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Friday, January 17, 2020

Far Reaching Consequences by Anya Summers


Far Reaching Consequences
Anya Summers
(Crescent City Kings, #2)
Published by: Blushing Books Publications
Publication date: January 15th 2020
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance

Phoebe needs a second chance at life.

In the aftermath of the devastation from her failed marriage, Phoebe returns to her old stomping grounds to open her own bed and breakfast. Starting over is the bravest thing she’s ever done – or so she thinks. But opening her front door to find a blast from her past on her front porch changes all that. The teenager she’d once known has become a jaw-dropping, dominant man in his prime.

He wasn’t looking for a relationship until she blazed back into his life.

Graham runs his own construction business, remodeling homes, and building brand new ones. When his buddy gives him a lead on a new project, he never expects to run into Phoebe, the woman he shared a single kiss with eons ago. Nor is he prepared for the Dominant in him to stake his claim before the end of their first meeting. He wanted her in high school but there had been too wide a gulf separating them. Now, Graham will stop at nothing until he makes her his. But there are larger forces at work, attempting to tear them apart.

When everything Phoebe holds dear becomes a target, Graham will risk it all for the one woman he knows he can never live without.

Publisher’s Note: This steamy second chance romance contains elements of power exchange.

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EXCERPT:

The rubber soles of Phoebe’s taupe-colored work boots squeaked against the golden cinnamon hardwood floor. Daisy’s paws clicked as she trotted beside her. Phoebe would have to trim Daisy’s nails again. The plantation itself was in sad disarray after decades of neglect. In some ways, the plantation was strangely like her life—or at least the way it had been, until she made the commitment to fix it. For the last thirty years, this place had stood vacant and unloved. The previous owners had been unable to sell the property and unable to invest in her upkeep. This grand old lady had become a dilapidated ruin of a bygone era.

Phoebe hoped to fix this place up, just like she had her life. She believed, with a bit of elbow grease, she would be able to turn the plantation back into a showpiece—one for which people would pay for the experience of staying there. New Orleans and the surrounding area was a pre-eminent tourist destination that Phoebe planned to capitalize on.

She eventually wanted her own airport shuttle for guests. But that was getting ahead of herself. The first step was a complete renovation.

It was only recently that Phoebe had been able to actualize her dream of owning Riverland to renovate it into a fully operational bed and breakfast. She’d used the inheritance her late grandpa, Ralph Mackenzie, had bequeathed her in his will a year ago. The tidy sum he’d left her had been enough to buy this place outright, along with the small acreage surrounding the old plantation, with money left over for the needed renovations.

Financially, it would be tight at first until she started having paying guests. That was why she waited tables at the strip joint Bayou Sin on Bourbon Street in the meantime. Not because she loved wearing skintight clothes with men trying to grope her, but it helped supplement her income.

This plantation was infused with all her hope for the future, one that belonged to her and her alone.

As she reached what had once been a grand entrance, with its heavy, double oak doors the same warm cinnamon as the floors, she drew the right-side door open, a greeting on her lips as she spread them in a fake smile like the one she wore serving drinks. Daisy’s whole body vibrated, her attention directed at the man on the opposite side of the door. The initial punch of fear disintegrated as she studied him and memories dulled by time and distance surfaced.

He was tall, a good six two, and built like a professional baseball player with broad shoulders and a head full of dark chestnut hair that was a few weeks past needing a trim. His button-down ivory dress shirt was rolled up to his elbows, leaving his tanned, brawny forearms bare. The shirt was tucked into a pair of well-worn blue jeans with a brown leather tool belt slung around his lean waist.

But it was the man’s eyes, artic blue, making her think of frost and snow, in the tan, slightly weathered face that caused a bell of recognition to sound through her and made her lips curl into a genuine smile.

“Graham? Graham Layton, is that really you? You’re the contractor Dante recommended?” Joy filtered into her voice as she stared at the blast from her past. It had been almost nineteen years since the night of the winter formal in high school. The night she had always considered one of the best of her life.



Author Bio:

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Anya grew up listening to Cardinals baseball and reading anything she could get her hands on. She remembers her mother saying if only she would read the right type of books instead binging her way through the romance aisles at the bookstore, she'd have been a doctor. While Anya never did get that doctorate, she graduated cum laude from the University of Missouri-St. Louis with a M.A. in History.

Anya is a Bestselling and Award-Winning Author published in multiple fiction genres. She also writes urban fantasy and paranormal romance under the name, Maggie Mae Gallagher. A total geek at her core, when she is not writing, she adores attending the latest comic con or spending time with her family. She currently lives in the midwest with her two furry felines.

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Gouster Girl by David. E Gumpert


GOUSTER GIRL

by David E. Gumpert
Publication Date: December 9, 2019
Genres: YA, Interracial Teen Romance, Historical Fiction, Coming of Age, Romance

SYNOPSIS

Maybe because they are young and innocent, cute black Valerie Davis and nerdy white Jeffrey Stark are late to realize that falling in love on Chicago’s South Side in 1963 is a highly risky business for an interracial couple. At first, they help each other out of tough racial fixes—he saves her from attack at an all-white amusement park and she saves him from injury in a racial brawl at their high school. But as their romance becomes more serious, so do the racial dangers. White police target Valerie as a prostitute and black gang members see Jeffrey as trying to sexually exploit a black girl. Seemingly inevitably, the blossoming romance collides head on with the realities of Northern-style racism one hot summer afternoon at one of Chicago’s most beautiful Lake Michigan beaches, when a racial protest turns ugly, confronting the couple with terrible choices.
Gouster Girl vividly depicts the raw racism so prevalent during the early 1960s, which ushered in decades of gang violence that turned sections of Chicago into the urban killing fields they are today. Gouster Girl opens in the summer of 1963 with the white Stark family tearfully moving its belongings onto a moving truck in front of the tidy South Shore neighborhood apartment building they love, just blocks from where Michelle Obama would grow up. As they load up the truck, 16-year-old Jeff and his parents argue yet again about the racial fears and fantasies that are leading them to abandon South Shore, with its delis and shuls and beautiful beaches. Through the eyes of Jeff, Gouster Girl then takes us back to the unlikely racial violence that led to his romance with Valerie and how she variously teases and embarrasses him to confront his most deeply held racial prejudices. Valerie introduces Jeff to the highs and lows of her life– to black music and dancing, as well as police corruption, job discrimination, misguided school tracking systems and housing discrimination that keeps blacks separate and unequal.
A makeout session in an isolated section of Jackson Park leads the couple into a confrontation with police, which highlights for both the realities of what we today refer to as “white privilege.” It also pushes the Stark family more fully toward a decision about whether to join other whites in fleeing South Shore.
This highly evocative coming-of-age story will alternately charm, anger terrify, and upset readers as they travel back to a time that was seemingly simpler, but was also blunt in its racial and religious prejudices.
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ABOUT DAVID E. GUMPERT

David E. Gumpert grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in South Shore and Hyde Park. In the years since graduating from the University of Chicago, he has attended Columbia Journalism School and worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and an editor for the Harvard Business Review and Inc. magazine. He has also authored ten nonfiction books on a variety of subjects—from entrepreneurship and small business management to food politics. His most prominent titles include How to Really Create a Successful Business Plan (from Inc. Publishing); How to Really Start Your Own Business (Inc. Publishing); Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Food Rights (Chelsea Green Publishing), and The Raw Milk Answer Book (Lauson Publishing).
He spent ten years in the 1990s and early 2000s researching his family’s history during the Holocaust. The result was a book co-authored with his deceased aunt Inge Bleier: Inge: A Girl’s Journey Through Nazi Europe (Wm. B. Eerdman Publishing).
He spent much of the last half-dozen years going back to his own roots in Chicago to research and write the historical novel, Gouster Girl. While some of it stems from his own experiences growing up in South Shore and Hyde Park, he also conducted significant additional research to complete the book in late 2019.

Dawn Michelle Hardy
Publicist | Literary Agent | Book Consultant
IG @TheLiteraryLobbyist


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The Third Best Thing by Maya Hughes



Title: The Third Best Thing

Series: Fulton U #3
Author: Maya Hughes
Genre: Contemporary Romance

Cover Design: Najla Qamber
Release Date: January 30, 2020




Blurb


Dear Letter Girl, I need to see you. When can we meet?



Her response never came. My secret pen pal with a dirty mind has ghosted me.
I've roped Jules, my sweet as pie next door neighbor, to help me track her
down.



There's only one problem—I'm falling for her. The tortoise shell glasses, out
of this world curves and delicious treats are making the search for The Letter
Girl even harder.



My notes were supposed to be a one time thing. A little too much wine and
naughty thoughts on a winter's night. I never thought Berk would write back. I
wanted to tell him it was me, but the fear of rejection kept my lips sealed.



Now he’s enlisted my help to track down The Letter Girl and our search has him
hot on my, ahem, her trail.



She's the girl next door.



He's my secret pen pal.



Truth is on a collision course with their hearts and it’s only a matter of time
before one of them gets wrecked...







Excerpt

How can you lose someone you’ve never met? The
Letter Girl
 had careened into my life like a damn smash and grab pro
and wormed her way into my heart before I knew what happened.
She was everything I’d ever wanted in a girl. Hot as hell.
Smart and caring. The slow slide of the notes from X-rated to something more
caught me off guard, but she became someone I could talk to. Someone I could
share parts of myself that I didn’t share with other people. Even if she didn’t
know everything about my past, she knew more than most.
No one wanted to be sexy pen pals with a former foster kid
with almost no one in the whole world. Nah, that was for the college senior,
soon to be pro athlete.
Don’t ever let anyone see things bother you; I learned that
in foster home number four. If everything’s a joke, there’s nothing they can do
to hurt you, but losing TLG when I thought I’d finally found
someone who knew me for me and actually gave a shit? That hurt. It was an
unexpected squeeze on my heart every so often that made it hard to breathe.
Jules slid her hand closer, herky-jerky like she was in a
stop motion animation movie before it finally landed on top of mine with a
gentle pat. “Is it really that important for you to find her?”
I shrugged. “Maybe not. She probably got tired of trying to
figure out my fucking chicken scratch.” I forced out a laugh through the
tightness in my chest.
“Once the season starts things will be crazy for you,
right?”
“You’re right. I guess I’m fixating because not much else is
going on.” No, this would always be a question I needed answered. Who is TLG and
did all the things we’d written about mean as much to her as they meant to me?







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Author Bio

Maya
Hughes, that's me!, can often be found sneaking in another chapter while hiding
in the bathroom from her kids! :-) I'm a romance writer who loves taking
inspiration from everyday life, namely my husband and biggest fan. Inspiration
also strikes when I hear a song, meet someone new or daydream while at soccer
practice.

I love
writing stories that capture the possibilities of the paths less travelled and
enjoy experiencing life through my characters’ eyes.

I'm the mom
of three little ones, the wife to an amazing husband and also work full time.
Some of my favorite things are cupcakes, cinnamon rolls, white wine, laughing
until I can't breathe, traveling with my family and Jeff Goldblum. 

Fake You by MV Ellis





Title: Fake You
Series: Boys of Trinity Hall #2
Author: MV Ellis
Genre: Bully Romance

Cover Design: Sarah Paige, Opium House Creatives

Release Date: January 31, 2020





Blurb


Drew
I hate
the lies you tell.
For as long
as I can remember, everything in my world has been fake. The happy nuclear
family. The loving parents. The close father-son relationship. The respectable
family business. All lies. I’ve had it with the pretense and the show, but I’m
been trapped on a dizzying merry-go-round of deception, and I can’t get off.

So when
she’s thrown unexpectedly into my path, and I discover she’s just another fake,
I need to make her pay. Little do I know, the deceit runs deeper than I
imagined, and nothing is as it seems.

Kik
I tell
the lies I hate.
I hate the
lies and the pretense, but if I ‘m going to achieve what I want in life,
they’re a necessary evil. Truth is, I’ve mostly made peace with the idea. What
I’m doing is a means to an end, and the end definitely justifies the means.
Besides, it’s not forever—nothing ever is.

Everybody
has to do what they have to do, right? I can live with that. Kinda. Sorta.
Maybe. At least I can until he comes bursting into my life, and is determined
to tear down everything I’ve worked so hard to build.







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Trailer




Excerpt

“Kiss me again.”

She hesitated a moment, searching my face. I stared back,
unblinking. If she was hoping to see anything other than pure naked desire, she
was looking in the wrong place, as her expressive brown eyes met mine. The
moments ticked by like a thousand eternities, and as much as I wanted to skip
to the part where I got what I craved, I held my nerve and waited.

She blinked slowly, before rising onto her knees, leaning
forward, and pressing her lips hesitantly to mine. Her kiss was whisper soft,
and if it wasn’t for the fact that I could see her with my own eyes, and was
touching her with my own hands—without even realizing it, I’d gripped her
thighs, and was squeezing them gently—I could have believed I’d imagined it. As
it was, with the way she was looking at me as she made up her mind, she seemed
like a dream.

She reached out to grab the back of the couch, arms either
side of my head, and kissed me like she meant it. I returned the favor, tilting
my body a little so that I could push my lips up to hers, hard and fast. At the
same time, I moved my hands from her thighs, and looped them around her neck,
linking my fingers.

My sense of the world altered as the kiss intensified. As we
licked, sucked, nibbled, and bit, every fiber of my body became attuned to
hers. I allowed my heavy eyelids to fall closed, but even so, I saw her face in
my mind’s eye. I could feel, smell, taste, and hear nothing... but her.We
kissed until I was on the verge of losing my mind—the vision of Kik being
gradually obscured by a black cloud of burning desire.

Just as I was trying to fathom how to maneuver her right
where I wanted her without doing myself further damage, she did the honors,
bracing herself on the back of the couch then lifting her butt, and lowering it
again onto my waiting, straining dick. Sweet baby Jesus.

I tilted my hips even more, intensifying the pressure. I
wanted her so bad, my dick threatened to tear a trail through my sweats as she
ground hard against it in a slow circular motion. I unlocked my hands from
around the back of her neck, and reached into my pants pocket. When I drew it
back out, palm upturned, she pulled her lips away from mine to see what I was
holding.She nodded toward the condom.

“I don’t even want to talk about the level of presumption
here.” That made two of us.

“Me neither. I just want to fuck you like nothing else
matters.” 






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Author Bio

MV ELLIS knows what it’s like to fall head over
heels in love with a badass musician. She followed her heart halfway around the
world to be with one. She moved from London to Sydney after a steamy holiday
romance with a sexy bass player in sultry Brazil.

Twelve years, two children and a dog later, and she’s still
smitten. All this with a guy she sat next to on a bus for 36 hours! She has
toured internationally as a “WAG,” and her experiences inspire her writing.

Ellis’s love of romance began when she was 11 years old,
after a summer spent secretly reading her auntie’s books. She’s been a sucker
for an alpha hero and strong heroine ever since.

An avid reader, Ellis always knew she’d write a book of her
own one day. She was right about that. Following a career spanning advertising,
marketing, and social media, she finally wrote her debut novel, Catching
London 
in 2017.




Author Links

Big Ben by Nana Malone




Title: Big Ben
Series: See No Evil Trilogy #1

Author: Nana Malone
Genre: Romantic Suspense

Cover Design: Najla Qamber

Photo: Wander Aguiar
Release Date: April 21, 2020




Blurb


It began with betrayal.
And ended in murder.

She was never supposed to cross my path. 
She was never supposed to know about the currency of
Secrets or the Oaths of Blood.

But like a thief in the night, she stole my soul even if she
wasn’t mine to possess.

As a member of the Elite, I live by simple tenets. A gentleman
above all. Private matters stay private. Secrets whispered are never revealed.
Enemies and friends are of the same coin. And power is king.

My so called brothers killed my friend. I intend to make
them pay.  And before it’s over, I’ll bend all the rules of morality,
decency and legality. I will borrow and steal to set the scales right. But
begging--begging, you can forget about.

My name is Ben Covington and I know my sins. 












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Coming Soon


Releasing June 9


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Releasing August 18

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Author Bio


USA Today Bestselling Author, NANA MALONE’s love of all
things romance and adventure started with a tattered romantic suspense she
borrowed from her cousin on a sultry summer afternoon in Ghana at a precocious
thirteen. She’s been in love with kick butt heroines ever since.




With her overactive imagination, and channeling her inner
Buffy, it was only a matter a time before she started creating her own
characters. Waiting for her chance at a job as a ninja assassin, Nana, meantime
works out her drama, passion and sass with fictional characters every bit as
sassy and kick butt as she thinks she is.




The books in her series have been on multiple Amazon Kindle
and Barnes & Noble best seller lists as well as the iTunes Breakout Books
list and most notably the USA Today Bestseller list.




Until that ninja job comes through, you’ll find Nana working
hard on additional books for her series as well as other fun, sassy romances
for characters that won’t leave her alone. And if she’s not working or hiding
in the closet reading, she’s acting out scenes for her husband, daughter and
puppy in sunny San Diego.



Want to hit me up? Just email me:

nana@nanamaloneromance.com




Author Links





Capo by Nicolina Martin


Lock and Capo
Nicolina Martin
(Russo Saga, #6)
Published by: Blushing Books Publications
Publication date: January 28th 2020
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance

You’ll die if you talk.

The warning haunts her every waking hour.

After a rough start, Chloe finally has financial stability, a place to call home, and friends she’d die for. It never occurred to her that the sentiment would be put to the test, but when her best friend gets on the wrong side of infamous mob boss, Luciano Salvatore, Chloe intervenes, sealing her own fate.

Salvatore never intends for Chloe Becker to live. Beaten to within an inch of her life by his most ruthless enforcer, she still stands tall, refusing to bend to his will. Curiosity gets the better of him and he decides to see what it takes to make her lose that last streak of defiance.

He definitely doesn’t intend for her to get under his skin.

When his existence crumbles and one heart stops beating, it kicks his own back to life, but it might be too late for forgiveness.

This is the sixth and final book in the Russo Saga series, but can be enjoyed as a standalone.

Publisher’s Note: This contemporary, mafia romance contains elements of danger, suspense, adult themes, power exchange, sensual scenes and is intended for adults only. If any of these offend you, please do not purchase.

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Previous books in the series:



Author Bio:

Nicolina Martin is a Swedish born author who escapes the long, dark winter nights by writing hot contemporary romance/suspense.

She's a mother of three teenage girls, a medical doctor, a quirky loner, and a social human being. She has traveled the globe, has had more lovers than she can count, has loved and hated, succeeded and failed, has gone through marriage and divorce. She has seen darkness and despair, as well as light and happiness.

All these experiences, she pours into her tales, taking her readers for a wild ride while twisting their minds. She loves showing that stories can be different even if the trope is the same.

Nicolina believes that life is too short for regrets and in looking forward, no matter what. She wants to enjoy every moment, and cherish life.

To find out more about Nicolina Martin, visit her official website.

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