INVESTIGATOR Harlequin Series Fall Blog Tour Promo Post: Texas Baby Conspiracy by Barb Han

She’s fighting for her and her baby’s lives

But she can’t remember why…

Injured and locked up in a decrepit trailer, Alyssa Hazel wakes to only fragments of memory. She knows she's pregnant, her life is in danger—and there's one man she can trust once she escapes. But police officer Blake O’Connor hasn't forgiven Alyssa for walking away from their marriage. Can he protect her and their unborn child…even when this conspiracy hits too close to home?

Buy Texas Baby Conspiracy by Barb Han

Harlequin.com  |  Kindle  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Book Depository

When Alyssa Hazel stirred and felt nothing but walls on all four sides of her, shock robbed her voice. Panic caused her pulse to pound and the extra blood thumped against her skull. Her head threatened to split open as she tried to recall where she was and why she was here.

She pushed her hands out, trying to see if the walls would give. The material was pliable but solid enough to hold form. She felt for cracks or anything she could grip. Movement hurt. She attempted to stretch out her legs and couldn’t get very far.

Where was she? What happened? Why was she enclosed in such a tight space? A haze pressed down on her brain and the pressure was the equivalent of a thunderstorm rolling in.

It was pitch black and she couldn’t remember a thing about where she’d been or what she’d been doing before ending up in this…whatever this was. Forcing recall only made her brain hurt more. A stomach cramp drew her legs tighter to her belly.

Wouldn’t there be a door if she was in some kind of compartment? There would have to be a crack around a door or hatch. She reached up and couldn’t find a ceiling. That seemed like the first good sign so far. It meant that she might be in a small closet or storage room.

She felt around, trying to get her bearings because right now she was at a loss as to where she was and what she was doing there. Bringing her hands to cra­dle her stomach, she knew one thing was certain, she was pregnant. Very pregnant. Her belly was huge.

Again, her mind drew a blank to a question that was so basic she felt like she should have an answer. What on earth was she doing there? She brought her hand up to her head and looked for a reason for the memory loss and headache. She touched a tender spot and felt dried blood.

At least she thought it was. Seeing was impossible despite her eyes adjusting to the dark.

Logic said if she’d gotten inside this structure, there had to be a way out. Bracing her hands against thin walls, she maneuvered up to a sitting position.

Next, she instinctively checked to make sure she had on clothes and then immediately checked for her wedding ring. The band was gone. Thank heavens she had on a cotton shirt and jeans. No shoes but she did have on socks. She remembered wearing her fa­vorite boots. The random memory seemed to float around with no context to ground it. Where had she been going? What had she been doing?

A noise startled her. She froze, unable to make out what it was or exactly where it came from other than out there.

About the Author

USA TODAY Bestselling Author Barb Han lives in Texas with her adventurous family and beloved dogs. Reviewers have called her books "heartfelt" and "exciting." When not writing or reading, she can be found exploring Manhattan, on a mountain, or swimming in her backyard.

Connect with the Author

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DREAMER Harlequin Series Fall Blog Tour Promo Post: Twelve Dates of Christmas by Laurel Greer

Can two rivals create mistletoe magic?

When a local wilderness lodge almost cancels its Twelve Days of Christmas festival, Emma Halloran leaps at the chance to convince the owners of her vision for the business. But Luke Emerson has his own plans—to keep the lodge in the family and protect his grandfather’s legacy. As they work together, Luke and Emma are increasingly drawn to each other. Can these utter opposites unite over their shared passion this Christmas?

Buy Twelve Dates of Christmas by Laurel Greer

Harlequin.com  |  Kindle  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Book Depository

  

And while he didn’t get why the Brownie leader was intent on making the tree into a rainbow bird, he wanted to do right by the kids. The small troop had asked him to help—a request that had earned a storm cloud of a frown from “Ms. Emma”—because he was the tallest person present who wasn’t already working on a tree. The girls also seemed to think being the local game warden gave him some sort of magical knowledge about bird-themed crafts. If feather number one hadn’t proved them wrong, feather two sure had.

No matter. He couldn’t disappoint the girls, even though he had electrical cords to run, spotlights to position and a staff to organize. And at the top of his to-do list: keep his grandfather from leaving his house to survey the action.

Luke gritted his teeth at the possibility of Hank Emerson trying to hook up the power connections for the trees while hacking up phlegm from his pneumonia-ridden lungs. No. Hank was going to keep his stubborn ass fixed to his well-worn couch for the next twelve days, and Luke would do every­thing else that needed doing.

He got into a rhythm, fully covering the high-up branches the little girls couldn’t reach with their shorter arms and rubber cement.

“Now the sparkles.” A Brownie peered at him hopefully as she held out a can of spray paint. No, spray glitter.

“Your troop leader didn’t mention sparkles,” he said.

The girl pressed the can into his hand. “We want it on the edges.”

“You got it.” He was asking for a dressing-down from Emma for following the girls’ instructions in­stead of hers, but she was nowhere to be seen and time was running out. With a careful hand, he sprayed the tips of as many feathers as he could. The Brownies oohed and aahed.

Choking on the fumes, he stepped back, forcing a straight face as he took in the eyesore. It was a good thing every charity or youth group who entered the twelve-day contest received at least a portion of the total funds raised. If the money was solely awarded to the first-place team, the Brownies wouldn’t have a chance at the new canoes they hoped to afford.

The Brownies were clearly of a different mind. They gazed at their creation, faces shining as bright as the pink-and-blue lights Emma had wound through the branches at exact one-inch intervals. Feathers filled in the rest of the spaces. An extra-large papier-mâché pear, wrapped in green, raindrop-size LED bulbs, topped the kaleidoscope monstrosity.

A pear in a partridge tree.

Only Emma…

“Looking great, girls,” he lied.

“That’s a big frown, Warden Emerson.”

The mild comment came from beside him.

He spun, facing Emma Halloran and her glossy red smirk. It didn’t matter the occasion—Emma was always done up like she was anticipating an Insta­gram photoshoot.

And no matter how many times she shot his flan­nel shirts and muddy work boots a disdainful look, he still struggled to keep his eyes off her. Her wool coat hid the curves of her tall figure, but he’d been able to conjure a mental image of her sexy shape since she sat behind him in twelfth grade English class. He’d turned around so often, trying to bring a blush to her pale cheeks, he’d had to go to the chiropractor for a kink in his neck.

Not much had changed in sixteen years. Not her sleek brown hair begging to be mussed, nor her legs, longer than the Gallatin River.

Nor her love of getting under his skin.

 

About the Author

Born and raised in a small Vancouver Island town, Laurel picked up her pen to write Julie Garwood fan-fiction during junior high English class. She hasn't put it down since. Ever committed to the proper placement of the Canadian "eh," she loves to write books with snapping sexual tension and second chances. She lives outside Vancouver with her law-talking husband and two daughters. At least half her diet is made up of tea. Find her at www.laurelgreer.com.

 

Connect with the Author

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GLAMOROUS Harlequin Series Fall Blog Tour Promo Post: Just for the Holidays by Adriana Herrera

She’s snowed in at Christmas…

with a man she must resist!

Casting director Perla Sambrano knows Gael Montez is the perfect actor for her new film project. As long as she forgets his oh-so-tempting allure and keeps her heart out of it. Because their chemistry’s no act and she needs to be careful…

The Montez men hurt the women they love. Or so Gael believes. Keeping things professional with Perla is the only way to protect her. Until a snowstorm strands them together, leading to an unplanned Christmas fling that lands them both on the naughty list!

Buy Just for the Holidays… by Adriana Herrera

Harlequin.com  |  Kindle  |  Barnes & Noble

 

Gael leaned back, considering the information his sister had just given him. It was exciting to think about. A series about Francisco Rios, the leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, was a dream project. The man had led an extraordinary life. He’d graduated from Harvard Law School in 1921—the first Puerto Rican to do so. While studying there he’d met Claudia Mieses, a Peruvian biochemist—and the first Latina to be accepted to Radcliffe College—who was remarkable in her own right. Gael had al­ways thought their love story was a romance for the ages. And that Rios’s life story deserved to be told. Being a part of bringing something like this to the big screen was more than a dream…it was the kind of opportunity that had drawn him to be an actor in the first place.

“I want it,” he said with finality, feeling a buzz of excitement he hadn’t felt in months. “Who do we talk to?” he asked. Hell, he’d probably be willing to do the part for free. But his sister frowned at his question, her expression almost reluctant. When he looked at Manolo, Gael noticed the man looked smug. Clearly, the other shoe was about to drop.

“The studio producing the series is Sambrano,” Gabi blurted out, as if trying to quiet their uncle be­fore he could get the first word in. No wonder the older man was smiling. What felt like a ball of lead sank through Gael. The skin on his face felt hot. He shouldn’t be surprised that the mention of the Sam­brano name still had this effect on him after all these years, but it did.

“Tell him who’s in charge of casting, Gabriela.” His uncle sounded a little bit too pleased with him­self for that nugget to be anything other than the person Gael suspected.

Gabi fidgeted, her eyes everywhere but on Gael. “Perla Sambrano’s doing the casting.” Unsurpris­ingly, he felt the blood at his temples at the mere mention of his ex-girlfriend. Perla Sambrano was someone he took pains not to dwell on. “She’s work­ing for the studios now,” Gabi added, pulling him from his thoughts. “She’s their new VP of global casting and talent acquisitions.” His sister’s tone was sharp, laced with recrimination. Perla Sambrano had been the reason for the one and only time his twin had stopped speaking to him.

“I don’t know if this is the right project,” he said, ruthlessly tamping down the pang of discomfort that flashed in his chest. He stared at his sister, expect­ing her to rehash old arguments. But she just stared at him, disappointment written all over her face. He knew enough not to take the bait. That conversation  as over and done with. He would not apologize for making the choices that had them all sitting in a pri­vate jet heading to the ten-million-dollar mansion his money had bought.

“This is not going to work, Gabi,” he told his sis­ter, before turning away from her withering glare. He looked at his uncle and felt a surge of irritation at the pleased little smirk on his face. He was not some damn toy for Manolo and Gabi to compete over. “These aren’t going to work, either,” Gael quickly added, gesturing to his uncle’s pile of scripts. “Let’s keep looking.” That made Manolo’s smile flag, but he wasn’t here to save anyone’s feelings. This was his career, and family or not, they worked for him.

Gabi nodded tersely. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but then seemed to let it go. Gael focused on the book he’d been reading on his phone and tried very hard not to think about Perla or the project.

Dwelling on ancient history was not a habit he indulged in.

 

About the Author

Adriana Herrera was born and raised in the Caribbean, but for the last 15 years has let her job (and her spouse) take her all over the world. She loves writing stories about people who look and sound like her people, getting unapologetic happy endings. 

  

Connect with the Author

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Blog Tour Promo Post: Meet Me in Madrid by Verity Lowell

Meet Me in Madrid by Verity Lowell is available in trade paperback and eBook on October 26^th!

In this sexy, sophisticated romantic comedy, two women juggle romance and career across continents.

Charlotte Hilaire has a love-hate relationship with her work as a museum courier. On the one hand, it takes her around the world. On the other, her plan to become a professor is veering dangerously off track.

Yet once in a while, maybe every third trip or so, the job goes delightfully sideways…

When a blizzard strands Charlotte in Spain for a few extra days and she’s left with glorious free time on her hands, the only question is: Dare she invite her grad school crush for an after-dinner drink on a snowy night?

Accomplished, take-no-prisoners art historian Adrianna Coates has built an enviable career since Charlotte saw her last. She’s brilliant. Sophisticated. Impressive as hell and strikingly beautiful.

Hospitable, too, as she absolutely insists Charlotte spend the night on her pullout sofa as the storm rages on.

One night becomes three and three nights become a hot and adventurous long-distance relationship when Charlotte returns to the States. But when Adrianna plots her next career move just as Charlotte finally opens a door in academia, distance may not be the only thing that keeps them apart.

 

Buy Meet Me in Madrid by Verity Lowell

Harlequin.com  |  Kindle  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Book Depository

The car arrived with the luggage while they were still flirt­ing and deliberating in the kitchen, the cava as yet unpoured. Hearing the buzzer, Adrianna had reluctantly thrown on a robe and slippers and run down the three flights, leaving Charlotte still leaning on the counter to contemplate what came next.

“I’m putting your very nice suitcase in my room,” a breath­less Adrianna said as soon as she closed the apartment door behind her. “It won’t fit in the study.”

It would have fit in the study. But it fit a lot better in the bedroom.

“I’m out here,” Charlotte informed her. She had taken the bottle and glasses and resituated herself on the living room sofa. If it had been in the States, the long, upholstered couch with its plethora of throw pillows would have sat smack-dab in front of a flat-screen TV. This one, by refreshing contrast, faced a wall of tall, arched casement windows looking onto mostly sky and a distant cityscape punctuated by the city’s nu­merous church towers. Today the potted trees and summer furniture on the neighboring balconies were coated with an inch or two of velvety snow.

What sun there had been was already dimming.

Adrianna was surprised, but certainly not disappointed, to find Charlotte curled up at one end of said sofa, glass in hand, taking it all in just as she herself liked to do at sunset.

“It’s beautiful,” Charlotte said. “Doesn’t look like any place else I’ve been.”

“Sure doesn’t.” Adrianna sat down close beside Charlotte. Encouragingly close, she hoped.

Charlotte filled Adrianna’s flute with pale bubbly and raised hers in a wordless toast. Their glasses clinked.

“What are we drinking to?” Adrianna asked.

“Bank closures and oversold hotels?” Charlotte replied with a laugh and a gulp. Her legs were folded under her and as she went to set down her glass, she slipped into Adrianna’s shoul­der, not seeming to mind at all when Adrianna leaned into her and caught her eye.

“If you’d have looked at me like that in school, I’m not sure what I would have done,” Charlotte said.

“I can’t promise I never did,” Adrianna admitted. “Espe­cially there at the end.”

“You were definitely shopping around at one point, as I re­call. Like a freshman for new classes,” Charlotte said. “Least that’s what it looked like from where I stood.”

“I was a train wreck,” Adrianna said solemnly. “My ex cheated on me with someone I cared about and I was worried to death I wouldn’t get a job—and interviewing cross-country practically every week while I finished the last chapter of my diss. Those days seem incomparably easy, yet completely im­possible when I look back. But I fucked things up with a lot of people and I hate thinking about it.”

“Your heart was broken,” Charlotte said, reaching for the cava. She’d stopped looking at Adrianna but her voice conveyed empathy.

Had someone broken Charlotte’s heart? Adrianna wanted badly to know.

“And I did that to others in return,” she said.

“You are indeed a heartbreaker,” Charlotte laughed.

“You’re one to talk,” Adrianna replied. “I can’t believe you weren’t dating your pretty little ass off—or seeing faculty on the sly at least. I don’t think I do believe it.”

“Well, you can believe it or not. I’m not saying I didn’t sleep around some. But grads and faculty were off-limits. Not out of moral approbation. I just knew it would throw me off my game. I don’t mind telling you I had tempting offers from both parties.”

Good thing Adrianna wasn’t one of those former suitors. It was so much better finding her again like this, now that they were both past the stage of perpetual heightened insecurity. Now that there was no history with Charlotte, only possibility.

Neither of them were drunk, just usefully relaxed, their inhibitions disarmed by the alcohol, their focus sharpened by the caffeine.

Adrianna set down her own near-empty glass and turned toward Charlotte.

“Let’s toast to layovers instead.”

“With what?”

“Come here,” Adrianna said, just to see how Charlotte re­acted to being told what to do.

“Make me,” she replied, finishing what was left in her flute and starting to rise.

“Where are you going now?”

“I’m thirsty. Think I’ll get a glass of water…”

“Fuck the water,” Adrianna said. She pulled Charlotte back down to her for a deep, wet kiss that burned deliciously from the sparkling wine in her mouth and on their lips. Charlotte responded with a kind of unrestraint, immediately taking the lead. God did she. Adrianna suddenly seemed to feel her touch everywhere.

It was one of those moments when you don’t realize how much you want something—someone—until she’s within reach. She wasn’t going to lose her second chance.

 

Carina Adores is home to highly romantic contemporary love stories featuring beloved romance tropes, where LGBTQ+ characters find their happily-ever-afters.

 Discover a new Carina Adores book every month!

• The Life Revamp by Kris Ripper (coming November 30)
• If You Love Something by Jayce Ellis (coming December 28)
• D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding by Chencia C. Higgins (coming January 25)
• Sink or Swim by Annabeth Albert (coming February 22)
• Going Public by Hudson Lin (coming March 29)

About Verity Lowell

Verity Lowell is a professor and occasional curator who writes queer of color romance. She likes imagining and describing a world where art, ambition, and history provide the background for diverse and steamy love stories, mostly about women falling hard for women. She and her partner and their cats live in New England and sometimes elsewhere. 

Find Verity Lowell Online

Website  |  Goodreads

Blog Tour Promo Post: Fan Club by Erin Mayer

In this raucous psychological thriller, a disillusioned millennial joins a cliquey fan club, only to discover that the group is bound together by something darker than devotion.

Day after day our narrator searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women's lifestyle website - entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by international pop-star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana's every move.

When a colleague notices her obsession, she’s invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy, candlelit listening parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer to uncovering the sinister secrets that bind them together - while simultaneously losing her grip on reality.

With caustic wit and hypnotic writing, this unsparingly critical thrill ride through millennial life examines all that is wrong in our celebrity-obsessed internet age and how easy it is to lose yourself in it.

BUY LINKS:

Bookshop.org  |  Books-A-Million  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Amazon

Apple Books  |  kobo  |  IndieBound  |  Google Play

I’m outside for a cumulative ten minutes each day before work. Five to walk from my apartment building to the subway, another five to go from the subway to the anemic obelisk that houses my office. I try to breathe as deeply as I can in those minutes, because I never know how long it will be until I take fresh air into my lungs again. Not that the city air is all that fresh, tinged with the sharp stench of old garbage, pollution’s metallic swirl. But it beats the stale oxygen of the office, already filtered through distant respiratory systems. Sometimes, during slow moments at my desk, I inhale and try to imagine those other nostrils and lungs that have already processed this same air. I’m not sure how it works in reality, any knowledge I once had of the intricacies of breathing having been long ago discarded by more useful information, but the image comforts me. Usually, I picture a middle-aged man with greying temples, a fringe of visible nose hair, and a coffee stain on the collar of his baby blue button-down. He looks nothing and everything like my father. An every-father, if you will.

My office is populated by dyed-blonde or pierced brunette women in their mid-to-late twenties and early thirties. The occasional man, just a touch older than most of the women, but still young enough to give off the faint impression that he DJs at Meatpacking nightclubs for extra cash on the weekends.

We are the new corporate Americans, the offspring of the grey-templed men. We wear tastefully ripped jeans and cozy sweaters to the office instead of blazers and trousers. Display a tattoo here and there—our supervisors don’t mind; in fact, they have the most ink. We eat yogurt for breakfast, work through lunch, leave the office at six if we’re lucky, arriving home with just enough time to order dinner from an app and watch two or three hours of Netflix before collapsing into bed from exhaustion we haven’t earned. Exhaustion that lives in the brain, not the body, and cannot be relieved by a mere eight hours of sleep.

Nobody understands exactly what it is we do here, and neither do we. I push through revolving glass door, run my wallet over the card reader, which beeps as my ID scans through the stiff leather, and half-wave in the direction of the uniformed security guard behind the desk, whose face my eyes never quite reach so I can’t tell you what he looks like. He’s just one of the many set-pieces staging the scene of my days.

The elevator ride to the eleventh floor is long enough to skim one-third of a longform article on my phone. I barely register what it’s about, something loosely political, or who is standing next to me in the cramped elevator.

When the doors slide open on eleven, we both get off.

…

In the dim eleventh-floor lobby, a humming neon light shaping the company logo assaults my sleep-swollen eyes like the prick of a dozen tiny needles. Today, a small section has burned out, creating a skip in the letter w. Below the logo is a tufted cerulean velvet couch where guests wait to be welcomed. To the left there’s a mirrored wall reflecting the vestibule; people sometimes pause there to take photos on the way to and from the office, usually on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend. I see the photos later while scrolling through my various feeds at home in bed. They hit me one after another like shots of tequila: See ya Tuesday! *margarita emoji* Peace out for the long weekend! *palm tree emoji* Byeeeeee! *peace sign emoji.*

She steps in front of me, my elevator companion. Black Rag & Bone ankle boots gleaming, blade-tipped pixie cut grazing her ears. Her neck piercing taunts me, those winking silver balls on either side of her spine. She’s Lexi O’ Connell, the website’s senior editor. She walks ahead with her head angled down, thumb working her phone’s keyboard, and doesn’t look up as she shoves the interior door open, palm to the glass.

I trip over the back of one clunky winter boot with the other as I speed up, considering whether to call out for her attention. It’s what a good web producer, one who is eager to move on from the endless drudgery of copy-pasting and resizing and into the slightly more thrilling drudgery of writing and rewriting, would do.

By the time I regain my footing, I come face-to-face with the smear of her handprint as the door glides shut in front of me.

Monday.

…

I work at a website.

It’s like most other websites; we publish content, mostly articles: news stories, essays, interviews, glossed over with the polished opalescent sheen of commercialized feminism. The occasional quiz, video, or photoshoot rounds out our offerings. This is how websites work in the age of ad revenue: Each provides a slightly varied selection of mindless entertainment, news updates, and watered-down hot takes about everything from climate change to plus size fashion, hawking their wares on the digital marketplace, leaving The Reader to wander drunkenly through the bazaar, wielding her cursor like an Amex. You can find everything you’d want to read in one place online, dozens of times over. The algorithms have erased choice. Search engines and social media platforms, they know what you want before you do.

As a web producer, my job is to input article text into the website’s proprietary content management system, or CMS. I’m a digitized high school janitor; I clean up the small messes, the litter that misses the rim of the garbage can. I make sure the links are working and the images are high resolution. When anything bigger comes up, it goes to an editor or IT. I’m an expert in nothing, a master of the miniscule fixes.

There are five of us who produce for the entire website, each handling about 20 articles a day. We sit at a long grey table on display at the very center of the open office, surrounded on all sides by editors and writers.

The web producers’ bullpen, Lexi calls it.

The light fixture above the table buzzes loudly like a nest of bees is trapped inside the fluorescent tubing. I drop my bag on the floor and take a seat, shedding my coat like a layer of skin. My chair faces the beauty editor’s desk, the cruelest seat in the house. All day long, I watch Charlotte Miller receive package after package stuffed with pastel tissue paper. Inside those packages: lipstick, foundation, perfume, happiness. A thousand simulacrums of Christmas morning spread across the two-hundred and sixty-one workdays of the year. She has piled the trappings of Brooklyn hipsterdom on top of her blonde, big-toothed, prettiness. Wire-frame glasses, a tattoo of a constellation on her inner left forearm, a rose gold nose ring. She seems Texan, but she’s actually from some wholesome upper Midwestern state, I can never remember which one. Right now, she applies red lipstick from a warm golden tube in the flat gleam of the golden mirror next to her monitor. Everything about her is color-coordinated.

I open my laptop. The screen blinks twice and prompts me for my password. I type it in, and the CMS appears, open to where I left it when I signed off the previous evening. Our CMS is called LIZZIE. There’s a rumor that it was named after Lizzie Borden, christened during the pre-launch party when the tech team pounded too many shots after they finished coding. As in, “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks.” Lizzie Borden rebranded in the 21st century as a symbol of righteous feminine anger. LIZZIE, my best friend, my closest confidant. She’s an equally comforting and infuriating presence, constant in her bland attention. She gazes at me, always emotionless, saying nothing as she watches me teeter on the edge, fighting tears or trying not to doze at my desk or simply staring, in search of answers she cannot provide.

My eyes droop in their sockets as I scan the articles that were submitted before I arrived this morning. The whites threaten to turn liquid and splash onto my keyboard, pool between the keys and jiggle like eggs minus the yolks. Thinking of this causes a tiny laugh to slip out from between my clenched lips. Charlotte slides the cap onto her lipstick, glares at me over the lip of the mirror.

“Morning.”

That’s Tom, the only male web producer, who sits across and slightly left of me, keeping my view of Charlotte’s towering wonderland of boxes and bags clear. He’s four years older than me, twenty-eight, but the plush chipmunk curve of his cheeks makes him appear much younger, like he’s about to graduate high school. He’s cute, though, in the way of a movie star who always gets cast as the geek in teen comedies. Definitely hot but dress him down in an argyle sweater and glasses and he could be a Hollywood nerd. I’ve always wanted to ask him why he works here, doing this. There isn’t really a web producer archetype. We’re all different, a true island of misfit toys.

But if there is a type, Tom doesn’t fit it. He seems smart and driven. He’s consistently the only person who attends company book club meetings having read that month’s selection from cover to cover. I’ve never asked him why he works here because we don’t talk much. No one in our office talks much. Not out loud, anyway. We communicate through a private Morse code, fingers dancing on keys, expressions scanned and evaluated from a distance.

Sometimes I think about flirting with Tom, for something to do, but he wears a wedding ring. Not that I care about his wife; it’s more the fear of rebuff and rejection, of hearing the low-voiced Sorry, I’m married, that stops me. He usually sails in a few minutes after I do, smelling like his bodega coffee and the egg sandwich he carefully unwraps and eats at his desk. He nods in my direction. Morning is the only word we’ve exchanged the entire time I’ve worked here, which is coming up on a year in January. It’s not even a greeting, merely a statement of fact. It is morning and we’re both here. Again.

Three hundred and sixty-five days lost to the hum and twitch and click. I can’t seem to remember how I got here. It all feels like a dream. The mundane kind, full of banal details, but something slightly off about it all. I don’t remember applying for the job, or interviewing. One day, an offer letter appeared in my inbox and I signed.

And here I am. Day after day, I wait for someone to need me. I open articles. I tweak the formatting, check the links, correct the occasional typo that catches my eye. It isn’t really my job to copy edit, or even to read closely, but sometimes I notice things, grammatical errors or awkward phrasing, and I then can’t not notice them; I have to put them right or else they nag like a papercut on the soft webbing connecting two fingers. The brain wants to be useful. It craves activity, even after almost three hundred and sixty-five days of operating at its lowest frequency.

I open emails. I download attachments. I insert numbers into spreadsheets. I email those spreadsheets to Lexi and my direct boss, Ashley, who manages the homepage.

None of it ever seems to add up to anything.



Excerpted from Fan Club by Erin Mayer, Copyright © 2021 by Erin Mayer. Published by MIRA Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Erin Mayer is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Man Repeller, Literary Hub, and others. She was previously an associate fashion and beauty editor at Bustle.com.

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website  |  Twitter  |  Instagram  |  Goodreads

ARC Book Review: The Lady Gets Lucky by Joanna Shupe

Following The Heiress Hunt, beloved author Joanna Shupe continues her new Fifth Avenue Rebels series with a scandalous romance about a good girl desperate to rebel and the rebel desperate to corrupt her.

A first-rate scoundrel.

A desperate wallflower.

Lessons in seduction.

The woman no one notices . . .

Shy heiress Alice Lusk is tired of being overlooked by every bachelor. Something has to change, else she’ll be forced to marry a man whose only desire is her fortune. She needs to become a siren, a woman who causes a man’s blood to run hot . . .and she’s just met the perfect rogue to help teach her.

He’s the life of every party . . .

Christopher “Kit” Ward plans to open a not-so-reputable supper club in New York City, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to hire the best chef in the city to guarantee its success. Even if it requires giving carnal lessons to a serious-minded spinster who has an in with the chef.

Their bedroom instruction grows passionate, and Alice is a much better pupil than Kit had ever anticipated. When the Society gentlemen start to take notice, Kit has to try to win Alice in other ways . . . but is he too late to win her heart?

Pre-Order/Buy Links

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NOTE: An ARC copy was given to me in exchange for an honest review. 

It's been a while since I have read historical romance. For the longest time, I read nothing but historical romances. Then I got burnout and lost interest in reading historical romance. I still loved reading, but I needed a break from historical romances. During outings to Barnes and Noble, I would see Joanna Shupe's name, but due to said burnout, I wasn't interested in picking up her books. Boy was missing out. I absolutely loved the first book, The Heiress Hunt. The Male Lead (ML) of the sequel The Lady Gets Lucky is a character that was introduced in book one. Enter, Christopher “Kit” Ward. Kit has a reputation as a ladies' man, while our Female Lead (FL) Alice Lusk is a rich and shy wallflower. Alice is tired of being passed over and decides to proposition Kit to become her seduction teacher. Alice's motivations are very much fueled by her desire for freedom away from her overbearing mother. Alice wants a spouse who wants her as a person and not used as a personal piggy bank. Despite his reputation, Kit was hesitant to Alice's proposal, but when he needs the recipes of a famous chef that only Alice has knowledge of, a deal is struck. With this premise, you just know the two main leads would eventually fall in love with each other. A bit predictable, but an enjoyable story all the same. 

4 swoon-worthy stars

About the Author

Photo by Kathryn Huang Photography

USA Today Bestselling author JOANNA SHUPE has always loved history, ever since she saw her first Schoolhouse Rock cartoon. Since 2015, her books have appeared on numerous yearly “best of” lists, including Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Kobo, and BookPage.

She currently lives in New Jersey with her two spirited daughters and dashing husband.

When she’s not writing or doing laundry, she can be found on Facebook or Instagram.

Joanna is represented by Laura Bradford of the Bradford Literary Agency.

HTP Fall Blog Tour (Inkyard Press/YA Edition) Promo Post: Lies My Memory Told Me by Sacha Wunsch

From the thrilling voice of Sacha Wunsch comes a heart-stopping psychological mystery in a world where memories can be shared—but maybe not trusted.

Enhanced Memory changed everything. By sharing someone else’s memory, you can experience anything and everything with no risk at all: learn any skill instantly, travel the world from home, and safeguard all your most treasured secrets forever. Nova’s parents invented this technology, and it’s slowly taking over their lives. That’s where Nova comes in. She can pick up the slack for them—and she doesn’t mind. She knows Enhanced Memory is a gift, and its value outweighs its costs.

But Kade says Nova doesn’t even know the costs. Kade runs a secret vlog cataloging real experiences, is always on the move, and he’s strangely afraid of Nova—even though she feels more comfortable with him than she ever has with anyone. Suddenly there are things Nova can’t stop noticing: the way her parents don’t meet her eyes anymore, the questions no one wants her to ask, and the relentless feeling like there’s something she’s forgotten.

But there’s danger around every corner, and her own home might be the most dangerous place of all.

BUY LINKS:

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Prologue


The platform was a hundred and fifty feet up.

I tried not to look down.

I hadn’t even known I was afraid of heights until the moment I stood up there.

The stranger came up to me, grinning. “You’re going to love it,” he said.

I swallowed.

My entire body was sweating, most notably my palms, slipping as I tried to grip the safety harness.

Was I really going to do this?

No. I was going to get unclipped, turn around, and simply climb back down what felt like the millions of stairs stretching below me.

And then, just as I started to turn, someone pushed me off the platform.

I screamed as I dropped, nothing but air beneath me.

And then… I started to glide.

The scream kept coming a few seconds more, but my heart did a flip before it could reach my mind. I was soaring. Over the treetops. Whizzing along the zip line at high speeds. It was the best thing I had ever felt.

I had never been this free. Which made sense, I was essentially flying, after all.

Giggling was very much not in my nature, but there I was, giggling anyway. I closed my eyes to get a better sense of the wind on my face, but when the sweet scent of fresh-blooming flowers greeted me, I opened them again. Sure enough, the trees several yards below my feet were blooming some kind of large purple flower.

I sucked in a breath, wishing I could inhale the whole scene, wanting to appreciate it as much as I could—savor it—know­ing it wouldn’t last forever, and landed gently on the other side.

I did not have to be pushed off the second platform—barely able to wait my turn to jump again. I soared from platform to platform, wishing nothing more than for this to go on for­ever, grinning all the way, and realizing only at the last sec­ond that the final landing platform wasn’t a platform at all, but a deep, cooling pool.

I sucked in a breath, and with a final burst of adrenaline, I splashed into the crystal-clear water.



TWENTY MINUTES EARLIER



“Come on, open it,” Mom said, her smiling beaming.

I held the small, beautifully wrapped box, unable to imag­ine what it was. My parents knew I wasn’t really that into jewelry, and neither were they really, but what else could be in such a small box?

I tore into it and flipped the lid open.

Which confused me even more. It wasn’t a ring or a pen­dant, just a small metal disk.

Dad sensed my confusion. “Give it a second,” he said, beaming even brighter than Mom.

In a blink, a form emerged, a hologram above the disk. There was no sound, but it looked like the person in the ho­logram was gliding through the tops of trees high in the air.

“This is…really cool,” I said, and meant it, but couldn’t help but feel like I was missing something.

Mom was practically bouncing on the couch. “We wanted to do something special for your birthday.”

“Thank you” was all I could really think to say. The disk was pretty cool, but what the hell was with their enthusiasm?

“You’re welcome Nova,” Dad said. “But this isn’t the whole thing. It’s the experience of it that’s the real gift.”

“The experience of it?”

Mom had gotten up and gone to the desk by the front door. She picked up another box, this one unwrapped, and pulled something from inside.

“Here, you put this on,” she said, handing me a clunky set of headphones plugged into a small handheld device about the size of a phone.

“The disk goes in there,” Dad said, and showed me how to open it, setting my new present inside.

And then I experienced my first ever zip line.

As the experience ended, I blinked my eyes open, a hun­dred percent sure I’d be soaking wet, but I was sitting right back in my living room. The sensation was a bit disorienting, but my parents were staring at me like they were about to explode.

“What was that?” I asked, grabbing the hem of my shirt, which I couldn’t quite comprehend being dry.

“That was Enhanced Memory,” Dad said, but the look on his face said so much more—like if he’d had feathers, they’d be plumaged out like the most badass peacock of the bunch.

“What did you think?” Mom asked, clasping her hands like she had so much energy whizzing through her body she had to do something to hold it in.

“Well obviously it was amazing, but by the way you two are acting, you already know that.” I couldn’t help but grin. They were just so cute sitting there all proud of themselves. “But seriously, what is this? What is Enhanced Memory?”

I’d seen 3D movies and had even tried virtual reality once, but this was way beyond either of those. This was next level.

“It’s simple,” Dad said. “The headphones are equipped with dozens of…well, let’s call them electrodes for sake of ease, though really, they’re more advanced than that.”

“Okay,” I said, mostly with him still, although knowing Dad it wouldn’t be long until the science-y droning took hold and steered him right off the layman’s term trail.

“And these,” he said, taking the disk out of the machine and holding it up, “are Memories.”

“Memories.”

Mom nodded. “We discovered a way to extract memories and reproduce them.”

“Wait, you guys created this?”

Mom nodded, her smile huge and eyes wide. “This is what we’ve been working toward all these years.”

My mouth dropped open. I knew my parents had been working on some kind of project for a long time, but I guess I hadn’t really been that interested in what it was.

Mom laughed at my stunned expression while Dad came over to give me one of his signature kisses on the top of my head.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” Mom said, beaming.

I mean, they were scientists and science was basically the last thing I wanted to pay attention to, so I never really asked many questions.

But this was way beyond science. This was…actually kind of awesome.

A smile crept across my face. I couldn’t wait to try it again.



Excerpted from Lies My Memory Told Me by Sacha Wunsch, Copyright © 2021 by Sacha Wunsch. Published by Inkyard Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Photo Credit: Tammy Zdunich

Sacha Wunsch grew up dividing her time between the family farm in Canada and traveling to numerous fictional worlds. She was a bookseller before discovering her love of writing mind-twisty novels - which has proved an excellent job since she gets to blame all the TV she watches on her love of storytelling. She now splits her time between the city and the lake, and still travels to made-up worlds as often as she can.

SOCIAL LINKS:

Website  |  Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Instagram  |  Goodreads

Author website: https://sachawunsch.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sachawunsch

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sachawunsch/



Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55920773-lies-my-memory-told-me?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=yWdh9NEb7s&rank=1

Promo Post: Celebration at Christmas Cove by Carrie Jansen

Acclaimed writer Carrie Jansen excels at delivering sweet and gentle romances that are sure to charm readers and make them believe in the healing power of love. This fall, Jansen makes her Berkley debut with the first installment of the Sea Spray Island Romance series. Celebration at Christmas Cove tells a heartwarming story of a grieving woman who can't wait to leave a wintry New England island and a widower who would do anything to stay. 

Travel magazine writer Celeste Bell is in a terrible mood. Not only was her flight to the Caribbean diverted to a Massachusetts island, now it looks like she’ll have to spend Christmas there. Single and still mourning the loss of her mother a year earlier, Celeste is desperate to avoid any emotional entanglements and all holiday festivities. She just doesn’t feel like celebrating.

But that’s exactly what community center executive director Nathan White and his young daughter, Abigail, want to do. Nathan is entirely focused on making sure that his daughter has a happy Christmas, especially with the knowledge that if he can’t raise money for the community center soon, it will close and they’ll have to leave the island. When he meets Celeste, Nathan begins to feel a connection and wonders if he’s brave enough to risk his heart once more.

Thawing their frozen hearts and saving the community center will require a Christmas miracle. But tis the season…

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Monday—December 19

“You’re bumping me?” As a writer for an elite travel magazine, Celeste Bell had virtually flown around the world over the course of the past seven years and she’d never been bumped from a flight. She knew it was bound to happen sooner or later; she just didn’t want it happening now.

“We paged you three times, but since you weren’t at the gate for initial boarding, we assigned the seat to another passenger,” the agent explained.

Celeste wasn’t at the gate because she’d had to bring her luggage to the ticket counter after changing out of the ugly sweater she’d worn to her office holiday party earlier that day. This season, she’d been avoiding Christmas festivities like the flu, but since participation was mandatory, she reluctantly donned the most hideous apparel she could find: a fluffy, white sweater with a cartoonish fir tree emblazoned across the front. The tree was crowned with a blinking LED-powered star, and a dozen miniature, multicolored sleigh bells were strung from its boughs with silver tinsel. The sweater bore an uncanny resemblance to a yuletide craft Celeste had made in first grade from a paper plate, cotton balls, glitter and various geometric shapes cut from red, green and yellow felt. Oh, the things she did for the sake of her career.

“I get it. Symbolism,” Brad, the college intern, remarked. Holding a plastic cup of eggnog in one hand and a chocolate mint brownie in the other, he gestured toward her midsection with his chin. “You chose that sweater because your last name’s Bell, right?”

The bells were actually Celeste’s least favorite part of the sweater, which was saying a lot. Whenever she walked from her cubicle to her boss’s office or to the break room and back again, their jingling made her feel like a Clydesdale horse—it didn’t help that she’d gathered her long, thick blond hair into a high ponytail—and drew increasingly annoyed looks from her coworkers over the course of the day.

She intended to switch wardrobes before a colleague drove her to Logan International Airport, but at the last minute, the magazine’s editor in chief, Philip Carrington, tasked Celeste with proofreading Brad’s post about the Boston Harbor Holiday Cruise. And by proofreading Philip meant rewriting. Brad’s draft was so poorly structured, it took Celeste half an hour to reword it, and by that time her coworker was threatening to leave without her.

When she arrived at the airport, Celeste wheeled her luggage into the restroom so she could change. She removed her heavy winter coat, scarf and gloves, and she stuffed them into her suitcase, along with her socks and shoes. Then, she opened her smaller carry-on and checked to make sure she had a travel blanket with her before adroitly exchanging her slacks and ugly sweater for a casual slate-blue swing dress and crochet cardigan. Finally, she slid her feet into a pair of canvas sneakers. Celeste intended to be ready for the tropical Caribbean temps the moment she stepped off the plane.

But first she’d have to step onto the plane.

“Are you sure there aren’t any seats left?” It was an inane question, and Celeste could hear the whine of desperation in her own voice.

“I can book you on the eleven-thirty-six flight tomorrow morning. Of course, we’ll compensate you for the inconvenience, as well.”

Tomorrow was December 20. Technically, Celeste didn’t need to be in the Caribbean until first light on December 23. That’s when the Christmas carnival—or simply carnival, as it was called—for the particular island she was visiting kicked off a daybreak street party known as j’ouvert. The trip was a mix of business and pleasure; after taking a couple days to enjoy a much-needed break, Celeste would spend December 23, 24 and 25 attending carnival and describing its highlights in a Christmas Day post on the magazine’s blog. That meant if she didn’t leave Boston until almost noon tomorrow, she’d squander nearly a full day of vacation. Even so, Celeste cared less about that than she did about the weather forecast, which warned that a nor’easter was brewing. If it followed its projected course, the storm could pack a wallop in terms of snow accumulation, and who knew how that might affect air travel for the next few days. She couldn’t risk it.

“Would you check for flights on other airlines, please?”

The agent’s fingernails clicked against the keyboard, her expression impassive. After what felt like an eon, she said, “If we hurry, I can book a seat for you on a flight with our partner airline, IslandSky. There would be a brief layover on Sea Spray Island—”

“I’ll take it,” Celeste said as the woman continued to speak.

“—then you’d continue to New York City and from there you’d fly nonstop—”

“Yes, thank you, that’s what I want to do.” Celeste didn’t care about the small print, she just needed to get on that flight.

A few more minutes of keyboard clicking and then Celeste was off and running, dodging fellow travelers and circumventing airport vendors as she darted toward Terminal C with her carry-on bag in tow, the sweater inside it jingling all the way. As she ran, she recognized it wasn’t really the need for an extra day of relaxation that spurred her on. Nor was it solely that she’d made a professional commitment to cover the carnival. No, what really urged Celeste forward was the fear that if she didn’t leave now, right now, it would be too late and then there’d be no escaping for Christmas.

And escaping was her primary purpose in volunteering to immerse herself in a Caribbean carnival while all of her coworkers were celebrating Christmas with their families. From the rollicking parades and music, to the lively dancing, vibrant costumes and mouthwatering food, the carnival wasn’t likely to evoke memories of the calm and cozy but joyful Christmases that Celeste used to celebrate. On the contrary, going to the Caribbean would keep her from thinking about how it had been just over a year since her mother passed away. And it would take her mind off the fact that she was still lonely. Still alone.

Just thinking about not thinking about it made her lungs contract.

Or maybe it was the exertion of tearing through an overly dry, hot and crowded airport trailing an unwieldy piece of luggage in her wake. As fit as she was, by the time Celeste arrived at her gate she was gasping. Light-headed, she hardly registered that the descending ramp the agent directed her to follow led outside to ground level where the plane awaited her on the tarmac.

Celeste skidded to a standstill. The realization hit her like a gelid gust of air: it’s a prop plane. When it came to prop planes or Christmas festivities, it was almost a toss-up as to which distressed her more. Almost but not quite. Pressing her dress flat against her legs so it wouldn’t fly up in the wind, Celeste numbly soldiered forward, the end of her ponytail lashing sideways at her face.

She climbed the four ladder-like steps and entered the dimly lit interior where a flight attendant—or was he the copilot?—reached to take her carry-on for stowing while simultaneously issuing safety instructions. Overcome with either regret or relief, Celeste plunked herself into the seat closest to the door, fastened the buckle around her waist and closed her eyes. She was finally on her way.

From CELEBRATION AT CHRISTMAS COVE published by arrangement with Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Carrie Jansen.

 About the Author

Carrie Jansen earned an MFA in creative writing and published many poems and short stories before becoming a novelist. An avid bodyboarder and beach walker, she spends as much of the year as she can on Cape Cod, where she draws inspiration for her contemporary romances. She also writes Amish romance novels under her pseudonym, Carrie Lighte. Learn more online at carriejansen.com.