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The Bequest
Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / iBooks / Kobo / Google Play -- EXCERPT: “Mrs. Brooks? Mrs. Nathaniel Brooks?” I haven’t been called Mrs. Nathaniel Brooks in more than a year, not since before Nate died. It catches me by surprise and leaves me almost unable to speak. “Hello?” “Yes,” I manage to say. “That’s me.” I clear my throat. “Good.” The man shuffles some papers. “My name is Karl Swift.” Something about his voice, perhaps the wobbly timbre, makes me think that Karl is quite old. “What can I help you with, Mr. Swift?” “Er, well, it might be more correct for me to tell you what I think I can help you with.” He sounds like Bilbo Baggins at his birthday party. “Okay.” “I’m actually a lawyer as well—I found your name on your law firm website from a simple search. I’m calling to notify you that last night, I formally read a will that had been posted in all the local papers and online.” “A will for whom?” I still have no idea why he called, and I’m beginning to think he was improperly named–he’s definitely not ‘swift.’ Spit it out, Ol’ Man River! “Jedediah Brooks passed away almost two weeks ago.” Brooks. He’s related to Nate, then. The name finally registers. “Nate’s uncle?” “Even so,” Mr. Swift says. “I’m very sorry to hear that Uncle Jed passed,” I say, rotely. I didn’t meet Nate’s uncle more than a handful of times, and even then we barely exchanged a handful of words. He had a full head of white hair the first time we met, nearly twenty years ago at my wedding to Nate. He must have lived quite a long life. “Thank you. His death was quite a shock, but at least it was quick. Jed always said he wanted it to be fast, not drawn out.” My hand trembles where it’s holding the phone. Nate’s death wasn’t quick at all—and it was so fast I could barely think straight. “Is that why you called? To let me know that he’d passed?” “Not precisely,” Mr. Swift says. “You see, as I understand it, both of Mr. Brooks’ nephews, Nathaniel and Paul, predeceased him.” I murmur my assent. They were both so young. It still sounds so wrong to agree that they’re both dead, even now. “In that case, there is quite a substantial bequest made to your children, Mrs. Brooks.” “Excuse me?” “Jed owned a three thousand, two hundred and eleven acre cattle ranch out here, on the northern side of Utah. It’s one of only six properties in the state that have stayed with the same family continuously, all the way back to the original land grant. In fact, portions of the property are actually in Wyoming, but it’s mostly in a place called Daggett County.” “Are you saying that my children’s great-uncle left them a three-thousand acre ranch?” “Yes, but it’s not quite that simple.” I wish Mr. Swift would cut to the chase. For a lawyer, he certainly lacks in clarity. “What does the will say, then?” “Specifically, it provides that the ranch and all its appurtenances, including the home, a guest house, two large barns, an outbuilding for storage, and some three hundred and fifty head of cattle should be left to your children and the children of Nathaniel’s brother, Paul, per stirpes.” I wonder what something like that is worth. Maybe Ethan could get his Razr after all. “Well, that’s unexpected.” “However.” Mr. Swift rustles more papers. “In order for the bequest to vest, the heirs or, in the case that they’re minors, their appointed guardians, must adequately and actively operate the Birch Creek Ranch for a period of one full year.” “Operate it?” I ask. “Meaning, we can’t just sell it?” “That’s correct. In order for your children to inherit under the terms of the will, you would need to move here and run the ranch for a year.” 
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One for the Money
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GIVEAWAY! Hosted by: #Book Blitz #Freedom or Death by Adria Carmichael (Juche, 4) #Dystopian #YA @Xpresso Book Tours31/5/2022
Freedom or Death
-- EXCERPT: The guards led us along the dark, empty streets of the Village of the Strayed as an ice-cold drizzle sprayed us from above. They didn’t tell us where they were taking us or why, and we didn’t ask. We already knew the answers. Neither Nari nor I resisted the relentless progression through the night. There was no screaming or kicking or biting or clawing. We just plodded forward compliantly, aware that any attempt to fight our silent captors would only make things worse. Or, at the very least—expedite the imminent torment awaiting us in the musty dungeons deep underground. Nari’s soft sobbing behind me was the only sound I could hear over the beating of my heart and the stamping of heavy guard boots against the muddy surface beneath us. It took some time for the light rain to fully soak my short hair and glue it to my scalp, but once saturated, large drops of water began trickling down my forehead and into my swollen eyes. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation was strange and made me blink. Considering the direness of our situation, I expected my chest to fill to the bursting point with uncontrollable panic at any moment. But it didn’t set in. Not yet at least. I knew it was just a matter of time before that horrible feeling returned to assert its rightful control over me. But at this precise moment, there was only one feeling consuming my existence—confusion. And as we passed the School of Juche, drawing closer to our inevitable destination, that feeling fueled a myriad of questions stampeding through the chaos in my mind. What happened to Jun Ha? Had the dark figure that entered the back of the truck been our father? Why hadn’t Mina, Mrs. Choy, and Hana showed up at the meeting point? And how in the Great General’s name did Sun Hee find out about our escape? However, out of all the questions devoid of answers, one tormented me more than all the rest combined. 
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Only In Darkness
-- EXCERPT: I stand looking off the cliff at the raging river and jagged boulders below. I’m going to jump–or rather let myself give in to it and just fall–that I know. What I don’t know is what will happen next. There are two ways it will end, and the more I think about it, the more trouble I have deciding which result will be worse. Often, it’s the not knowing that makes life hell. I’ve been in the dark and unaware for so many years. Now I know what I am. But it is the unknown of what that fate holds for me, should I survive, that makes me shudder. I’ve lost my family, my friends, and everything I’ve ever known, and still, someone, or something, is out there hunting me down like an animal, trying to take what has completely altered my life. The only thing I do know is I’m going to take the leap. It will be a rush for a few seconds, and then I will hit the rocks and hopefully die instantly or–and this is what I can’t fathom–if what they say is true, my back will explode, and I will transform into what my grandmother and the others of the tribe call the winged ones. 
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Almost Perfect
-- EXCERPT: “Let me help you,” Sable said from the doorway. “I got it. I’ve been shot before. I have nine lives.” Hunter flashed a grin. Her hand grasped his undamaged arm. “Please.” He paused. “All right.” He turned down the lid on the commode and sat down. “Take off your shirt,” Sable instructed as she doused a washcloth with warm water. Hunter pulled the shirt over his head and revealed his firm chest. Blood stained his sandy-colored skin and the blond hairs on his forearm. Sable started cleaning his arm and around the cut. “Why do you do this?” “Do what?” So close to him in the small bathroom, his voice rumbled in her ears. “You’re good at what you do, but you risk your life to protect people all the time, right? How can you constantly jeopardize your own safety?” “You’re one to talk.” She looked up at him briefly before setting the bloody rag on the counter and picking up a cotton swab. “Normally, being a thief isn’t so dangerous.” He watched her work for a bit. “It’s exciting. It’s in my blood. I’ve been this way since I was sixteen. I got into trouble and an organization helped me get on the right path.” “Men like you…” Sable shook her head, tossing the bloody cotton in the trash. “Never mind.” “Men like me? Daredevils?” he prodded. “Yes, daredevils. And players.” “What’s wrong with us? Daredevils are fun. Players make the best lovers.” Amusement filled his voice. She wrapped his arm with gauze, keeping her eyes trained on the task and avoiding his eyes. “Players also break hearts.” “Only if you give them your heart,” Hunter said in a low voice. That was a warning if she ever heard one. Sable smoothed a hand over the bandage. “There.” She briefly washed her hands while he continued to watch her. When she finished, she stepped back, but Hunter caught her shirt and held her in place. She didn’t want to look at him but couldn’t resist lifting her gaze. “You want to give me your heart, Sable?” The thinning of the air made breathing difficult. “I’m not that foolish.” Hunter’s light-colored eyes scoured her face. Then he stood, fisting her shirt in his hand and hauling her closer. Sable let out a soft gasp. The breath leaving her nostrils trembled and stuttered as much as her beating heart. “Thank you for taking such good care of me.” She swallowed. “You’re welcome.” He cocked his head, gaze dropping to her parted lips. “I’ve been wanting to kiss you for the longest. You gonna let me kiss you, Sable?” he asked huskily. He didn’t wait for an answer. He dipped his head, and her lips fell open wider before his mouth touched hers. Their mouths crashed together, guttural moans leaping from their throats and filling the small bathroom. 
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Death Warden: Grave Spirits MC
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The Burly-Que Girls: The 6
-- EXCERPT: Suddenly, an impatient knock from outside assaulted the apartment door like a mobster’s Tommy gun. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. “Who in hell …?” Ginger got up and opened the door. Annie Fannie stood there in all her hoity-toity glory. Ginger glared up at the tall, svelte woman, her shock evident. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Dressed in a designer outfit that no doubt cost more than Ginger’s entire wardrobe, hell, probably her entire apartment, the uninvited guest pressed the back of her hand to Ginger’s shoulder to nudge her aside. “Let me in. The heat out here is insufferable.” She came to an abrupt halt just inside the door, leaving Ginger stuck in the open threshold to deal with the heat. “Well, well, well. Look … at … this,” Annie snarled as she sauntered into the room and stood like a queen looking down her nose at her peons. “The whole gang is here. Hello, girls. It’s been a long time.” Dolly huffed. “Not long enough.” “Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?” “No, Annie, we’re not,” Ginger stated flatly. “I haven’t gone by Annie since I quit performing. It’s Anastasia now.” She patted her dyed blond hair, making certain they noticed she had a chichi coif. “I’m guessing you’ve never quit performing, one way or another.” Dolly stood up to face the interloper mano a mano. Merry hopped up to join the line of defense. “My, my. What hostility. What did I ever do to make you all so rudely hostile toward me?” “Gee, Annie, I’m surprised you ask, because we know you don’t give a rat’s ass what we think.” Dolly balled up her fists and ground them into her hips, at the ready. “As for the hostility,” Ginger seethed, thirty years of hot anger boiling up unexpectedly, “how about the fact that you lied to my boyfriend about me and stole him away? Huh? How about that?” “Pfft. Please. He wasn’t worth having. I only dated him a few times. You could have had him back. Oh wait. I remember now. He went on to Pussy Willow after me. I guess he liked her … willow.” She smirked, amused at her supposed wit. “You treated us like shit,” Dolly growled. “You insulted our costumes and our acts and even our bodies. Like you thought you were so much better than us.” “Well …” Annie made the mistake of throwing her arms out wide and looking around the room. “I’ve certainly never lived in a hovel like this.” That did it. Ginger flung herself at their tormenter, clawing at the viper’s haute couture dress and tearing it down to her waist. “You little bitch!” Annie Fannie, once the most elegant of exotic dancers, turned out to be a formidable foe. She grabbed a handful of Ginger’s hair and with that they hit the floor, rolling around and throwing punches as best they could. Arms and legs flailed about at random, like a game of Whack-a-mole gone bad. Dolly and Merry jumped into action, each snatching a brawler and yanking her away. Everybody got roughed up in the process. The Women’s Wrestling Association had nothing on them. “Girls! Girls!” Dolly hollered. “This isn’t going to change anything.” “Stop! Stop!” Merry yelled at the same time. “You’re both acting like Neanderthals.” Once separated and on opposite sides of the room, the brutal enemies tried to kill each other with laser stares. “Look at what you did to my dress. It’s ruined.” Annie slung the comment across the room. Her pink, embroidered, lacy, padded, underwire bra poked out at them. “Yeah. Well, that’s nothing compared to what you did to my life. I loved Harold!” Ginger’s lower lip quivered as she shook a quaking finger at her nemesis. Annie frowned, paused, then said, “His name was Howard.” “No, it wasn’t! He was my Harold.” “Ah, Ginger, honey.” Dolly’s gentle tone caused Ginger to look at her friend. “I remember him.” They watched as awareness clicked in on Ginger’s face. “As much as I hate to admit that Annie is right, his name was Howard,” Dolly reminded her. Ginger looked to Merry for support, but all Merry could offer was a helpless shrug. “Oh. Oh. Well. Yeah, sure. Now I remember.” Ginger straightened herself, patted her mussed up hair, casually sat down at the table, and calmly clasped her hands. “I knew that.” “Now that we’ve done a brawling bump and grind down memory lane,” Annie chided, stuffing the torn edge of her dress up into her bra straps, “I’d like to get to the reason for my visit and then get out of this dump as quickly as possible.” “Do tell,” Dolly said. “Why in hell are you here?”
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Dark Blue Waves
Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Kobo Only 99¢ for a limited time! -- EXCERPT: Janet marveled at her reflection in the mirror. Her light brown hair with its sunny highlights looked elegant swept up; her neck appeared long and delicate. Her green eyes sparkled. She looked older, more sophisticated with her nineteenth-century toilette. She was certainly too suntanned to be fashionable among the creamy-skinned young women of Bath. Her form was perhaps too muscular for nineteenth-century tastes, but sport-sculpted shoulders and legs would be well-covered by the fashions of the day. It did not require an extreme stretch of the imagination to believe that she might have just stepped out of the Bennet household. If only she could learn the manners and banish anachronisms from her discourse, she might actually get away with it. “Why, Jane! Don’t you look lovely! What a miraculous recovery.” Emma glided into the room, all smiles and good cheer. “Doctor Perry has given me an excellent report. We are to take a short walk, but I have strict instructions to rest frequently. I have brought my sketching pad and pencils so that we shall have every excuse to sit and rest. Doctor Perry assures me you are strong, and he is confident you should soon be back to your old self.” Janet smiled at her new friend. How kind they were being to her. She followed Emma out of the room, and then out the front door into the glorious, sunny June day. June 17, 1813. She could hardly believe it. She, Janet Roberts, writing her master’s thesis on nineteenth-century English social customs and manners and how they were reflected in the literature of the period, was now walking around Bath on June 17, 1813. This was a dream come true. How her fellow students and scholars would envy her, if only they knew. But would they ever know? Would she ever return to her twenty-first-century life to complete that half-finished thesis, the one she needed to finalize by next May? Would she return to finish her Austen seminar? She’d agonized endlessly over her father controlling every aspect of her life—her studies, her career, her choice of a husband—yet here she was, a few days later, and her life was one giant question mark. Emma slipped her arm through Janet’s, and the two women walked along the green of The Crescent, then continued the short distance to The Circus. This was the very same route Janet jogged with Siobhan only a few days earlier, on the morning of the accident that changed her life. The streets were a riot of sights, sounds, and color. Women in their elegant dresses, servant girls in their coarse, functional smocks and aprons. In Janet’s world, it was not always easy to distinguish the classes by fashion. A twenty-first-century internet billionaire might work daily in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, just like the worker cleaning the streets. But here, in this new world, class and privilege were prominently displayed in one’s dress and carriage. There were no blurred lines. No room for ambiguity. Children wandered the streets, carrying heavy parcels and buckets in their delicate, tiny hands. Janet longed to relieve them of their loads. How on earth could such young creatures be working so hard, carrying burdens that must weigh as much as they? Surely they should be in school, or enjoying their brief childhood, or accompanied by an observant adult, someone to ensure that they were vigilant and would not risk being run over and killed by a passing horse and carriage in a careless moment of childish distraction. Goodness, her modern sensibilities found this far too difficult to digest. As she and Emma promenaded, elegant men stepped aside to allow them to pass. The men smiled and tipped their hats to the passing ladies. The smell of horse manure was overwhelming. It hung so thickly in the air that Janet felt a wave of nausea wash over her. She saw a few men braving oncoming traffic, shovels in hand, attempting to clear the streets, only able to eliminate a small portion of the mountains of accumulated horse droppings. Hadn’t the automobile been touted as the ideal solution to eliminate pollution? Janet, alongside her middle school classmates, had laughed smugly at the absurdity of that premise. How easy to have been smug in her clean and hygienic modern world. But now that she was actually living in the time period and breathing in the overwhelming odor that must have permeated every major city, she felt more sympathy for those who had welcomed the technology as a possible liberation from the nauseating stench that blanketed cities and towns. Janet tried in vain to compose her face, but she couldn’t help but stare at the sights and sounds all around her. Emma laughed at her friend. “You must remember to close your mouth and not gape at your surroundings. It looks as if you are out in the world for the first time, my dear Jane. Surely, you have not forgotten in this brief time what the world looks like beyond the confines of the sick bed.” You would be surprised, Emma.
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Painted Scars
-- EXCERPT: (Nina POV) “How much do you owe them?” I ask.
GIVEAWAY! Hosted by: #Book Blitz #Dead Wrong (Grave Talker 6) by Annie Anderson #Urban Fantasy @Xpresso Book Tours24/5/2022
Dead Wrong
-- EXCERPT: Hooking a finger in the bridge of my sunglasses, I pinned him with a cold glare. “Tell me, is it fibbies in general, my gender, or me in particular you don’t like, Preston? Because this is the second time in a matter of days that you have skirted around another agent to tell me to get off a crime scene, and I gotta say, it’s pissing me off.” A sneer curled his lip as he planted his feet, leaning forward just a touch too close for my comfort. “Maybe I don’t like your kind, Warden,” he growled, cutting through any and all levels of pretense. “Maybe I don’t like trying to clean up arcane fuck shit on my only day off. Maybe I—” I caught sight of his KPD brethren stopping to stare, and cut him off. “Shut. Up,” I growled, fighting off the urge to cover his mouth with my hand. The absolute last thing I needed was a cranky beat cop exposing the arcane world to all a fucking sundry. “If you know who I am and even an inkling of what’s good for you, you will keep your fucking mouth shut until I tell you to open it.” Snatching my cell from my back pocket, I dialed Tobin’s number. “Yeah, boss?” he answered, the timid waver to his voice gone now that he was alone in the house and couldn’t see my face. Tobin didn’t like direct contact of any kind, but on the phone? In front of a computer? He was an absolute powerhouse. “I need everything you have on an Officer N. Preston.” I squinted at the shield pinned to his chest. “Badge number 745632. And I need it yesterday, if you please.” Tobin paused briefly, a faint snicker rattling down the line. Tobin loved it when other people were in trouble. His keyboard clacking like machine gun fire was music to my ears. “On it. Give me five.” Without so much as a nod to polite phone etiquette, the line disconnected, and I stuffed the cell back in my pocket. I’d have to talk to him about that. Staring at the prick whose face had turned an unhealthy shade of puce in the short time I was on the phone, I tilted my head to the side and narrowed my eyes. “Now that’s done, what were you saying about my kind, again? Not that you know what my kind even is or what I’m capable of.” The subtle buzz around the guy had a solid human flavor to it, but I’d been wrong before. I’d been wrong about a lot of things. 
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