Sunday, May 25, 2014

Big Amazon Gift Card Giveaway for Master of Hearts, Plus A Turning Wild Sneak Peak

So when I settled on a weekend release date for my first BBW shifter romance novella, Turning Wild, I forgot this was Memorial Day weekend with the usual holiday processing issues and holdups.  So...maybe a little taste of Turning Wild?  Like, the first two chapters?

-Begin Excerpt!-


CHAPTER ONE

There were days that reminded Holly not to get too big for her britches—and that wasn’t a self-deprecating crack about being a curvy girl.  She felt one of those humbling moments coming, even though she’d just put ten hours in at her research desk at the Agency and all she had been thinking about was getting home and shucking off her painfully professional skirt suit and ill-fitted overcoat and brushing her brown hair out of its overly tight bun.  Walking up to the front door of the supermarket, however, brought more to mind than the fact that she was out of eggs.

The chubby little girl, maybe all of twelve years old, standing on the wide slab of cold, gray sidewalk with her straight brown hair whipping across her face in the chill wind could easily have been Holly ten years before.  The situation was familiar enough, as well, with three older boys standing over the girl and sneering down at her as she glared silently back at them.  They were all still so awkward in their bodies, with one boy far too scrawny for his baggy jeans, another with arms too long for his sleeves, posture stilted by an adolescent effort to look cool.  For her part, the girl was round-faced and round in the middle, padded out to silly proportions by her puffy pink coat.  And all of them so serious about establishing and enforcing the social pecking order that always slotted brains and chubby kids at the bottom.

This little Holly kept her expression cold, smooth, disdainful in the face of jibes about fat girls.  Holly knew from experience that the boys’ interest in tormenting the girl wouldn’t last as long when their victim refused to cry or tremble or show much concern at all over their cruelty.  The very same tactic had insulated Holly from the same kind of bullying as a child, as an orphan shuttled from foster home to foster home, as a pudgy teen with zero fashion sense beyond the knowledge that black was slimming, as a bookish college student with a couple too many hours to her hourglass figure.

As Holly got closer to the door, she could see there was a little more to the story, with the little chubby girl clutching a small husky pup.  The dog’s pale blue eyes showed considerably more fear than the child’s as one or another of the lanky boys grabbed for its tail or poked at it.  There was no way for Holly or the girl to explain to the pup their particular method for freezing out the pointless, indiscriminate anger of soulless people, so it showed its panic too readily, trying to burrow into her puffy coat.

On another day, Holly might have walked past the kids without stopping.  It seemed heartless, she knew.  Most of the other adults who went about their business without intervening did so because….  Well, kids will be kids, and plenty of them had themselves teased and bullied classmates for being fatties or weaklings or brains.  Plenty of others had been teased and didn’t want the reminder of the humiliation.  Holly, had she just let it go, would have done so for the sake of the girl, because Holly knew that look, because Holly herself had worn it.  Sometimes, it didn’t serve to interfere when a child like that girl was standing strong.  Best not to undermine her when Holly didn’t know what she was going home to.  A household of skinny sisters and a hypercritical mother?  A classroom with a teacher who didn’t like fat kids because she’d been one?  Or…nothing—a foster home or a shelter where she was either the whipping girl or the invisible child?  Sometimes, it was better just to pass by with a knowing glance, a shared moment of recognition, older to younger.

On another day, Holly might have let the child handle her own business, but there was something about that particular little girl on that day protecting that runt of a husky pup from those boys.  And it was simple enough for Holly, now that she was older, an adult.  Now that her life with the Agency had taken on an element of mystery, secrecy, intrigue, danger that the average person knew nothing about.  Mundane confrontations like this seemed so much less intimidating.

Arms crossed, the expression on her full face mirroring that of the girl’s, Holly stood about three feet from the cluster of children and waited for them to notice her.  When they did, one of the boys even had the nerve to snicker and say, “What?  She your kid?  You look like her.”

Holly tilted her head and kept staring, until the boys’ gazes started shifting anxiously back and forth between hers and the girl’s, back and forth, hers and the girl’s.  It creeped them out after about thirty seconds.  “Fuck this,” the same smart ass said before all three boys shuffled away, casting ugly looks over their shoulders at Holly.

Advancing a few steps to stand next to the little girl, both the older and younger still watching the bullies skulking through the parking lot toward the street, Holly said, “Nice dog.”

“Yeah,” the girl sighed in a relieved breath, finally looking down to pet the pup.  “Wish I could keep him.”

“He’s not yours?”

The girl shook her head, one hand fighting all that long brown hair still whipping into her eyes.  “No, it was just sitting on the sidewalk all cold, and those boys were kicking at it and talking about doing some…some really mean stuff to it.”

Holly nodded.  “Pretty lucky you stepped up.”

The child squinted briefly, doubtfully up at Holly.  “Not smart, though.  They’ll remember this when they see me at school.”

Holly nodded again.  “But sometimes you just have to.  Don’t give them anything to grab onto, and they’ll give up after a few days.”

That statement hung between the girl and the woman, until the child shifted abruptly to bundle the pup into Holly’s arms.  “I gotta go.”

Holly sucked in a sudden breath and opened her mouth to protest, but the little husky squirmed hard, trying to dig its way up under her jacket.  By the time she had calmed the pup, made sure it wasn’t going to tumble right out of her arms, the child was yards away walking head down into the wind.  The sight churned uneasy feelings in the bottom of Holly’s stomach.  In part, it was because of how much the girl really did resemble her, in size, in attitude, and in that somberness behind her eyes that no kid should have had.  And in part, it was in recollection of the snide comment from the mouthy boy, when he had asked if Holly was the girl’s mother.

She wasn’t.  Holly wasn’t anyone’s mother, no one’s sister or niece, not even a daughter anymore or so much as a cousin.  And certainly not a wife or girlfriend, which made Holly snicker just briefly, without real humor.  Many aspects of her life had changed drastically over the previous few months—since the Agency had taken her on, since the attack that had prompted the covert government team to contact her in the first place—but the overall desirability of Rubenesque women to the average American male was not one of those miraculous alterations.

At this rate, without so much as a date in a year and a half, there weren’t going to be any little Holly’s in her future.  That made the new job, her career with the Agency, that much more important.  It got her up in the morning, gave her something to be passionate about, a sense of self-worth even if no one outside the office knew how smart and resourceful and persistent she could be.  At least someone needed her, had a place for her.

“You got a dog?  That’s unexpected.  And extremely cool.”

That voice.  That deep, muted rumble of a voice like a distant storm—a huge crashing torrent rolling toward her, but from so far off it was only a low grumble, a promise of thunder.  Few things in the world made Holly feel so much dread and excitement at the same time.  Rainstorms and Dustin Berg.  And one was right behind her.

The man was Holly’s neighbor, having moved into the townhouse next to hers about two months after the Agency had relocated her for her own safety.  The man was her gadfly, always just behind her back or just beyond her peripheral vision right about the time she was doing something embarrassing, like trying to jog her size sixteen body around the local park trail when she hoped it would be deserted, or like trying to wrestle a puppy out from under her coat while its paw was hooked in between her blouse buttons and flashing her bra.  The man was five-feet-ten-inches of lean runner’s muscle and slow drawl, vaguely southern-sounding, military around the edges.  The man was, well, her fantasy lover in the flesh, the unobtainable hunk she dreamed about on very good nights.  And only God knew why he bothered to talk to Holly so much, except that maybe he was just that nice a guy.  An absolutely cut, rock-jawed, deep-voiced, boy-next-door grown up nice guy.  She rolled her eyes at herself.

Holly took in a breath and swallowed hard before pivoting to face her neighbor.  She found him huddled down into his black leather coat, collar turned up against those perfect, hard-angled cheekbones.  Coffee brown eyes squinted against the wind, which had lightly chaffed and pinkened his broad, soft smile.  That and the sight of his thick brown hair, cut short along his neck and over his ears but left in sensually mussed ruffles along his crown, took her breath away.  Her body flashed hot from her groin to her knees.

“Hey, Dustin,” she said, careful to sound unaffected by her surprise or his glaring good looks or the fact that she could smell the earthy, woody scent of him even from two feet away in a strong gust.

When Dustin reached toward her to pet the puppy, Holly almost gasped.  Her heart definitely stopped for the full second it took her to realize he wasn’t reaching for her.  Of course he wasn’t.  And yet….

And yet his steady brown eyes were trained on Holly, not the pup, as he looked up from under the thick fringe of his eyelashes, head tilted down against the flurry.  “He’s adorable.  Huskies, they’re kind of wolfish.  That and the eyes, that makes some people nervous.”  The hiss of the wind made him lean in just a little bit to be heard, and that meant his body was sheltering hers, so near, so right.  She trembled in the cold.  Yeah, the cold.  “That doesn’t make you nervous, Holly?  That wolfishness?  The eyes?”

His or yours, she wanted to ask.  Instead, expertly covering her physical reactions to Dustin’s nearness, she shrugged.  “Not really.  I’ve always thought their eyes were beautiful, sort of otherworldly, like they’d seen things only they could see.”

Holly bit her lower lip to shut herself up when she saw Dustin react to her overly fanciful ideas with a strangely approving smile, ringed with the subtle shadow of stubble he left around his mouth and along the hard, strong line of his jaw.  Those kinds of piercing looks from him made her heart skip and then flutter erratically, every time.  They even made her think that he was flirting with her now and then.

The idea that he might ever have guessed Holly had a crush on him mortified her, because she knew that wasn’t a big girl’s place, drooling over men as panty-wetting sexy as Dustin Berg.  So long as she never let on, so long as she came off as though she had zero libido, she could avoid the agonizing awkwardness of Dustin realizing she was attracted to him.  Some men could be downright cruel when a curvy girl presumed to flirt or even entertain a secret crush.  Not Dustin, she suspected, but still….

Dustin, as though sensing Holly’s building skittishness, straightened over her.  God, those shoulders, even under the layer of heavy black leather.  He maintained a powerful, looming presence still but not quite so close.  “Things only they could see,” he repeated, pausing.  “That’s a good way to put it.  Maybe you should bring him next time you run in the park.  We could—.”

“I’m not keeping him,” Holly blurted, panicked at the thought of Dustin seeing her in workout clothes.  Whenever she ran into him on the trails, she always slowed down to a smooth walk and pretended to check her pulse.  No jiggling in front of Dustin Berg, please.  It was a thought that almost made Holly laugh out loud at herself.  “I mean, he’s not my dog.  He’s a stray, just huddled on the sidewalk.”

“You could keep him, then.  Copper Ridge is really good with their pet policy.  But you don’t want to?”  Dustin was still petting the scruffy rump of the pup, who had finally settled with his head nestled up under Holly’s full breasts.  She tried not to be offended by the dog’s utilitarian attitude to something as personal as her chest or to let Dustin’s vaguely disappointed tone make her feel guilty.

“I work,” she said.  “A lot.  There’s no one at home.”

There wouldn’t have been anyone to take care of a pet if something happened to Holly, something like the attack a few months back, if it had been worse.  Just like there hadn’t been anyone for Holly when her mother had died ten years before.  No one to know Mom wasn’t where she was supposed to be, except a daughter who didn’t want to call for help after she’d seen ambulances take her grandparents away and never bring them back, after police had taken Dad away and never brought him back, either.  The idea of the runty little husky waiting by the door and no one ever coming home to him, because there wasn’t anyone but Holly and no one to know, made her queasy in the way only the smell of musty cardboard and bad memories could.

“So what are you going to do with him?” Dustin asked, rousing Holly from her private thoughts.  She started to answer, but she could only shrug, at a loss.  “Here,” he said, gathering the dog into his arms after a brief struggle with four gangly legs and a stiff tail.  “I’ve got a friend who works in a vet’s office.  She can check to see if he’s got a chip.  If not, well, they get nothing but animal lovers in their offices all day.  Someone will want him.”

Holly stiffened like the pup, robbed of his warm nook.  “It’s not that I don’t….  It’s just….”  Then, little by little, her shoulders sagged back down.  “There’s no one at home.”

“Yeah,” Dustin breathed low, peering appraisingly at Holly, as though he suspected there was more context at work in the statement than was immediately apparent.  “Well, if you change your mind, I’m sure she can keep him around at the office for at least a couple of days.”

“Yeah, okay, great.  Thank her for me,” Holly said.  Then she pulled her overcoat tight, despite it being about a half-size too small, and folded her arms and braved the wind back to her car.  Without buying her groceries.  She kept thinking of that little girl and Dustin’s reaction to Holly not wanting—not letting herself want—to keep the pup and wondering dismally whether Berg’s “friend” at the vet’s office was another way of saying girlfriend.


CHAPTER TWO

“Looks like she’s not inviting us home to dinner anytime soon,” Dustin told the ratty pup in his arms as they both watched Holly fleeing across the parking lot.  “Fine by me,” he added, frowning, not meaning it half as much as he wished he did.

Had the pack not assigned him to watch her, Dustin would have stayed as far away from Holly Parker as humanly and inhumanly possible.  She was too curvy, too luscious, too infuriatingly independent, too much of a challenge for the wolf inside him.  And she was damn near too much for the tenuous remains of his self-control.  She smelled, for chrissake.  Not only like she was wolfkin but of wild lavender and cedar, like she’d been rolling naked in it.  And the images that went along with that fucking thought!

Breathe, two, three, four.  Berg automatically defaulted to the meditative breathing technique he’d been practicing the last few weeks, as the hunger to turn and to hunt and to mate had gotten worse.  The wilding was getting worse, getting closer, claiming a little more of his humanity with each turn and clawing at him when he refused to shift.  Hours of meditating, miles of running, adding pounds by the dozens to the weights at the gym all just maintained the status quo, the constant simmer of hunger and the low growl of the wolf just waiting.  Volunteering to work in town, away from the pack, to scout varg leads and keep an eye on Holly or others like her, wasn’t helping the way he thought it would.  Breathe, two, three, four.

And no matter how much he tried, whenever she was anywhere around him, Dustin couldn’t take his eyes off Holly.  Walking, getting into her car, she held her shoulders back so stiff and straight, as though that was going to keep those curves of hers from rolling and swaying seductively, temptingly.  He sized her up like the predator he was, more so day by day.

They were playing the same game, Dustin and Holly, but only he acknowledged it.  She really seemed to think that coming off cool and unimpressed was going to fool him into believing she wasn’t attracted to him, but her pussy wet itself for him whenever they were together, whenever she was within reach.  He could smell that, too.  And that made the wolf inside him rise up as wild and rampant as she made his cock.  Lucky for Dustin his black leather coat hit him at the top of his thighs, just low enough.

For his part, Dustin had tried not to flirt at all at first, then only as much as was necessary to warm Holly up enough that she’d let him get a little closer to her, to her life.  Now, after eight months of living two buildings over from her and watching the woman trying to pretend she wasn’t half as wild or passionate as he knew her to be, the long stares and accidental caresses were the only pressure valve he had to keep himself from putting her face-first against a wall with her arms held above her head while he mounted her for all they were worth.

Dustin growled under his breath at that thought, his groin throbbing.  The husky whined and looked up at him, head tilted in question.  “You wouldn’t understand.  You’re too young.  And you’re a dog.”

No, there was no special telepathic link, canis lupus to familiaris, wolf to dog, and the pup sure as hell didn’t know English.  So the husky, yawning and then licking his narrow muzzle, ignored the wasted taunt and Dustin’s frustration.

The were shook his head and turned toward the supermarket entrance.  “I suppose you’re going to get hungry before morning.  Steak for me and kibble for you.  Let’s keep that straight.”  Dustin carried the pup with him into the store.  The first clerk to notice started to say something about animals not being allowed, but a steady stare, a growl so low and soft it didn’t really consciously register with her, and a quick wink from Dustin ended the matter.  If only Holly was as easy to manage.

That thought stuck with Dustin as he finished his shopping and headed back to the townhouses, north side of town, the end with the money and the parks and all the woodsy landscaping.  It was the next best thing to actually living in one of the national forests north and east of the city, where the arid inland valleys of California gave way to the Sierra Nevadas, condos and abnormally green golf courses disappearing in favor of rich red earth and loam, trails and remote cabins.

All the photos on Dustin’s mantle, above the environmentally friendly gas fireplace he never used, showed him surrounded by giant sequoias or redwoods.  Not in that godforsaken Eastville trailer park at the base of the foothills, but swimming at Shafts Lake with Ron when Dustin was just fifteen, or hiking with Martin and Tate about twelve years back, right after he’d turned eighteen and gained full status with the pack.  Not a single picture included his jailbird brothers or his drunkard redneck daddy.  The pack brothers who’d taken him in at fourteen, those were the only family he cared to acknowledge.

The sound of a plastic garbage can being turned on its side in the kitchen reminded Dustin he had a four-legged guest.  “Steak for me and kibble for you,” he repeated as he scooped the willful pup up out of the pile of trash it had strung across the tile floor.  The husky looked unrepentant with the clear wrap from the steak packaging hanging out of its mouth.  “Right, then, you look for something else to tear up so I don’t feel half as bad about taking you to see Laura tomorrow at the vet’s.  Maybe we’ll even get you shots.”  The pup reared back in Dustin’s arms and kicked frantically to be set down, as though it understood that word.  “And I’ll get rid of this.”  Dustin held up the trash bag and shook it at the puppy, who retreated a few feet from the noise before forgetting what it was running from and sitting down to scratch its ear instead.

Out on the front step, pulling the door closed softly, Dustin paused and listened.  A normal human couldn’t have heard it, but he had, plenty of times.  Sometimes he caught the strains of blues singer Nina Simone or maybe Ella Fitzgerald playing on the stereo and winding out from a cracked window in Holly’s townhouse.  One time she was humming along, a sound so sweet and wistful that he’d felt it not just in the heat of his groin but as an ache deep in his chest and the back of his throat.  He understood that sound of longing, felt it every moment he was separated from his pack—but he also knew what was going to happen if he didn’t keep his distance.

On the way to the big garbage bin by the mailboxes, Dustin passed Holly’s townhouse.  Hers was the one with all the lights on, the pale blue one.  She looked so good, so soft, when she wore light blue, Dustin thought to himself out of nowhere.  Over the hedge and the patio fence, he saw her sliding glass door was gaping a few inches.  It was cold outside for that, but honestly she burned food a lot.  Girl was sexy as hell and could not cook to save her life.  No smell of burned pasta tonight, though, and no music.  Dustin shook his head at himself realizing he’d been hoping to see her dancing by herself again in the living room with a glass of wine, but better he didn’t.  That night he had damn near hopped the patio fence.

Long, silky straight brown hair, and light cinnamon brown eyes.  Full round breasts and hips to match.  And that goddamn scent of lavender and cedar.  Dustin could practically smell her.

No practically about it, he realized as he came around the corner of Holly’s townhouse and strode directly into the voluptuous wolfkin.

“Oh, fuck.”  Holly’s eyes got big, and she put her hand over her mouth.  For the language and the trash bag split open on the paved walkway, she murmured, “Sorry.”

“S’okay.  You’re kinda cute when you cuss.”  It was a struggle for Dustin, groin instantly straining and burning, not to confess that he just plain liked the way she sounded when she spoke before she thought, without filtering, unguarded.  He wanted to hear her say it again while she was underneath him, along with a lengthy selection of other delectable syllables women only tended to say when they were about to be overcome by an orgasm.  And then to feel her nails in his back and hear her growl….

Dustin’s carnal revelry subsided when he recognized the quiver that passed over Holly’s plush lips, the slight shiver along her shoulders.  She was wearing just a blue, zipper-front track suit, no coat, hair loose, probably coming back from the bin herself, but it wasn’t the kind of shudder that came from being cold.

“You okay, lupa?”

She wasn’t looking at him, head down.  “Yeah, I’m just….”  Then she raised her face, her bright honey brown eyes narrowed.  “What did you say?”

More than he should have.  “What’s wrong, Holly?  Bad day?”

Whatever was really bothering her, she shrugged it off.  “Long day.”

Long life, her tone said.  “Yeah, I know.”  And he did.  Dustin knew all about Holly’s background, from growing up with a father who thought drinking and armed robbery qualified as vocations, to losing her grandparents and her mother before she was even a teenager.  He knew about the were attack—the varg attack—almost a year before and that fact that she was very likely working for an Agency cell, considering the people who had approached her soon after that bullshit report she’d filed with the police.  No mention at all of the fact that the man who had “mugged” her in that parking lot on her way home had been a shifter.  But Dustin and pack leaders Ron and Eric had seen the hospital file and the photographs of the bite wound on her left shoulder.  “I know,” he said again, but he couldn’t convey to her how true it was, how sincere.

Then he bent down to pick up the tattered trash bag just as Holly leaned down to do the same, and their hands and cheeks brushed at the same moment.  Dustin’s senses filled with…with lavender and cedar, the memory of hips swaying to “I Want Some Sugar In My Bowl”, a naughty word like fuck from those bee stung lips, and the anxious tremor along her flushed skin and ripe curves.  Holly and Dustin both straightened, gazes flared and locked, only he stood up with a step forward into her.  He couldn’t keep the growl out of his breath, the rumble reverberating gut deep, from the root of him, his swelling cock.  The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as the wolf in him pushed hard to free itself, to rise up right through his bristling skin.  Dustin’s shoulders settled and shifted back as his hips strained forward and his hands clenched into fists, the only thing he could do to keep from grabbing her, jerking her against him, or throwing her to down onto the grass and….

She can’t pretend we’re not flirting now, he thought as he angled his face down over hers and took the luscious pad of her lower lip so slowly, so carefully, but so hungrily between his teeth.  He snarled but didn’t bite; he held her still and sucked while she trembled against him.  The wolf inside him thrilled at her reaction, at the musk of lust mixed with fear.  He scraped her lower lip gently with the edge of his teeth and sucked again, then lapped upward with the tip of his tongue to taste her upper lip, sweet with wine, coppery with the blood coursing beneath her skin.  Holly’s eyes sank closed, millimeter by millimeter, and she held her breath one full heartbeat, two, three.  He distinctly heard each one, felt them in the most minute pulsing of her blood.  Dustin lost track of the beats when his own throbbing pulse began pounding in his head, as she sighed into his mouth and went pliant and submissive against him.

It was the worst thing Holly could have done, like she’d rolled over and offered her belly—or her sweet, vulnerable pussy.  Their very first kiss was Dustin forcing her submission, biting his little lupa, and she didn’t even understand what was happening, so he couldn’t….  Fuck, he couldn’t do what his body wanted to do and strip her bare and put her on all fours, couldn’t work himself wildly, brutally into her tight core from behind while she bucked and bounced against him and whined at the burn and the stretch and the need between her legs.  If she submitted to him fully, like that, she had to know what she was doing and what it meant.

A split second before he reached his limit, before he’d gone so far he could only give in to the urge to drive his tongue into her mouth and his cock into her sex, Dustin stepped back from Holly.  He steadied them both with one hand on her shoulder, holding himself back from her by pushing her away, the other hand wiping his mouth.  She probably thought he was wiping away the wetness of her lips against his, but it was really to hide the fact that he was outright salivating at the idea of taking her.

“Holly, I’m sorry.”  Behind his hand, Dustin was slurring his words, canines elongating just enough for him to feel them and know the wolf was coming if he didn’t get the hell out of there.  “I just—.”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Holly said in a breathy rush, not looking at him.  “Stuff happens.  It doesn’t mean anything.”  Then she started around Dustin on her way back into her townhouse, her steps hurried, gestures stiff and tight.  “I mean, you probably have a girlfriend who wouldn’t be happy about that.  Enough said.  We can just forget it happened.”

She didn’t even look back.  Goddamnit.  He could guess all the things she was thinking, and he couldn’t stop her to explain, not unless he wanted to have a lot more to be sorry for.

Dustin turned his face toward a renewed gust of wind, up toward the nearly whole disk of the glowing moon.  He gulped air and let the chill on his skin and in his lungs beat back the prickle of fur and the pain of shifting tissue and bone.  With the wilding progression so far advanced, Dustin could have turned in seconds, but it took two full minutes and a forced march across the complex parking lot to calm himself enough to say he was even mostly human again.

And all the while, every single second, the wolf in him gnawed at his insides.  It demanded he turn, feed, mate with a ravening hunger and savagery.  It demanded he mate, but surely it meant fuck, not mate.  Not mate.

It occurred to Dustin only then that he’d never stopped to wonder what the difference would feel like, between finding a woman who hardened his cock and one that called to his wolf in a way no other did.  He had always just assumed he would never actually mate, as female Odin’s Wolves were rare, but hadn’t he heard Ron talk awhile back about a Fenris Wolf who’d paired with a wolfkin who had never even turned and another shifter who had somehow bonded with a full on human?

Dustin did remember one particular pack teaching quite clearly: one of the few things capable of arresting the wilding progression that eventually obliterated the human in a werewolf was finding a true mate.

-End Excerpt-

So hopefully that sample both whet the appetite and provided enough of a taste to hold everyone over until Monday or Tuesday, when the processing will be done.  In the meantime...

To help spread the word about Master of Hearts: A Domination and Submission Romance Anthology, which is a hit thus far on Amazon as well as B&N, the authors involved (myself included!) are hosting a big Amazon gift card giveaway.  There are fifteen cards of differing values to win and numerous ways to enter.  Check it out!

Monday, May 19, 2014

May Releases And A Sneak Peek At BBW Shifter Romance Turning Wild

So what do I have lined up for everyone these last two weeks of May?

I should first point out that today is the release date for a domination and submission romance anthology called Master of Hearts, featuring nine talented and popular erotic romance authors, including me!  I'm extremely lucky to have the first title in the His Series, At His Whim, appearing in the collection along with work by authors like Adriana Hunter, Aphrodite Hunt, Terry Towers, and Selena Kitt.  For a limited time, Master of Hearts is selling for just $0.99 (for over 450 pages of domination romance), as are each of the His Series titles.  Here's the quick scoop on the anthology:

Master of Hearts: A Domination And Submission Romance Anthology

To be claimed, taken, and possessed with the carnal skill of a consummate Dom.... Surrender to the desire to belong to a man whose hunger demands complete control of your pleasure and his own. Trust nine of the most popular authors in domination and submission romance to introduce you to the Master of Hearts in this sensual collection of stories and novelettes.

If there's enough reader interest in the His Series again, the time might be right to pursue that His Series novel, for those Adrian & Chloe fans among you.  :)

This coming Friday, we have the release of my first BBW shifter romance novella, Turning Wild.  While Turning Wild is not a BDSM or domination and submission romance, I think everyone will be happy with the sexy, savage, alpha males showing my heroines what they want in no uncertain terms.  Turning Wild is a standalone shifter romance novella, but there are plenty more sexy wolves to meet in the world of the Aesir Shifters if the interest is there.  Here's a peek at the cover and blurb:

Drawn suddenly and violently into a hidden world of shifters hiding among humans, Holly is learning that there’s more than one type of were to beware of. One is a threat to her life, another to her heart….

Curvy girl Holly Parker’s life has become a series of simple choices that somehow change the course of her entire future.  Taking a shortcut home puts her on a collision course with a maniac who is not what he seems.  Keeping her mouth shut about her attacker's fur and fangs lands her a job with a covert agency that tracks and exterminates supernaturals preying on their human neighbors.  And now her decision to rely on her intimidatingly sexy neighbor, Dustin Berg, for protection when her wolfish stalker returns opens her eyes not only to the untamed power and passions of the were-soldiers known as Odin’s Wolves but to her place among them.

Caught between her duty to protect people from the kind of attack she suffered and her irresistible attraction to the man—the shifter—who has risked his life to save her from a creature he insists is an aberration hunted by other wolves as well, Holly must decide who is on her side and who is merely using her for their own purposes.  Of all her choices, this is the one that will decide whether she loves or dies.

Again, Turning Wild is scheduled for release on Friday, May 23, 2014.  This erotic romance will contain strong sexual content and a forceful were-soldier hero.

And lastly, the following Friday, May 30, is the release date for The Art of Domination 5: Soft Focus, where we might see more of Emery Jarvis tempting Iva away from bad boy Dom Nolan.

That's the news in my corner of the world.  Summer is getting closer.  May it be filled with reading.  :)

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

A Lot of Paranormal Romance to Love and a $100 Amazon Gift Card!

With my own sci-fi paranormal romance available, and a werewolf romance in the works, I wanted to share some new paranormal titles from friends and let you all in on a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. (That's the Rafflecopter entry form right down there!) a Rafflecopter giveaway

So what shiny titles do I have to tell you about?

The Vixen Arises by J.E. & M. Keep

A cryptic warning from a beautiful man, a desperate need for her blood from her vampire lover, and Anjasa is forced out of her apathy.

For too long, she'd been hedonistic without purpose, and now the elven bombshell is getting her life back together. It's just too bad that the entire city is working to stop her.

When a gorgeous man warns her about what was to come, she shrugs it off. That is, until Jaral, her lover, warns her about their enemies, and she is forced to take the lead in protecting her new life or risk losing it all. Everything comes to a head as she seeks to balance opposing forces in a game of strategy she's only just beginning to play.


Bear With Me by Lynn Red

From USA TODAY and NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Lynn Red comes a steamy, seductive, sensuously heart-felt alpha werebear romance!

Curvy, scrappy, and slightly self-conscious, Lilah Jorgenson is a raccoon-shifting painter with a white streak in her hair and a longing to find the family she never really had.

As a kit scraping by in back alleys, Lilah had to steal to survive. The only predictable part of her life is her weekend job at the Jamesburg Jail. Oh, and her constant, grinding need to find a mate, a family and a home to call her own.
Thickly-muscled, inked-up former soldier Rex Lee spent five years away, but when family duty calls, he and his little cub come home. Love is distant memory. The only thing Rex has on his mind is keeping his family – his daughter and his father – safe... until a fight lands him in the Jamesburg lockup.

When Lilah sees the giant behind bars, the tattoos around his eyes make her yearn, and burn, hotter than she ever has in her twenty-six years of life. And when Rex catches a glimpse of Lilah’s two-toned eyes and sly grin? No matter how much he fights his instincts, sometimes a bear just can’t say no. No matter how much Lilah tells herself it’s all wrong, she knows deep down... she and Rex? It’s exactly right.

Lilah may have sworn off theft when the Jorgenson family took her in, but she’s got one thing left to steal – Rex’s heart.

THE JAMESBURG SHIFTERS is a USA TODAY best-selling series of standalone novels featuring a unique hero, heroine and satisfying HEA ending. No cliffhangers here! Books can be enjoyed in any order you like – you won’t miss a thing!


The Secret Wolf (A Full Moon Mercy Novel) by Ana Fawkes

Sitting next in line to run Full Moon Mercy Motorcycle Club, Lucas Trowwer has kept his fair share of secrets. Whether it’s the cover up of murders in town or the fact that all the men that sit at the table are truly beasts on the inside, Lucas knows the line between paranormal and reality is very thin.

When bodies start piling up in town, the evidence points to a rival shifter crew looking to take down the MC, and the last thing Lucas needs is to save an innocent woman and fall for her. His trust must now reside in a woman who is beyond beautiful... and completely human. If things couldn’t get any more confusing, a one night stand from Lucas’s past comes forward with news that could change the path of Full Moon Mercy and Lucas is trapped within secrets, romance, and bloodshed.

There’s a war brewing in the town of Mercy… and deep inside Lucas’s beast of a heart.


Flower-And-Willow In New Angeles by Erika Masten (That's me!)

New Angeles, 2126…

Lily, the most sought-after of all geisha submissives in the renowned Garden House, is about to graciously decline yet another wealthy patron’s offer to become her Danna, her Dom, when she discovers the man making the offer is Teven Vance. Heir to the most important banking family in New Angeles, Vance was not only Lily's first love as a young apprentice but the patron who purchased her virginity—the night before he disappeared from her life. Eight years later, he returns a self-made man to claim Lily as his own, but military plots and political intrigues follow Lieutenant Colonel Teven Vance of the Western Command, threatening the family and traditions that mean everything to the woman he loves. They could even cost her life.


I Married a Bear! by AT Mitchell

SOME HEARTS ARE MEANT TO BE, EVEN IF THEY DON'T KNOW IT YET...

He's the big bad Alpha husband she never wanted. She's a sharp tongued tigress with really dangerous curves.

Laura Hisch can't believe she's marrying him. Him!

She's not cut out for the brutish, tough talking, tattooed head of the Denali werebear clan. If only she wasn't bound by a pesky old treaty with an arranged marriage clause!

One look at the voluptuous lady from Tiger Bay drives James Roark insane. Obsession, passion, and hunger only have one cure. He's got to make the sweet stubborn werecat at the altar his wife for real.

If only he knew marriage is just a ruse for her real mission. Get close to him, find his weakness, and then give Tiger Bay everything it needs to drive the bears away once and for all.

Easy, right? Wrong. Yielding her heart to this bad boy means betrayal, and either James or her clan are going to pay big time.

Will James turn a sham marriage into something beautiful – or will loving Laura lead to all out war? And if that's not complicated enough, there's a jealous female werebear standing by to make sure these fated mates never become one.


The Pride MC 1: In Heat by Scarlett Skyes

Shortly after the events depicted in 'Bearly Legal', another young woman wakes up to find her whole world changed. She's always stayed on the straight and narrow, the man of her house is the Reverend John Stark after all, but now she's having dreams, strange sinful dreams about a tall, muscular, tattooed biker with long blonde hair. The kind of guy that her parents would never approve of in a million years.

Jayna can't get the thought of him out of her head, and is driven to find him at 'Roar' the biker bar located just outside of the town limits, drawn to him like a moth to the flame. What Jayna can't possibly know is that she is entering her first mating cycle, she is in heat and her very presence is enough to drive any shifter wild with lust.

When a group of werewolves try to claim her for themselves, it seems her fate is sealed. That is, until the approaching thunder of The Pride Motorcycle Club interrupts. What happens when werewolves try to take an alpha werelion's fated mate?"