Book Blitz & Excerpt: Damned When I didn’t + Giveaway

Damned When I Didn’t
Cherie Colyer
Published by: The Wild Rose Press
Publication date: November 18th 2020
Genres: Paranormal, Romance, Young Adult

Death isn’t the end for eighteen-year-old Avery Williams, and her final resting place isn’t beyond the Golden Gates. No, the Queen of the Damned has plans for her and, unbeknownst to Avery, fought hard to gain possession of her soul.

As Hell’s newest succubus, Avery is expected to siphon life from the living. It only takes a long, meaningful kiss, but for a virgin like Avery, kissing guys she barely knows isn’t something she’s comfortable doing. Avery focuses on the upside of her fate—she’ll be returning home, or so she thinks. When the Queen of the Damned cuts her off from her old life, Avery is determined to find a way back to her family and friends, even if it means facing Hell’s fury if she’s caught.

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EXCERPT:

I kicked my sneakers off near the kitchen stools and dropped my purse on the floor.

“What’s your problem?” Cole asked. He stood a few feet from me, eyes narrowed.

“Nothing.” I breathed in deep, trying to calm myself. The stench of cheap perfume invaded my nostrils. I covered my nose with my hand. “You reek of imitation lavender and…and…onions.”

Cole tossed his keys onto the counter. Obvious confusion flittered over his features only to be replaced with the realization that I was referring to the scents of the waitress.

“You’re one to talk!” he spit back. “You stink of Sport Goofy.”

“Sport Goofy, I mean Marcus, barely touched me.” Cole gave off such a strong odor, I was sure the waitress had put her hands all over him.

Cole stepped closer, placing his hands on the counter on either side of me, caging me in.

“And I barely touched her,” he growled. “When a human’s life force flows from them to us, our souls grow brighter and—”

“We smell like them,” I said, finishing his sentence. He’d told me that once.

“And because our senses become sharper, we know when our kind renews.” The blue in his irises was more pronounced than I’d remembered. I bit my lip to keep from asking him if that was because of my heightened vision or because he’d renewed, as he called it. “Now, do you want to tell me what’s really bothering you?”

I felt my face warm, and I had to fight to keep my gaze from traveling to his lips. Did I want to admit that I was irrationally jealous that he’d kissed another girl? Nope. So, instead, I said, “Her smell makes me want to puke.”

“Eau de Jock is doing the same to me.”

“You’re the one who called Sport Goofy,” I reminded him.

He smiled, clearly happy that I’d called Marcus by the nickname.

“You’re the one who pissed off the Queen of the Damned,” he countered.

I twitched a shoulder. “I still can’t stand how you smell right now.”

“Fine!” He grabbed me just under my butt and lifted me over his shoulder. I screamed. He held my legs, keeping me from falling.

“What are you doing?” I grabbed his waist from my upside down position.

“You think I smell?”

“Reek. And you said I do, too! Now put me down!”

“Let’s fix that.”

He marched to the bathroom with me slung over his shoulder. The next thing I knew we were standing in the tub. He continued to hold me like a sack of rice.

“Cole?”

He slid me down his chest so I stood in front of him with his arms keeping me from moving.

“Cole?”

He reached behind me.

I glanced up at the showerhead, then to the knob next to me. “You wouldn’t!”

“Want to bet?”

Author Bio:

Cherie Colyer is the author of Challenging Destiny and the Embrace series. When she’s not getting the fictional people in her life into trouble, she can be found solving network issues at work, spending time with family and friends, reading, or exploring the great outdoors.

Cherie lives in Illinois with her family.

To learn more about Cherie and her novels visit www.CherieColyer.com

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Spotlight & Excerpt: Indigo + giveaway

This is my stop during the blog tour for Indigo (Indigo #1) by Paula Berinstein. Indigo is the first book in a time travel romance series set in the 18th century. The blog tour is organized by Lola’s Blog Tours. and runs from 9 till 22 November. See the tour schedule here. There’s also a tour-wide giveaway for 5 e-copies of Indigo; enter at the bottom of this post!

Indigo

Indigo (Indigo #1)
by Paula Berinstein
Age category: Adult
Genre: Time Travel Romance/ Historical Romance
Release Date: February 14, 2020

What would you do if you suddenly found yourself mistress of an 18th-century plantation?

Esther Rubens is looking forward to getting to know her new community in South Carolina and repair her troubled marriage. But as soon as she arrives in Charleston her life begins to diverge from the idyllic picture in her mind. Her physicist husband, Melvin, is arrested for driving while black, she inherits a strange English property from a cousin she didn’t know she had, and she learns that her great-grandmother Sophie, a brilliant scientist kidnapped by the Nazis, discovered the secret of time travel.

Intrigued by Sophie’s cryptic journal Melvin begins to experiment with time travel, but his anger at the police makes him careless. The process backfires, killing him and throwing Esther back to 1750. Attacked by an unknown assailant the moment she arrives in the past, she seeks protection at an indigo plantation belonging to a dashing planter with a dangerous secret, negotiating a deal that guarantees her safety. But she soon realizes she’s made a terrible mistake in her choice of savior. What she discovers on the plantation is far more horrific than anything she could have imagined.

Overwhelmed, she attempts to flee just as the planter’s mysterious, handsome brother arrives from England seeking refuge—and offering an opportunity that’s too compelling to turn down. But can he be trusted? And are the two of them strong enough to vanquish the evil that’s pervading the lowlands? Only time will tell.

You can find Indigo on Goodreads

You can buy Indigo here on Amazon

Excerpt:

When I came to I felt awful. My head hurt, my mouth was dry, and my legs were like wet noodles, which I discovered when I tried to pick myself up off the ground. The ground? How could I be lying in this dirt? I’d been in Melvin’s lab. I should still be there. Surely I hadn’t been blown out the window. Or had the entire lab been destroyed and I was lying in the rubble?

I looked around but the light hurt my eyes and I couldn’t see much. It was blazing hot and I was surrounded by trees and shrubs. It was odd because we’d been right in the middle of the city and this looked like wilderness. Perhaps I was dead and this was heaven? Or could I be hallucinating?

I squinted to keep all that light out and could see that I was indeed in what appeared to be a clearing in the middle of some woods. That made no sense because there was no explosion large enough short of a thermonuclear bomb that would have thrown me that far, and if it had I’d be dead. I lay there for a while in a state of half-consciousness, and when I felt my head clear enough I attempted to sit up.

It took me several tries but finally I managed, although I fell right back down a couple of times first. I looked around me and sure enough I was in the country. What was odd, though, was that the air smelled salty, which implied that I was near the ocean. I’d grown up around that smell and knew it well.

Wherever I was I couldn’t stay here. I had to get back to Melvin, even if he was dead. Oh my God, Melvin was dead! Was there a chance he’d survived? I thought back to what I’d seen right before I’d lost consciousness. Melvin hurled into the air, Melvin’s body broken into pieces. I couldn’t bear to think of the rest, but I did recognize the truth. My darling husband was gone. Whatever problems we’d been having would never be resolved now. We would never find our way back to each other. And he would never save the world. I burst into tears and cried for the longest time until I couldn’t cry anymore. The world and I had lost the best man I knew. What would we do without him?

~~~~

Download your free copy of a short story set in the Indigo series!

The Unfortunate Death of Bastien Riddle

~~~~

Paula Berinstein

About the Author:
Paula Berinstein is the author of the Amanda Lester, Detective series for tweens and teens. Indigo is her first novel for adults. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

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Giveaway

There is a tour wide giveaway for the blog tour of Indigo. Five winners will each win an e-copy of Indigo.

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Book Blitz & Excerpt: The Waltz of Devil’s Creek + Giveaway

The Waltz of Devil’s Creek
Justine Carver
Out October 20th 2020
Genres: Adult, Historical

Judith Campbell is dying, and she cannot take the painful truth about where her son came from to the grave with her. While on her deathbed in Atlanta, Georgia in 1994, Judith tells him the tragic story of his conception, and which of two men his birth father could be: the young man who professed his love to her, or the pastor who assaulted her.

Set in the Deep South in 1947, The Waltz of Devil’s Creek digs into the dark crevices of racism and women’s rights during a heated political climate in an era of segregation. Combined with Judith’s lack of social stature, and at a time when reporting sexual assault was unheard of, every injustice is stacked against her from the very beginning.

But there is a light in Judith’s young life: her best friend, Joseph Bird, who has loved her since childhood. Joseph stands up for Judith when no one else will and proves that even in the darkest of times, a light is always burning.

Goodreads / Amazon

The waltz of devil's creek

EXCERPT:

The sound of trickling water hit the floorboards beneath me; I sucked in a sharp breath and froze.

Joseph’s eyes strayed downward; his brows crumpled in his forehead, and he gawked at me like I’d grown a third eyeball. “Are you…peein’?” he asked as if he couldn’t believe such a thing.

“No…I uh…” I couldn’t get the words out, but I sure knew what was going on. I gripped my belly with both hands and sat down on the edge of the bed, fluid dripping down my legs—I’d swore I’d never wear a dress again, but I couldn’t fit into pants anymore. “I think I’m gonna have a baby now, Joseph.”

His eyes darted back and forth from my face to the puddle on the floor; he looked as white as the sheet I’d just dressed the bed with.

“Oh, umm…what do you…oh shit, Judy, I don’t know what to do. I’ll go get—.” He started for the door to fetch my pa.

“Joseph, remember what we talked about,” I said, stopping him in his tracks. “You can do this.”

“I remember a brief conversation about who’s gonna deliver this baby,” he said with sarcasm. “But I also remember tellin’ you ain’t no way in hell I can do it. You gotta go to the hospital.”

The first wave of pain struck me like somebody done hit me across the lower back with a two-by-four. “Ahh! Oh no, Joseph, this…ahhh!” I gritted my teeth so hard that pain shot through my jaw and into the top of my head. “I can’t go to the hospital…please, you promised.”

“What?! I did no such thing!”

“Yes, you did! You said: ‘I swear on my life I’ll deliver the baby if nobody else is around to do it’—can’t go back on it now.”

He threw his hands up in the air. “Well yeah, I may’ve said that, but it was only to get you off my back about it—I can’t deliver a baby!”

“You’re gonna have to!” I cried out in pain again and fell back against the bed; I didn’t know why, but for a moment, I thought about how I’d just made the bed and was annoyed by the awful timing.

I heard my pa’s voice from the doorway—he was like the dead arisen, as I hadn’t heard him say much in so long. I clamped my jaw down again, eyes closed so tightly I saw spots dancing on the inside of my eyelids.

the waltz of devil's creek mock up

Author Bio:

Justine Carver was born and raised in the Southern United States on a heavy dose of creek-wading, lightning-bug-catching, and Saturday morning cartoons. She is a full-time writer, all-the-time reader, and every now and then, she pulls her head out of the clouds long enough to remember how much better it is up there.

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the waltz of devil's creek

 

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