways in which the internet and publicness allow us to collaborate, think, ways—how we manufacture and market, buy and sell, organize and govern, teach and learn. He also examines the necessity as well as the limits of privacy in an effort to understand and thus protect it. This new and open era has already profoundly disrupted economies, industries, laws, ethics, childhood, and many other facets of our daily lives. But the change has just begun. The shape of the future is not assured. The amazing new tools of publicness can be used to good ends and bad. The choices—and the responsibilities—lie with us. Jarvis makes an urgent case that the future of the internet—what one technologist calls “the eighth continent”—requires as much protection as the physical space we share, the air we breathe, and the rights we afford one another. It is a space of the public, for the public, and by the public. It needs protection and respect from all of us. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of the uprisings in the Middle East, “If people around the world are going to come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.” Jeff Jarvis has that vision and will be that guide.

Emma.  Beautiful, intelligent, radiantly talented, she lives in a star-studded world of wealth and privilege.  But she is about to discover that fame is no protection at all when someone wants you dead....

All she has to do is close her eyes and she remembers the day Brian McAvoy swept into her life.  A frightened toddler, she didn't know then that she was his illegitimate daughter or that he was pop music's rising new star.  All she knew was that with Brian, his bandmates, and his new wife, she felt safe.  And when her baby brother arrived, Emma thought she was the luckiest girl in the world...until the night a botched kidnapping attempt shattered all their lives...and destroyed Emma's happiness.

Yet now, even though Emma is still haunted by flashes of memory from that fateful night, she has survived.  She's carved out a thrilling career and even dared to fall rapturously in love.  But the man who will become her husband isn't all that he seems.  And Emma is about to awaken to the chilling knowledge that the darkest secret of all is the one buried in her mind--a secret that someone may kill to keep.


From the Paperback edition.