Monday, April 30, 2018

Dangerous Women: Stories of Crime, Mystery and Mayhem By Robb T. White

Dangerous Women:  
Stories of Crime, Mystery and Mayhem
By Robb T. White

Interview with  Robb T. White:

Crystal: Today I have the pleasure of hosting Robb T. White. Welcome Robb, I'm so excited to have you here today. Would you share a little bit about yourself with us today?

Robb: I’ll begin by saying the odometer on my 5-year-old Wrangler has exactly 5,884 miles on it, which proves I’m on a sliding scale between a stick-at-home and a full-time recluse. I grew up and still live in a small town on Ohio’s eastern end of Lake Erie—overlooking the lake, although I rarely go down there anymore unless my wife drags me along to hunt for beach glass. I’m usually found in my backyard in the hammock with a book as a prop to excuse dozing off. I’m married, retired, with three grown children, three grandchildren, and two cats.

Crystal: Do you have a favorite scene you would like to share with us?

Robb: I tried to end all the stories with a bit of poetic justice or a measure of irony apart from the two novellas that begin and end the collection. I favor the “comeuppance” ending; as it’s been around since the Middle Ages, I’m confident readers do, too. My favorite comes from “Black Sheep in a White Collar” in which the narrator—a smug, hardnosed contract killer—meets his fate in a horrific way, thanks to the woman he’d contracted with to kill her husband. He thinks she’s a petite, airheaded trophy wife who will crack like an egg under police interrogation (SPOILER ALERT). Instead, she’s worried he’ll break, so she beats him to the punch when he shows up at her house to kill her. I tossed out any notion of realism in the finale to have the narrator describe his own demise, but I enjoyed this two-paragraph conclusion too much to change it:

“He fell and landed hard at the bottom. It was a grave. His grave. He felt the first shovelful of dirt land. Then the second one, followed by a third and then a steady, rhythmic thunk, pause, thunk, pause—until his broken mouth was almost covered. He had a few seconds left to try to undo this horror. . .

The only sound, however, that penetrated up to the shoveling women above was a mushy-voweled gargling from the broken hole of his mouth. Above him, growing fainter, more distant as time stretched like taffy until a last shovelful of dirt tossed covered the blood-flecked spittle below.”

Crystal: Where did you come up with the idea for your latest release?

Robb: Nearly every story I write has to do with revenge or betrayal of some kind, so the classifying part by theme was easy. My family often mocks me, calls me Captain Obvious, for missing the obvious. I didn’t realize I had enough stories by and about women to build a collection around that fact. I’d already done a novel centered on a female protagonist before, so the idea wasn’t new—just the fact I’d accumulated enough stories to put a collection together.

Crystal: What are you currently working on?

Robb: I’m proofing a recently completed crime novella based on an incident from my hometown: a small fortune was stashed in an abandoned building by a woman who ran a store in her neighborhood for half-a-century. She didn’t trust banks. The money was hidden behind a refrigerator and discovered by two men. The grown children of the family are demanding its return. I rarely use real stories but this one intrigued me. I lifted from a financial commentator on one of the business channels: Dead Cat Bounce. The cliché has to do with a temporary and false uptick in a stock’s market value—one that isn’t genuine and won’t last. It sounds like anti-PETA activity, which it isn’t, of course, but I really liked the imagery despite the risk of using a cliché for a title.

Crystal: Do you have any special routine that you follow when you are writing?

Robb: I’m strictly an afternoon writer. I while away the morning on my favorite drug: caffeine. I do household chores while my wife snoozes (she won’t read this): dishes, straightening up the rooms, bringing out the trash and recyclables to the garage, and most important: dumping a couple coffee cans of bird feed in the feeder out back. When I’m done putzing around the house and yard, I head upstairs to my laptop.

Crystal: Did you have to do a lot of research for this book or any other? If so, do you have a fascinating fact that you have learned you would like to share with us?

Robb: I’m ashamed to admit my novels require little or no research. Anything I don’t know, or can discover in a book on hand, I google, pack my brain with temporary facts about the subject, and then fold this brand-new information into my narrative—before all those facts tumble out of my ears. I’m a fake for doing it this way, but the internet, for all my ambivalence about it, regarding social media, works. It just flat-out works. You can gain knowledge on any subject instantly, and as long as you’re intellectually capable of sifting the wheat from the chaff, any writer should be able to use it with—drum roll, big word coming, ahem—verisimilitude without blemishing the style or the upending the plot. As a writer of noir and hardboiled fiction, I worry that the everyday factual details of law enforcement, such as their use of databases and forensics technology, will go wrong and expose my ignorance—and indeed I’m sure that’s been the case somewhere back along the path of my publications to the present. I’d be arrogant to assume any expert could not find flaws. But I don’t strive to incorporate much technical detail because any reader who clamors to hear about short tandem repeat polymorphisms isn’t going to be reading me anyhow.

Fascinating fact: Never having walked into a nail spa in my life, I did research on what goes on inside besides gossip. I discovered that the tight band of skin beneath the nail plate, called the “proximal fold,” seals and protects the nail matrix from bacteria and germs where new cells are created. Some girls, even some manicurists, thinking this is dead skin, will cut it away when it dries out and cracks—big mistake because it leads to infection.

Crystal: Who are some of your favorite authors that you like to read?

Robb: My “big three” crime trio, as ever: Thomas Harris, David Lindsey, and Martin Cruz Smith. All are outstanding writers, crime fiction aside, and stylists of the highest caliber. I read William Styron at fifteen and have never wavered in my admiration for him. One by one, my other literary heroes have dropped away (Camus and he alone left standing). Styron is under-appreciated, has been for decades, and, I believe, is one of America’s great authors. I’m crazy about the elegance of his prose. I would love for a new generation of readers to discover him.

Crystal: Is there a genre you haven't written that you would like to try?

Robb: I’ve dabbled with a horror story now and then. I think of crime fiction as the daytime version of horror and Stephen-King-style fiction as its more flamboyant nighttime counterpart, but the psychology of experiencing horror is not that different when human monsters and evil monsters blend. One genre I’d like to try is science fiction—or, more exactly, fantasy, less the “science.” I remember being engrossed years ago by the steampunk film Perfect Creature that mixes vampires and “nineteenth-century London” on another planet.

Thank you, Crystal.

~*~*~*~*~*~
Blurb:
Weaker sex?  Not hardly!

The female is definitely deadlier than the mail.  Short stories about ladies who can hold their own.



Buy Link:
Class Act Books | Amazon

Excerpt:

Be careful what you wish for, Regina.
Her mother’s words. Sometimes she could hear her mother’s voice in the house.
The Vindicator piece on Bodycomb’s death was two paragraphs.
He was found floating in Lake Milton, a popular summer resort area for fisherman seventeen miles east of Austintown just off the Interstate 80 overpass. Shot by a small-caliber weapon in the back of the head. The important information was in the second paragraph: Bodycomb, it noted, was running a dog-fighting network among three states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia for a loose-knit West Virginia crime family connected to the Pittsburgh LaRizzo family.
Damn you, Leo.
She was blowing through caution lights, ignoring the honking of cars, as she beelined for the office on Market.
Like a script from a cheap thriller, he was there, wearing the same clothes and unshaven, big jowls dark with stubble, pong of body odor in the overheated single room.
“You promised me full disclosure, total honesty,” she said.
She threw the paper across his desk.
“Here it is in case you missed it.”
Be calm, Regina, she told herself. She wasn’t going to lose her temper and a new job in that order.
“I did and I meant it, Baby,” Leo said.
He glanced at the paper sideways and pushed it back to her. He’d obviously read it.
“You asked me—no, you demanded I call somebody. I did,” he said.
He disgusted her with those wagging jowls and big stomach. She noticed his belt was undone and a patch of curly belly hair exposed.
Probably jerking off in here, the freak.
“I suppose you’ll tell me when the mood strikes.”
“I meant the second case—your next case,” Leo said. “Full disclosure, just like you want.”
Her indignation petered out at the prospect. “So tell me about it,” she said.
Bodycomb was moving in on Donnie Bracca’s territory with his dog-fighting, Leo said.
“He can kill all the dogs he wants in West Virginia,” Leo said. “But Donnie B. controls gambling around here.”
“Donnie Bracca was your real client all the time,” Baby said.
“It’s like this, kid. They don’t blow each other up in cars no more. Gentlemen’s agreements, all nice and polite. But rules have to be followed. Bodycomb went rogue.”
She bit back a retort: You mean, like your own father?
Leo went on, waxing large, a hopeless Mafioso lover, although a real mafia man, a made man, could see Leo couldn’t be trusted. But even the Aryan Brotherhood used outside associates to get things done. Leo could be useful if you couldn’t buy a cop or scare off an investigative reporter snooping in shady politics or business deals.
She didn’t feel bad about Bodycomb’s death. After all, she'd wanted to kill the guy herself.
“Damn it, Leo,” she said. “You should have told me this in the beginning.”Baby moved in the direction Bodycomb’s vehicle had taken. After A couple of hundred yards through meadow grass up to her knees, she stopped and listened. Moving on, she dodged stunted bushes that popped up out of nowhere to snag her clothing. The foliage grew less dense. She found the parallel ruts of the Road Runner’s tracks and kept moving, straining her eyes to see light ahead. If Bodycomb was hiding assets from his soon-to-be ex-wife, he was taking a lot of trouble over it.
After five minutes of faster walking in the grooves, she heard barking coming from the right. She saw the first glimmer of light in the distance. The terrain was sparse but small slopes refracted the light source so it appeared and disappeared with every rise of the ground. A single dog barking became two, then three and finally a pack. Beneath their howls, men’s voices.
When she got close enough to make out words, she lay flat on her belly and put the binoculars on a cluster of men beside a ramshackle barn surrounded by cages of dogs in the beds of trucks beside a squared string of light bulbs a dozen feet from the ground. It looked like a crude boxing ring for backyard brawlers.
Its purpose became clear in the next few minutes. It was a dog-fighting pit.

~*~*~*~*~*~
About the Author:
Under the names Terry White, Robert White, and Robb T. White, Robert White is the author of numerous short stories and hardboiled detective novels.  A lifelong reader of crime fiction, he published his first story in Gary Lovisi's Hardboiled magazine. Since then, he has published several dozen crime stories, and a collection of mainstream stories in 2013. An ebook crime novel, won the New Rivers Electronic Book Competition in 2014.  His collection of crime stories featuring woman narrators and female characters is Dangerous Women:  Stories of Crime, Mystery, and Mayhem, published by Class Act Books in 2017.  

White was born, raised, and continues to live in Ashtabula, Ohio.

More about Robb at:

Friday, April 27, 2018

#FreeBook ~ Lies and Solace By Jana Richards ~ @JanaRichards_

 Lies and Solace
Love at Solace Lake Series (Book 1) 
By Jana Richards

Lies and Solace is FREE April 27, 2018 - April 29, 2018 ONLY 

Blurb for Lies and Solace:

She can’t live with one more lie. He can’t tell the truth.
Harper Lindquist is convinced she’s found the answer to her financial prayers. Unless she pours cash into crumbling Solace Lake Lodge, she’ll lose her family’s legacy. Her would-be savior arrives in the middle of a Minnesota blizzard and she’s determined to prove to her reluctant, and trapped, financier the lodge is a sound investment. But Harper isn’t completely honest with him. And she has no idea the lake is hiding secrets of its own.

Ethan James is a liar, but his money is very real. He isn’t convinced a broken-down inn is a smart investment opportunity. But the more he understands Harper’s dreams and desires, the more he wants to be the man to make them come true. The trauma in both their pasts means neither can fully trust the other. They must find the courage to love, to trust, and to accept, or yesterday’s sorrows will keep them apart.

Genre: Contemporary Romance, small town romance
Keywords: contemporary romance, small town romance, mystery, touch of paranormal, murder
ISBN: Ebook ISBN 978-0-9952791-0-0
Length: Novel
Heat Level: Spicy, fully described love scenes
Release Date: March 14, 2018
Cover Artist: Angela Waters

Excerpt, Lies and Solace:
As she stared into his dark eyes she realized how much she trusted him, and relied on him. That was something rare for her. The only people she trusted as much were her sisters.
I’m in love with him.
The thought blasted through her brain with the force of a tsunami. The tension of the last few weeks, the insecurity, the mistrust, the fear, slipped easily from her shoulders. For the first time, her mind was clear. She was in love with Ethan and she didn’t want to wait anymore. She wanted him. She wanted him to be her first, her last.
Finding courage she didn’t know she possessed, Harper slid off the stool and walked around the island. She plucked the wine glass from his hand and set it on the counter, then placed his hand on her breast. “Make love with me, Ethan.”
A fire lit in his eyes, telling her he wanted her, too. But there was a question there, a hesitation. “Are you sure?”
She’d never been more sure of anything in her life. “Yes.”
“Harper—”
“Shhh. Let’s not talk anymore.” She placed one finger over his lips, then stood on her tiptoes and kissed him.
Ethan’s reaction was lightning swift. He wrapped his arms around her and brought her close, his mouth descending on hers in a wild, warm kiss. Their tongues tangled, slid over each other. She’d missed his touch, his taste. She moaned, and in the sound she heard thirty-two years of longing.
For this. For him.

Other Books in the Series: 
Secrets and Solace
Book 2 

Truth and Solace
Book 3 

About Jana Richards: 

When Jana Richards read her first romance novel, she immediately knew two things: she had to commit the stories running through her head to paper, and they had to end with a happily ever after. She also knew she’d found what she was meant to do. Since then she’s never met a romance genre she didn’t like. She writes contemporary romance, romantic suspense, and historical romance set in World War Two, in lengths ranging from short story to full length novel. Just for fun, she throws in generous helpings of humor, and the occasional dash of the paranormal. Her paranormal romantic suspense “Seeing Things” was a 2008 EPPIE finalist.
In her life away from writing, Jana is an accountant/admin assistant, a mother to two grown daughters, and a wife to her husband Warren. She enjoys golf, yoga, movies, concerts, travel and reading, not necessarily in that order. She and her husband live in Winnipeg, Canada with their Pug/Terrier cross Lou and several unnamed goldfish. She loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website at www.janarichards.com

Social Media Links:
Newsletter Signup: http://janarichards.com/contact.html#newsletter


#Interview ~ SNICKETY DICKETY DOO by Danica-Lea Larcombe ~ @pumpupyourbook @danicalea

SNICKETY DICKETY DOO 
by Danica-Lea Larcombe

Q&A with Danica-Lea Larcombe:

Q: How did you come up with the idea to write your book?

A: I was on holiday on my own in Broome, Western Australia. I had left an old life overseas and I was excited about starting a brand new chapter. Sitting at a café overlooking the beach one day I suddenly got inspired to write. I had invented astrological planet characters years before (again while on holiday), drawn them and not done anything with them. I decided to turn them into transportable bubbles and combine them with my extensive travel experiences in over 20 countries. A secret box, a secret password Snickety Dickety Doo, and three children make up the rest of the story outline.

Q: How hard was it to write a book like this and do you have any tips that you could pass on which would make the journey easier for other writers?

A: I have always had an active imagination, and I do think you need this as well as the ability to not worry about what other people might think of your ideas. You also need to dedicate regular time to write so that the ideas are kept fresh in your mind, so much so that you are dreaming of your characters.

Q: Who is your publisher and how did you find them or did you self-publish?
A: I self-published through Blurb.com as I really wanted to get my book series out to the world and I had previously successfully self-published two travel narratives.

Q: What other books are you working on and when will they be published?
A: I am currently working on a PhD thesis on Biodiversity and Human Health, which will be completed in 2019, and then I would love to continue the Snickety Dickety Doo series.

Q: What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?
A: Occasionally a piece of modern technology is thrown in to help the children.

Q: Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?
A: I would like to open children’s eyes to different places in the world, their culture, languages and also to the adventures they can have exploring new places. In addition children learn about the astrological planets, and about getting along with their siblings.

Q: Thank you again for this interview! Do you have any final words?
A: The Snickety Dickety Doo series are books that incorporate imagination, sibling relations and adventurous world social learning experiences.

~*~*~*~*~*~
About the Book: 
George, Fiona and Marni find a tin of bubbles, not just any ordinary bubbles but planets. The planets shrink the children and take them to faraway lands. The children have many exciting adventures and try not to let their secret be discovered.  They learn about different cultures, currencies and languages, and are inspired at school.

In Series Two, George, Marni and Fiona continue their adventures around the world in the planet bubbles. They narrowly escape being killed by some monks in Turkey, find a little companion in Paris and visit royalty in Monaco.

Publisher: Blurb
Pages: 90
Genre: Children’s Fiction
$9.61 (Paperback) 

Excerpt: 
It wasn’t just a small piece of tin.  Curiosity got the better of her and Marni decided she better keep digging around.  She could see the edges now and it looked like it was a tin box of some sort.  Marni suddenly forgot about her wish and dug frantically to get the box out.  It was quite a light box of about medium size.  It was not painted and there was no writing on it. 

“What on earth could be in it?” Marni wondered.
It had a small padlock but this was rusted and broke off easily.  She opened the lid carefully to find nine individually wrapped balls, or so she thought.  She unwrapped one of the balls to find it was not a ball.  In her hand it shone like a bubble, and was soft and tender to touch.  It had little feet and hands and was the colour of the sun.

 “Oh my”, Marni whispered, “It has got a face!” 
The bubble’s eyes were closed and the mouth still.  On the other side it had the shape of a door, but there was no door handle.  How odd.

Marni looked at her watch quickly. It was six o’clock which was tea time and her parents would be calling her any minute.  She hastily re-wrapped the ball and closed the tin.  She put her secret wish down the hole and filled it up with the dark brown coloured soil. 
Somehow Marni made it back inside the house and into her bedroom without anyone seeing the box.  She could not wait to show it to George and Fiona but it would have to wait until after tea.  Her hands and knees were filthy dirty now, and her father questioned her. 

“What have you been doing? You look like a gypsy”. 
“Oh, just helping Fiona in the garden” Marni lied. 
Dinner was always a silent occasion in the Dimond household, and you got your knuckles rapped if you spoke.  Which Fiona did quite often. 

Marni wished tea time would hurry up and finish but she had to wait for the compulsory pudding first.  It would either be apple crumble or apple strudel with ice-cream.  Her mother baked wonderfully, but never seemed to want to try new recipes.  Now they were all allowed to leave the table because everyone had finished but the dishes still had to be dried and put away after her mother had washed them.  It was the height of the summer and daylight savings time meant that sunset would not be until about 8.30pm.

“George, Fiona, come into my room.  I have something to show you” Marni said.  “Quickly then” grumbled George.  “I want to finish my hut”. 
“Ooh what is it?” asked Fiona.  

About the Author: 

Danica-Lea Larcombe has a B.Sc (Environmental Health), a
Grad.Dip in Education and has taken courses in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Photography. She is currently undertaking a thesis in Biodiversity and Human Health, and lives with her Japanese Spitz Bella.
                                                                                       

WEBSITE & SOCIAL LINKS:

WEBSITE | TWITTER | FACEBOOK

 

http://www.pumpupyourbook.com


Thursday, April 26, 2018

#GiveAway ~ Serial Wives by Yvonne Walus ~ @GoddessFish @hotyve

 Serial Wives
by Yvonne Walus
  
Yvonne Walus will be awarding a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Please use the Rafflecopter below to enter. Remember you may increase your chances of winning by visiting the other tour stops. You may find those locations here.  


BLURB: 
Why would a rich girl become a prostitute?
Three years ago Joy refused to sleep with an ex boyfriend. When he committed suicide, her guilt was enormous. To punish herself she opted to serve as a prostitute for three years.

How far would you go to protect your child?
Cora loves her convict husband despite - or because of - his bad boy ways. But now that he's back in her life, she has their daughter to consider. Is a faulty father better than no father at all?

A serial killer…
A serial killer who murders women and displays their bodies dressed in a white sheet with a fencing mask covering the face. Who will be next?

GENRE:   Crime Fiction

Buy Links: 


~*~*~*~*~*~ 
Excerpt:

Zero’s shared office at the police station looked bleaker than usual. Not even nine o’clock and the morning was already too full of coffee and too scant on breakfast. After three hours in bed, Zero had chosen an extra fifteen minutes of snoozing instead of muesli and shower. She was regretting the no-muesli decision.

“So,” Zero said. “I got that list of psycho reasons for wanting to kill prostitutes.”

Kath raised her eyebrows. “Thought you’d get too sucked into the TV to do any work.”

Of course she did.

“Didn’t even switch it on. Used the Internet. According to Dr Google, scenario one is we could be looking at a man who has issues with women as such. He hates women and wants to hurt them, and the prostitute is simply an easy option. We’ll call him Bitter Boy.”

“Right.”

“The second scenario is that he despises prostitutes specifically. The attacks could be his mission to rid the world of women who, in his eyes, are morally unacceptable.”

“The Missionary.” Kath got up, reached for a blue marker and printed the two nicknames on the whiteboard, right below the photos and names of the two victims. Rebecca Mahoney, also known as Raven. Stella Baxter, a.k.a. Sirocco.

Zero wondered if their department would ever get a Smart Board. Unless Smart Boards were so smart they helped the police solve crimes, the official line went, the department would stick to the status quo in technology, thank you very much.



AUTHOR Bio and Links:

You won't believe this, but when I'm not a novelist I'm actually a Doctor of Mathematics. A business and data analyst. A wife and a mother. Most of all though - I am a writer (in several languages) hoping to change the world one book at a time.

My heritage is inter-continental. I was born and raised in Poland. When I was twelve, my family and I emigrated to South Africa. Your teenage years are usually your formative years, so it’s no surprise I consider South Africa my second homeland. For the past twenty years, I’ve lived in New Zealand, and people ‘back home’ tell me I’ve become a real Kiwi.

Crime fiction is my passion. My childhood hero was, predictably, Hercule Poirot. I've changed my mind several times since, and for a time I was totally into Harlan Coben's super-rich super-able Win (Windsor Horne Lockwood), but my current favourite is Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch… I mean, Sherlock Holmes.

My co-ordinates:

Here’s a link to the promo video for my latest book: http://stairwaypress.com/book/serialwives/.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

#GiveAway ~ Restoring His Howl by Megan Slayer ~ @MeganSlayer @GoddessFish


Restoring His Howl
by Megan Slayer

Megan will be awarding a bracelet made by the author and a swag pack to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Please use the Rafflecopter below to enter. Remember you may increase your chances of winning by visiting the other tour stops. You may find those locations here



BLURB:

Opposites can attract, but can they make the love last?

Dillon came to the Sanctuary to hide, but also to heal. He’d been abused and needed a safe place to come into his own. He never expected to find a partner, but love came looking for him. Can he accept what he deserves or will he push away a chance at forever because he feels unlovable?

Cinders knows from the moment he sees Dillon that he wants the wolf shifter for his own. But can a jaguar shifter and a wolf shifter really pair up? He doesn’t know, but he’s banking on the attraction to pay off. What he doesn’t expect is how deep Dillon’s scars run. Is he strong enough to see beyond what’s happened to Dillon and help create a future for them together?

Anything’s possible when the jaguar shifter, a former stripper, and the wolf shifter figure out how to restore his howl.

GENRE: Contemporary Paranormal LGBT Romance


~*~*~*~*~*~*~  
Excerpt:

©Megan Slayer, 2018 – All Rights Reserved

He spotted a black form moving in the grass. He hunched down and studied the animal. A jaguar. He should know the big cat by sight but didn’t know which shifter it was. The more the jaguar moved, the more Dillon watched. He couldn’t help himself. The black feline moved with grace and seemed to be showing off. The jaguar mesmerized Dillon. He’d seen plenty of big cats and knew there were at least two other jaguars on the property. Fifteen lions, four tigers, three jaguars, a bobcat shifter and six humans were currently at the Sanctuary—but he only knew a couple of them.

Something stirred within Dillon. Longing? Desire? A little bit of both? He didn’t think he could be loved because of the damage to his body and soul, but he wanted someone to care for him. To care about him. To see beyond his past and accept him. Was that even possible? Once others learned what he’d done and how often, they’d run the hell away from him and for good reason. He hadn’t been in control of himself, but did that matter? Maybe not, but he wanted a mate, and he had to hope they’d be able to give him a chance.

Mate… He snorted. Another wolf would be the best option, so why was he watching the jaguar? The wolf should be in charge and finding another wolf. Did the wolf crave the jaguar? Maybe. His human side definitely wanted the big cat. Well, no… The human side wanted to meet the human within the jaguar.

Christ. No, he couldn’t meet the shifter. What was he thinking? Not only would he wreck the fantasy, but he’d have to let in the person. Closeness meant the possibility of being hurt or abandoned. Hell, no.

“Aren’t you a pretty boy?”

He froze. He’d forgotten about watching the jaguar the moment he’d gotten wrapped up in his mind. The big cat was nowhere in sight. Shit, shit, shit. He knew the voice, though. Cinders. Of course, the jaguar was the stripper. How had he not figured that out? Because he hadn’t been paying attention. He was now.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~   
AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Megan Slayer, aka Wendi Zwaduk, is a multi-published, award-winning author of more than one-hundred short stories and novels. She’s been writing since 2008 and published since 2009. Her stories range from the contemporary and paranormal to LGBTQ and BDSM themes. No matter what the length, her works are always hot, but with a lot of heart. She enjoys giving her characters a second chance at love, no matter what the form. She’s been the runner up in the Kink Category at Love Romances Café as well as nominated at the LRC for best author, best contemporary, best ménage and best anthology. Her books have made it to the bestseller lists on Amazon.com.

When she’s not writing, Megan spends time with her husband and son as well as three dogs and three cats. She enjoys art, music and racing, but football is her sport of choice. Find out more about Megan and Wendi at: http://wendizwaduk.com/indexMegan.htm
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