I thought learning to fight would help me be stronger.
I never expected someone like Jax to teach me.
Someone who makes me want with just one look.
… This time I’ll fight with everything I have.
I fight.
I teach others to fight.
I have no intention of being in a relationship, the one and done suits me just fine.
Until I met Her.
She wants me to teach her how to fight.
After one look I think she just might be the biggest fight of my life.
The fight for her heart.
Her trust.
A fight I have no intention of losing.
J.M. Black is a twenty-something year old who loves spending time in fictional worlds. An avid reader since she can remember, an obsessed blogger and now a new author. She decided to follow her dreams of being an author instead of waiting for the right time- she created the right time. She has a pit bull fur baby named Chloe that thinks she is a lap dog at 97 lbs., a niece and a nephew she absolutely adores and can most likely be found reading on her kindle, watching TV or trying to get up the energy to hit the gym.
The Duke of Ice, an all-new historical standalone from USA Today bestselling author Darcy Burke, is available NOW!
Title: The Duke of Ice
Author: Darcy Burke
Genre: Historical Romance
Publishing Date: December 26th, 2017
Synopsis:
Everyone Nicholas Bateman ever loved has died. Except Violet Caulfield, which must mean he never loved her. Eight years after she threw him over to marry a viscount, Nick is a widowed duke who prefers isolation. When a friend convinces him to leave his lair of self-imposed solitude, he considers taking another wife, provided she agrees to his terms: no emotional attachment of any kind.
Now widowed, Lady Violet Pendleton hopes for a second chance with the man she’s always loved. But she isn’t prepared for the desolation in his soul or the animosity he still bears toward her. Despite those obstacles, it’s clear their passion hasn’t dimmed. However, the heat between them isn’t enough to melt the Duke of Ice, and this time Violet may find herself the jilted party. Can love, once so tragically lost, finally be found?
Excerpt:
“Looks like it’s you and Lady Pendleton,” Simon said. His voice carried a hint of something.
Nick snapped his head toward his friend and detected the glimmer of a smile in his gaze. He was enjoying this. He was playing matchmaker. And he had his sights set on Nick and Violet. Bloody hell.
Nick wanted to be angry, but his pull toward Violet was too strong. He’d felt it last night and again today when Simon had asked if it would be odd for him to pursue her. Nick had been jealous. Shockingly, blood-boilingly, desperately jealous.
The realization shook him to the core.
“Who’s to be the crier?” Simon asked.
“Why not Mr. Adair since he won Kiss the Nun?” Seaver suggested.
With everyone in agreement, Violet and Nick moved to the center of the room.
“Is this awkward?” she whispered.
“No.” His pulse quickened. Should he kiss her or should he fail?
His mind screamed the latter. And really, that was for the best. Jealousy aside, he and Violet had no future, not when their past was so painful.
And yet when they knelt with their backs to each other, he caught her scent of rose and an earthy spice. It was wholly feminine yet slightly wild. He hadn’t smelled a rose in the past eight years without thinking of her. His body reacted, heating at her proximity.
“Make ready,” Adair said.
Nick looked over his right shoulder and felt the air move as she looked over her left.
“Present.”
Nick leaned close to her cheek. He could feel her warmth, and his skin tingled.
“Fire.”
He moved closer, but she sprang up. Instinctively, he reached for her, his arm curling about her waist. He pulled her back down. To stop her from hitting the floor, he spun to his back and sprawled, bringing her down on top of him. He cupped the side of her face and kissed her, his lips sliding over hers for a brief but delicious moment.
“The cheek,” she murmured, her gaze locked with his.
He leaned up and brushed his mouth against the soft flesh of her cheek. His lips lingered perhaps a second too long, but he didn’t care. Desire coursed through him, and for the first time in years, he felt alive.
Darcy Burke is the USA Today Bestselling Author of sexy, emotional historical and contemporary romance. Darcy wrote her first book at age 11, a happily ever after about a swan addicted to magic and the female swan who loved him, with exceedingly poor illustrations. Join her reader club at http://www.darcyburke.com/readerclub. A native Oregonian, Darcy lives on the edge of wine country with her guitar-strumming husband, their two hilarious kids who seem to have inherited the writing gene, two Bengal cats and a third cat named after a fruit.
Infused with the rhythms of life in modern-day India, acclaimed author Sonali Dev’s candid, rewarding novel beautifully evokes all the complexities of the human heart in A DISTANT HEART. “Searingly asks its characters what they’re willing to do for the people they love… explores family dynamics, class issues, and many layers of guilt, hope, and determination in ways that are both distinctly Indian and universally luminous. Another beautiful, breathtaking novel from a not-to-be-missed author.” – Kirkus, STARRED Review
Add A DISTANT HEART to your TBR pile on Goodreads! Then keep reading to get an EXCLUSIVE first look and enter the giveaway for a prize pack from Sonali that includes a $50 Amazon gift card and print copies of A Bollywood Affair and A Change of Heart!
Title: A Distant Heart
Author: Sonali Dev
Genre: Romantic Women’s Fictoin
Release Date: December 26, 2017
Publisher: Kensington
Page Count: 100k
Print ISBN:978-1496705761
Digital ISBN: B06XZR97YK
#Ownvoices #Bollywood #WeNeedDiverseBooks
Synopsis:
Her name means “miracle” in Sanskrit, and to her parents, that’s exactly what Kimaya is. The first baby to survive after several miscarriages, Kimi grows up in a mansion at the top of Mumbai’s Pali Hill, surrounded by love and privilege. But at eleven years old, she develops a rare illness that requires her to be confined to a germ-free ivory tower in her home, with only the Arabian Sea churning outside her window for company. . . . Until one person dares venture into her world.
Tasked at fourteen years old with supporting his family, Rahul Savant shows up to wash Kimi’s windows, and an unlikely friendship develops across the plastic curtain of her isolation room. As years pass, Rahul becomes Kimi’s eyes to the outside world–and she becomes his inspiration to better himself by enrolling in the police force. But when a life-saving heart transplant offers the chance of a real future, both must face all that ties them together and keeps them apart.
As Kimi anticipates a new life, Rahul struggles with loving someone he may yet lose. And when his investigation into an organ black market ring run by a sociopathic gang lord exposes dangerous secrets that cut too close to home, only Rahul’s deep, abiding connection with Kimi can keep her safe–and reveal the true meaning of courage, loss, and second chances.
Infused with the rhythms of life in modern-day India, acclaimed author Sonali Dev’s candid, rewarding novel beautifully evokes all the complexities of the human heart.
Freedom was a beautiful thing! Mumbai in all its grimy, gray, pre-monsoon glory flew past Kimi as her auto-rickshaw sped between cars and pedestrians with the zeal of a bastard child born of a Diwali rocket and an immortal god. She almost asked the driver to slow down, but with the wind whipping her ponytail and the driver’s mop of curls in a joint symphony she felt as recklessly brave as the whirring vehicle racing along on its three wheels.
Emblazoned across the dashboard of the rickshaw was the goddess Durga dancing on the corpse of a demon like the evil-hunting badass she was. Bowing to her was Bollywood’s favorite superhero, Krish, with his muscles bulging like fat rubber balls and his hair coiffed high. In a perfect background score to Kimi’s life’s drama, the techno-beat-laden remix of an old Bollywood number drowned out the cacophony of horns the driver left in his wake.
The combination was delicious and exactly worthy of what she had just done. What she was about to do.
Freedom!
You know who else was badass? Kimaya Kirit Patil, that’s who.
There had been one hundred and twelve instances over twelve years when each breath had been a fight and her limbs had turned to mist. She had fought. Not like a warrior, because that would involve the use of said limbs, but like someone drowning, where all you could do is keep the water out of your nose, so it wouldn’t keep the air from your lungs. Breathe out. Breathe out. She had followed those breaths. Grabbed on to those thin wisps of air like lifelines and made herself live one grip at a time.
Then the cure she had waited twelve years for in a sterile room had come. A heart had become available. Surely that meant something. Someone had died, after all, so she might live. Someone with the exact kind of blood and plasma that would let a foreign heart beat within her chest with the confidence of an indegene. Surely that meant she could now have what she never thought she would—all that she had gazed upon from the windows of her room, sealed tight with every technology known to man, so no germ, no pathogen would dare venture into her world, let alone an entire human being. Except Rahul—he had ventured. And then gone on venturing until he was all the way inside.
He’d helped her understand calculus and the nuanced stories of Premchand. He had known how atoms split, why Europe went to war twice within half a century, and the why and when of each invention that transformed the history of civilization. He had touched her, despite promises he’d made. Because it was exactly what she had needed. His gloved hand in hers. He had given her anything she had asked for when everyone else had been too afraid. And she had known that if she lived, if her parents got what they had sealed her in a room twelve years for—a daughter who lived—she would spend the rest of that life taking care of him. The way he had taken care of her.
Except she hadn’t considered the most important part of her plan: him. She had returned from Hong Kong with her new heart and he had looked at her with those dark-tar eyes turned even darker by all that emotion when she ran to him. “You’re running,” he had said, as usual choosing the least words to say the most.
“Yes,” she had said, knowing exactly why every single hard-won breath had been worth it. But then she had told him her grand plan: the two of them living happily ever after.
As always she had asked him for what she wanted. What she hadn’t for one moment considered that he didn’t also want.
He had thanked her for the offer to love him forever, and passed on it.
The person who had kept her from being alone when she was locked up in a room had finally shown her what loneliness was when he walked away from her, leaving her alone in the crowded world she had craved for so long.
No one had the right to that kind of power.
She leaned back into the overstuffed vinyl seat of the speeding auto-rickshaw feeling awfully light.
It only made sense that losing a part of yourself would bring lightness.
No. She wasn’t doing that. She was not going all morose and doing the Tragic Princess shit anymore. That wasn’t her. No matter how people saw her, that was not her. Not anymore.
Actually, it had never been her. Why the hell was she letting herself go down that path now?
She was past the Rahul-induced sadness. Done with it. He’d made his intentions clear. They were no longer—well, they just weren’t anymore. Nothing, anything, they just weren’t.
Plato would ask if the fact that they weren’t anymore meant they had never been. Or was it Aristotle? You know who would know? The one person who she could not, would not, call for a fact check. This wasn’t a Tragic Princess thought, but here it was anyway: She had to stop thinking of life in terms of thoughts she saved up for Rahul like seashells collected on a walk along the beach. It was time.
Praise for A DISTANT HEART:
“Dev crafts another thrilling story filled with intense drama, deep emotion, and well-developed characters; a can’t-put-down book.”—Library Journal, STARREDReview
“Thrilling action sequences and a complex, weighty romance propel this smart, sensitive story. A natural wordsmith, Dev dives into the psyches of disparate characters with voice-driven prose that includes both chilling insights and quirky humor… This poignant, sensual, and exciting tale captures a range of emotions and conflicts.”—Booklist, STARRED Review
“Award-winning Dev returns with another of her emotionally resonating stories that explore, in depth, the intersection of friendship, love, sacrifice and desperation… There is a tremendous richness to this story… A truly captivating tale of friendship and love. Dev always delivers!”—RT Book Reviews, 4.5 Stars, TOP PICK!
Enter the giveaway for a prize pack from Sonali that includes a $50 Amazon gift card and print copies of A Bollywood Affair and A Change of Heart!
Sonali Dev’s first literary work was a play about mistaken identities performed at her neighborhood Diwali extravaganza in Mumbai. She was eight years old. Despite this early success, Sonali spent the next few decades getting degrees in architecture and writing, migrating across the globe, and starting a family while writing for magazines and websites. With the advent of her first gray hair her mad love for telling stories returned full force, and she now combines it with her insights into Indian culture to conjure up stories that make a mad tangle with her life as supermom, domestic goddess, and world traveler.
Sonali lives in the Chicago suburbs with her very patient and often amused husband and two teens who demand both patience and humor, and the world’s most perfect dog.
Sonali’s novels have been on Library Journal, NPR, Washington Post, and Kirkus’s lists of Best Books of the year. She won the American Library Association’s award for best romance 2014, and is a RITA® finalist, RT Reviewer Choice Award Nominee, and winner of the RT Seal of Excellence. She was hailed by NPR.org as a ‘stunning debut’.
New York Times bestselling author Cristin Harber's DELTA COLLECTION Special Edition is on sale for $2.99 for a very limited time! Three DELTA books, plus excerpts of two others for this price - you don't want to miss it!
ABOUT DELTA COLLECTION Special Edition:
The Delta Collection Special Edition boxed set includes three complete, bestselling romantic suspense stories (DELTA: RETRIBUTION, REVENGE, AND REDEMPTION) plus excerpts from DELTA: RESCUE and never seen before DELTA: RICOCHET (releases February 2018).
DELTA: RETRIBUTION
A MAN IS NOTHING WITHOUT HIS TEAM
Trace Reeves was one bad day from a dishonorable discharge. The best the Navy SEALs had to offer, he became a vengeful, angry mess when his twin brother was killed-in-action. Now he's focused on a deadly obsession and unable to cope with the pain and guilt... except one time, in the arms of a one night stand that he'd never see again. She was smart, the sexiest thing he'd ever touched, but she disappeared into the night.
Titan Group was recruiting for their Delta team. They wanted ghosts. No ties. Nothing personal. The best of the best who could live off the grid and surface when commanded. Trace was the perfect recruit. Damaged. Heroic. Nothing to lose.
UNTIL A MISSION--OR A WOMAN--CHANGES EVERYTHING
But when Trace's one-time fling becomes his high-value target during a black ops job, the lines blur between her rescue mission and saving himself.
DELTA: REVENGE
A Tortured Hero with a Heart of Gold
Growing up on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Javier Almeida has only his older sister to protect him. When she's sold to a human-trafficker, he vows to hunt down those responsible.
Years later, Titan Group's Delta team finds him, tattooed and brawling, a vigilante protector with information they want. They take him in and train him, working him harder than a man should be driven, until he's a soldier harboring an obsession. Ready for revenge, Javier ghosts his way across the globe, tracking the men who took his sister and working elite private security jobs.
Meets Sweet and Sassy
Jilted at the altar, Sophia Cole turns the reception into a one-woman party. She's intent on devouring all the cake and champagne, so she can bask in the calories she's been avoiding. In the midst of the revelry, he walks in, the one man she can never ignore.
Javier didn't expect to see Sophia again. He never thought he would even want to see her again. He shouldn't have touched her, but his mind won't stay away from her.
Now, Sophia Cole is thousands of miles away from the safety of her parents' lavish estate and working alongside him in hell. She's a staffer at an Embassy, and he's there to keep them alive. There are bombs and bullets and blood-hungry enemies.
And then she's taken. Gone. Just like his sister. But so much worse.
DELTA: REDEMPTION
"My name's Victoria--No last name. Don't ask."
That was all that the woman would share when Delta team's expert trigger man, an Australian named Ryder, pulled her from the pits of a human trafficking nightmare and took the gun from her hand.
He didn't mean to steal her revenge but survival was the priority. Now that Victoria was home? She had a past he was trying to understand while still keeping a secret from her.
But he's not the only one. When she goes missing, Delta team discovered that Victoria No Name was a one-woman vigilante force, taking on whoever crossed her path, from gunrunners to a drug-pushing motorcycle club.
She was exactly who Ryder thought she might be, and now he was coming in to help--whether she wanted backup or not.
Cristin Harber is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance author. She writes sexy, steamy romantic suspense and military romance. Readers voted her onto Amazon’s Top Picks for Debut Romance Authors in 2013, and her debut Titan series was both a #1 romantic suspense and #1 military romance bestseller.
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this
book for review from Rock Star Lit and the author. I was not
compensated nor was I required to write a positive review. The
opinions I have expressed are my own. I am posting this in
accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides
Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising".
Blurb: When Maddie Carter comes back from the grave, will Hawk have a fresh start with the one who got away?
Deep Six pilot, former Army Nightstalker, Rhett Hawkins, knew the day would come, but he had hoped it wouldn't be until after he was gone. Maddie Carter was destined to die young, because that is just how she lived. She flew by the seat of her pants and flying as all she cared about. He'd learned that the hard way, when he asked her to marry him and she shot him down.
But after her memorial service, Hawk just couldn't get past the feeling that something was wrong with the recounting of the events that led to the crash and her supposed death. Neither the helo or her body had been found. It drove him insane until he decided to do some investigation of his own. After getting conflicting stories from two surviving special operators, he knew he had to go the full distance to settle his mind.
Once in Central America, Hawk realizes there is much more going on than the Army knows. Not only is the now blacked-out military helicopter back in service, Maddie is behind the stick making drug runs for a brutal cartel.
When he has to convince her she needs to be rescued, Hawk sees she is not the same. Captain Maddie Carter is scarred, hardened and has no memory of him or her former life at all.
Back home, when her memory starts to return and secrets are revealed, could it mean he'd only rescued her to lose her again? Would those secrets change his own life forever too?
Madeline “Maddie” Carter wants to impress her father. Rhett Hawkins has feelings of regret and
loss. Theirs is one of the toughest and
thankless jobs there is. Until we can
walk in his or her shoes no one has the right to have anything negative to
say. This was a tough read because of
everything that Maddie has had to endure.
If you’ve seen the commercials for the Wounded Warrior Project,
this story is a great incentive to make a donation.Maybe in honor of a loved one that’s
served.We all need to help those that
have made the ultimate sacrifice.It’s a
great way to show we care.
This was a story that made me very mad.Some men are real jerks – and that’s the
printable version.If he weren’t a
fictional character…I’ll let you fill
in the blank.Just shows this author
knows what she’s doing.She’s also
created a great champion in Rhett and Maddie’s brother Max.Another great champion came in the package of
one Colonel Claire Wright.Had me
wishing that I was there so I could also show my support.
This was my first encounter with this series and it left me
wondering why I’ve never heard of it before.That’s one great thing about following or finding a tour; you find both
new authors and new books.And it leaves
you hankering for more. I'm afraid that I got hooked and didn't put it down until I was done. I look forward
to discovering more of the Deep Six
Security series.
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author Becky McGraw writes happily-ever-afters with heat, heart and humor. A Jill of many trades, Becky knows just enough about a variety of subjects to make her contemporary cowboy and romantic suspense novels diverse and entertaining. She resides in Florida with her husband of thirty-plus years and is the mother of three and grandmother of one. Becky is a member of the RWA, Sisters in Crime and Novelists, Inc.
