The Malone Brothers by S.L. Sterling

Series: The Malone Brothers

Author: S.L. Sterling

Genre: Contemporary Romance

START THE SERIES OFF FOR ONLY 99 PENNIES. A KISS BENEATH THE STARS IS ON SALE

Recovering from a messy divorce, Autumn Taylor treats herself to a trip to the tropics. Under the gently swaying palm fronds, she hopes to soothe her troubled soul with surf, sand, and sun. Never did she expect to catch the attention of a devastatingly handsome stranger, who awakens a longing in her she thought no longer existed.

After separating from his crazy ex, Hunter Malone is enjoying a vacation with his brothers. The female persuasion is the farthest thing from his mind... until he locks eyes with a stunning brunette.

What begins as a fling between Autumn and Hunter quickly grows into something more. But the scars from the past have her terrified of the future. To protect herself, Autumn pushes Hunter away.

Can Hunter convince her what they have is worth fighting for? Or will the love they share be over before it begins?

Those searching for a sizzling contemporary romance that tugs at the heartstrings need to look no further than A Kiss Beneath the Stars by USA Today Best Selling Author S.L. Sterling!

Ever feel like you've lost your way and everything is falling apart?

As my husband prepares to leave for a business trip a single, secretive text comes across his phone. I didn't plan to take a trip down memory lane on the eve of our anniversary. But taking this trip down memory lane leaves me in tears, sharing a story of deceit, lies, ...and misunderstandings. The man I gave my heart to ten years ago is being ripped away. 

We lost each other over the past decade.

That’s why I'd tried to push off this trip until after our anniversary. As usual, my career took precedence over what was important... US. Yet, the last thing I expect when the plane lands is a call saying that my wife thinks I’m having an affair. I almost lost her once and promised that would never happen again. Now I'm headed home to claim what's mine before someone else does.

Mia

All work and no play was a phrase I knew all too well. But that was about to change. Getting dumped at the start of my much overdue vacation was not how I planned to spend my time off. Neither was running into someone from my past. It was the last thing I expected.... but just what I needed.

My brother’s best friend was headed home when our paths collided at the airport during a massive storm. Twenty years of chemistry crackles around us like lightning, and we give in to what’s been a long time coming. 

From stranded old friends to insatiable lovers, spending a week together at his lake house, I'm reminded what it’s like to live in the moment. When I realize I didn’t really know him at all, I can’t help but think... I might have been his to hold, but could I be his to keep? 

Bryce 

I guess there are worse things than being forced into taking a vacation. I can think of a few. But being fresh out of a bad relationship, and in the middle of a huge merger, is not the ideal time to be jetting off for two weeks. 

One week in, I decide to cut my trip short, only to end up stranded at the airport. Just my luck. Everything changes when I run into my best friend’s little sister. Twenty years later, she’s all grown up and very much available. One thing leads to another, and we find ourselves back at my place riding out the storm and reconnecting in ways I never imagined. 

Feelings that had been delayed are finally able to take flight. The girl who held my attention all those years ago is now the woman holding my heart. I’m falling fast, but when we end up face to face in the boardroom, will our vacation romance go from pleasure to business?

My best friend Sophie was gorgeous, at times uptight and desperate.

Her biological clock was ticking and after yet another failed relationship she pulled me aside.

"Listen Chase, you know I adore you and you know I need you. Historically, you always come through for me." She swallowed hard while I listened. "It's no secret that I want a baby, the semi old fashioned way."

I nodded not really believing what I was hearing.

"I want you to do it."

"You want my swimmers?"

"Yes, through natural injection."

Sex with my best friend. The best friend I had once upon a time wanted in a bad way.

"Don't worry, I've got this covered," I assured her. She looked relieved and maybe even a little excited.

Seven Days, Six nights, and lots of sex. What more could I want?

Oh right. A way to turn this into forever so I could raise my child too.

S.L. Sterling was born and raised in southern Ontario. She now lives in Northern Ontario Canada and is married to her best friend and soul mate and their two dogs. 

An avid reader all her life, S.L. Sterling dreamt of becoming an author. She decided to give writing a try after one of her favorite authors launched a course on how to write your novel. This course gave her the push she needed to put pen to paper and her debut novel "It Was Always You" was born. 

When S.L. Sterling isn't writing or plotting her next novel she can be found curled up with a cup of coffee, blanket and the newest romance novel from one of her favorite authors on her e-reader. Her favorite authors include Kendall Ryan, Vi Keeland, Penelope Ward, Lauren Blakely, Alessandra Torre and Willow Winters. 

In her spare time, she enjoys camping, hiking, sunny destinations, spending quality time with family and friends and of course reading.

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HOW THE DEER MOON HUNGERS by Susan Wingate

HOW THE DEER MOON HUNGERS

Susan Wingate

YA/Coming of Age/Mainstream Fiction



For those who enjoy reading books like Where the Crawdads Sing and My Sister’s Keeper

MACKENZIE FRASER witnesses a drunk driver mow down her seven-year-old
sister and her mother blames her. Then she ends up in juvie on a
trumped-up drug charge. Now she’s in the fight of her life…on the
inside! And she’s losing.



HOW THE DEER MOON HUNGERS is a coming of age story about loss, grief, and the power of love.

ORDER YOUR COPY

Amazon → https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08676VMT3

PART ONE

the beginning

“a flower knows, when its butterfly will return, and if the moon walks out, the sky will

understand; but now it hurts, to watch you

leave so soon, when I don't know, if you will ever come back.” ―Sanober Khan

1

The Day Before

I, one Miss MacKenzie Becca Fraser, was never one for saying fuck much. But as with life, things change.

The year before, Dad removed Tessa’s training wheels. The bike had grown up, was halfway between a tricycle and a teenager’s bike. Her eyes glowed when the trainers came off. Her smile? Buoyant. My bike was what Tessa called a big girl bike—a beach cruiser in Tiffany box blue. Mine didn’t have ribbons shooting out of the handles. Can you imagine me going to school with ribbons out of the handles? My peeps would never let me live it down.

The evening before what people called the worst thing that’s happened on the island since Becca Winthrop went and flopped over dead of heart failure at the liquor store, we set off on a night ride—Tessa and me. We left Mom at home stirring up dust with her favorite electric broom. Tuesday was a lazy fall night, one with the sun and moon in competition for the evening sky; with the sun being selfish for time, trying to hang on to day even though it knew it should just stop shining, give up, and go away. We’d stuck playing cards in the spokes of our tires to add to clicking crickets, tree frogs chirping, a not-so-distant fox hacking out a cough to alert its scattered pack of food found—a doomed rabbit or kitty kibbles left out on someone’s porch. Up the hill, deep in the woods, an owl’s Psalm echoed back from its mate as if they were holding invisible hands across the horizon, not wanting to let go. Their song played while we rode.

We’d split the deck of cards, each one clipping twenty-six onto our tire spokes to deter animals from darting out into the lane ahead. Because that was all we needed—to crash into a raccoon crossing the street. Not much good for the coon either. But the road was deserted, and I kept Tessa in front, keeping my eye out for her.

Tessa rode her bike fast like she was angling to lasso the moon, which sat high at the end of the road over Old Man Johnson’s cattle farm. The big, yellow ball lolled around atop a silhouette of gossamer evergreens framing a large swatch of grazing land.

Wind fluttered that silky sable ponytail of hers as we came off the downhill side of False Bay Drive where the road at the end of summer stripes a path of thirsty grass along the strait, where cows graze in a pasture trimmed by a stand of golden poplars, crooked and bending toward the north sky away from steady winds coming off the water. Most people think that on our island in the Pacific Northwest, we live in slickers and galoshes year-round. But that’s the secret we have. Seattle gives our island a bad reputation, makes us soggy when we’re not. We live in what meteorologists call a banana belt or a rain shadow, so our island lacks the lush, drippy rainforests often found in other parts of the Pacific Northwest.

Each downstroke of my pedals matched rhythm with the plastic ribbons whipping off Tessa’s handlebars, whizzing like a thousand bees around her hands. When she skidded to a halt in front of me, I yanked left, my wheels slipping as I swerved to miss her, no doubt balding a spot on the tire’s rubber.

“What’s wrong with you?” I demanded, anger flashing hot in my cheeks and pooling into my chest.

Tessa didn’t seem to hear me. She was gaping up at the sky with that moon gaping back at her.

“What?” I repeated, but this time we were both fixed on the dang moon.

“Do you see it, Mac? The deer?” Tess was in the habit of starting, finishing, and rereading Thurber’s The White Deer for, like, the millionth time—a read way above her grade. In fact, she often fell asleep with the stupid book open-faced on her chest. Then the next morning she’d stick a crow feather in the book to mark her place and set it on her nightstand, ready for her evening read.

“There’s no deer in the moon, dork, but there might be a man if you look hard enough. You need to read real stuff. You’re getting weird.”

“See its horns?”

“Antlers.” I told her. “A hungry moon like that likes to eat seven-year-olds for dinner.” “Nuh-uh,” Tessa answered.

I rolled my bike backward, parallel to hers, close enough to sneak my hand around the back of her head and yank her ponytail.

 “Don’t,” Tessa yelped.

I enjoyed hearing her whiny kid voice. Mom called it plaintive. But Mom liked to make things sound more sophisticated. Her beaten-up chest of drawers was a chiffonier. The mossy stone patio, a pergola. Mom wanted more out of life, and I suspected she harbored a few regrets. “Our island didn’t hold a candle to New York City,” she’d complained one night. “Not even to Seattle. At least Seattle has an international flair,” she’d said.

Mom could have been a model if she’d pursued it, but she’d fallen in love, had kids. The what-happenedto-my-life syndrome seemed to have snagged her in a net she couldn’t get out of. She often talked about things she would do after Tess and I were out of school, when the house and her life were her own again. A longing filling her words, just enough for me to sense an underpinning of resentment. Her gaze would shift to the window, outside, away and away, but not for long; and she would chuckle. Then, she’d sit upright and say, “Oh, we wish on stars and mushroom caps for moon dust and fairies.” I don’t know where she got that phrase, but Mom always trotted it out when she got wistful. Maybe it came from Gramma Kiki. Who knows? It really doesn’t matter, but the oddity of a phrase like that will stick with you.

And although our island boasted an international school—Spring Street School—our town was mostly country, with nothing international about it. We didn’t even have a stoplight. Just stop signs and, of late, one abused turnabout.

When I glanced sideways at Tessa, she was straddling her bike as she stared up at the moon. I noted a certain otherness in her expression, as if we weren’t alone, as if the ghost of that deer she’d spotted in the moon had plopped onto her shoulders and was weighing her down. Her eyes seemed dark with worry and as deep as a pair of bottomless wells, shimmering with unshed tears. I think about that worry sometimes. It haunts me still.

“Come on,” I said. “We’d better get home. Mom’s already in a snit.”

“I wonder what the deer eats, Mac. Do you think it’s hungry?”

“One thing it doesn’t eat, Tess, is cheese!” I said, laughing, but Tessa didn’t get it. She didn’t know then, or ever, about the man in the moon or about the cheese the moon was allegedly made of.

I used to like the word allegedly. I’d learned it as a vocabulary word at the start of my junior year, and I got it right on a pop quiz in homeroom spelling. The teacher even had me write my sentence on the board: Gemma allegedly hid the pencil from me, but there was no evidence to prove that for sure. The sentences I would write with this word now could not be more different: I was allegedly taking care of Tessa when we went to the park the day after looking at the deer moon. And I was allegedly not watching when the car hit her.  Allegedly became an important word for me after Tessa died. It’s weird to recall how much I liked the word in my junior year but hated it afterward when I heard the cop use it.

“Allegedly,” he’d said, “the younger one was in the older sister’s care.” And then, as though no one understood, “The older one was supposed to be watching the younger one.” He said one as if we were buttons on a conveyor belt at some stupid button factory. The jerk.

After Tess died, I started counting the days of the moon as it sketched out a path in the sky from crescent to half to gibbous to crescent again. I called it moon spying, and every month when the moon was ripe, I used to rush outside to search that big ol’ cheese wheel. Maybe I’d spy Tessa riding on the back of the deer ghost, but mostly I just hoped she might see me searching the moon for a glimpse of her.

Susan Wingate is a #1 Amazon bestselling award-winning
author of over fifteen novels. Susan writes across fiction and
nonfiction genres and often sets her stories in the Pacific Northwest
where she is the president of a local authors association. She writes
full-time and lives in Washington State with her husband, Bob.

WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

Website: www.susanwingate.com

Blog:    www.susanwingate.com/blog

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/susanwingate

Facebook: www.facebook.com/authorsusanwingate

 

Seventh Circle by William Becker

Seventh Circle 

by William Becker 

Genre: Romance 

Michael is an awkward university student. He is lonely, socially anxious, and has no experience talking to members of the opposite sex. Michael is introduced to Mia, who is everything he could ever want. She is energetic, exciting, passionate, and much unlike him, massively experienced. Michael's life changes as he falls madly in love with Mia, feeling the passion burn within him; it threatens to swallow him whole, but as time goes on, Michael realizes things are not what they seem to be. 

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William Becker is a young horror author with a mind for weirder sides of the universe. With an emphasis on complex and layered storylines that tug harshly on the reader to search for deeper meanings in the vein of Silent Hill and David Lynch, Becker is a force to be reckoned within the horror world. His works are constantly unfathomable, throwing terror into places never before seen, while also providing compelling storylines that transcend the predictable jumpscares of the popular modern horror.

His first novel, WEEPING OF THE CAVERNS, was written when he was 14. After eight months of writing, editing, and revising, the story arrived soon after his 15th birthday. During the writing sessions for his debut novel, he also wrote an ultra-controversial short story known as THE WHITE SHADE that focused on the horrors of a shooting. Living in a modern climate, it was impossible for THE WHITE SHADE to see the light of day. Following a psychedelic stint that consisted of bingeing David Lynch movies, weird art, and considering the depth of the allegory of the cave wall, he returned to writing with a second story, THE BLACK BOX, and soon after, his second novel, GREY SKIES. 

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Out of My League by Sarah Sutton

Out of My League 

by Sarah Sutton 

Genre: YA Romance 

It’s all fun and games until someone catches feelings.

Sophia Wallace is convinced her life is over when her high school cuts the journalism program. Without the elective, she loses her chance to intern with the biggest newspaper company in the county, and why? All because the baseball team needs more funding. 

To make matters worse, her boyfriend publicly dumps her at a party, which is mortifying. But the icing on the cake is when the captain of the baseball team and the most popular guy at Bayview High, Walsh Hunter, decides to be chivalrous. He jumps in, throws his arm around Sophia, and declares his undying love for her. In front of everyone. 

Suddenly, Sophia is thrown into a world of fake relationships and undercover journalism, and she realizes she’s way, way out of her league. 

Good thing she’s got the team captain to teach her how to play. 

But faced with choosing between saving her journalism class or her newfound feelings for Walsh, will she strike out or hit a home run? 

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Also by Sarah Sutton

What Are Friends For? 

By Sarah Sutton 

Genre: YA Romance 

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Sarah Sutton is a YA Romance author, bringing you stories about teenagers falling in love (sometimes with magic)✨She spends her days dreaming up ideas with her two adorable puppies by her side being cheerleaders (and mega distractions).

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