Sunday, December 31, 2017

If Ever I Should Love You by Cathy Maxwell Reveiw & Giveaway


Once upon a time there were three young ladies who, despite their fortunes, had been on the Marriage Mart a bit too long. They were known as the “Spinster Heiresses” . . . 

He’s inherited a title, but not a penny to speak of, so the Earl of Rochdale knows he must find a wife—preferably one tolerably pretty and good-tempered, but definitely wealthy, and willing to exchange her fortune for his family name.
His choice: Leonie Charnock, one of the season’s “Spinster Heiresses.” Years before, the earl had saved the dark-eyed beauty’s reputation, and she is still breathtakingly lovely, leading Rochdale to hope that their marriage will be more than in name only.
However, Leonie doesn’t want to be anyone’s wife. Nearly destroyed by the secrets in her past, Leonie agrees to their union with one condition: there will be a wedding but no bedding. But it’s a condition the new Countess Rochdale isn’t sure even she can keep . . .

About the Book


If Ever I Should Love You
by Cathy Maxwell


Series
Spinster Heiresses Series


Genre
Adult
Historical Romance


Publisher
Avon Books


Publication Date
December 26, 2017

Buy from Amazon
Buy from HC
Buy from Barnes   Noble
Buy from Google
Buy from Walmart
Buy from iBooks

I truly loved this book. 
This story tells of many struggles we can face. Also our past can come back in our lives, good or bad.
Leonie struggles, but she does so on her own. She also struggles to earn the trust of Roman, she has his love but love and trust are needed.
I was so worried for Leonie, but she surprised everyone.

*I received a copy from edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.


Giveaway

To celebrate the release of IF EVER I SHOULD LOVE YOU, we’re giving away one paperback copy of A DATE AT THE ALTAR by Cathy Maxwell!
GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS:  Open to US shipping addresses only. One winner will receive a paperback copy of A Date at the Altar by Cathy Maxwell.  This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Avon Romance.  Giveaway ends 1/1/2018 @ 11:59pm EST. Avon Romance will send the winning copies out to the winner directly. Limit one entry per reader and mailing address.  Duplicates will be deleted.

About Cathy Maxwell

Bestselling novelist Cathy Maxwell embraces her writing romance as a way to express her belief that “loving well is the greatest adventure of all,” and to explore her fascination with the Regency period.

The author of over thirty historical romance novels and novellas. Cathy’s latest is the upcoming IF EVER I SHOULD LOVE YOU, the first book of the “Spinster Heiresses” trilogy from Avon Books. The series, set in the Regency period England, will be quintessential Cathy Maxwell–traditional historicals with a contemporary sensibility and a touch of humor. Other books include, A Date at the Altar, A Seduction at Christmas, The Marriage Ring, The Earl Claims His Wife, and His Christmas Pleasure. Her books have appeared for multiple weeks on The New York Times and the USA Today Best Seller lists.
Cathy received recognition from the start with her first novel, All Things Beautiful. Published in 1994, it was nominated for Best First Book by the Romance Writers of America and for Best First Historical by Romantic Times magazine. It also received first place recognition as Best Read of 1994 from the Reader’s Voice. She has been honored by Romance Writers of America with three RITA Award nominations. Romantic Times has honored her talent with three awards for writing books brimming with “Love and Laughter.”
Born in Olathe, Kansas, Cathy once called Virginia home, noting she is “a Virginian by choice, but a Kansan by nature.” She is now learning how to be a Texan and feels like Austin is the perfect place for her to hone her cowboy skills. She worked in television news and spent six years in the Navy, including a stint in the Pentagon. She is a member of Romance Writers of America, Washington Romance Writers, and Virginia Romance Writers and she is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences, libraries and special events. You can always reach Cathy at http://www.cathymaxwell.com

Author Links

website facebook twitter goodreads Amazon icon

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Purrfect Santa by Jessie Lane and Chasity Bowlin

Title: Purrfect Santa: Howls Romance
Author: Jessie Lane & Chasity Bowlin
Genre: Paranormal Romance Novella
Release Date: December 12, 2017

A woman afraid to love …
Nikki knows what it is to lose those you love. With her focus on her orphaned sister, she hasn’t given herself the chance to process her own grief over the loss of their parents. Life is chaos and the last complication she needs is a mate.
A lion alone for too long …
Joe Miller knows chaos. Being orphaned as a child, he’s never had a family to call his own. Crashing with a friend for the holidays, he’s hoodwinked into playing Santa Claus at a local mall. The last thing on his mind is finding a mate.
A love worth the risk …
With her baby sister on her hip, sadness in her eyes, and a longing in her heart, Nikki waits in line with her sister to see Santa. From the moment he scents her, Joe is in deep. It’s going to take everything he has to convince Nikki the love outweighs the risk to her heart. Luckily for Joe, he has fate and Nikki’s adorable baby sister on his side. After all, who can say no to the Purrfect Santa at Christmas?
Chapter One

If one more kid tried to pull his beard, he was going to roar.

Joe looked at the small spawn of Satan currently sitting on his lap and held in the urge to growl. The kid was maybe five years old, had blonde hair, blue eyes and dimples galore. His first thought was she was adorable. Now, after she’d pulled on his Santa beard during the picture, he knew better. She was nothing but trouble. If he really were Santa, he would give her coal in her stocking and a letter advising her parents to put her in the naughty corner.

“Smile, Santa!”

The photographer’s words were more of a warning than a cue to get ready for the second picture. So Joe played his role, ho ho ho’d, and smiled for the camera while the brat on his lap asked him for a pony.

There had been a time when Joe hadn’t dreaded Christmas so much. Back when he was a kid and everything about Christmas had still seemed so magical. Not so much anymore. It sucked when you spent the holidays alone. To say he was a bit bitter about the holiday season was an understatement.

Which was part of the reason he couldn’t believe he was here at The Mall of the Smokies, being the damn Santa. How had he gotten wrangled into this position again?

His buddy Sam. Buddy. So much for never leaving a man behind, he thought. There he sat, covered from head to toe in red velvet that was none too fresh and none too clean, thanks to the boozy sweat of the previous wearer. Of course, he’d also had more than one kid with a leaky diaper on his lap that day.

And Sam, where was Sam? Nowhere to be seen.

Joe and Sam had served together in the Marine Corps, but once Sam had completed his term of service, he’d come back home to help run the family business, a lodge in the mountains of East Tennessee. Joe, having nowhere to go after getting out of the service himself, had taken Sam up on his offer to crash at the Bearadise Lodge.

There was just one catch. The Lodge was sponsoring Santa’s Workshop at the local outlet mall, and they were short one Santa. Apparently, the old Santa had been fired for drinking on the job.

Damn that Sam!

After only one day of being Santa, Joe could see why the previous hire had been driven to drink. These kids were hell on his nerves. Like the blonde brat who was once again pulling on his beard. He was just about to give her a little growl when she hopped off his lap and ran giggling to her mother, who gave him an unapologetic glance before dismissing him entirely.

This job would have been so much easier if he were in a shifter-run community. Then he could growl all he wanted. Instead, he was dealing with humans and had to keep his feline traits under wraps.

As the next kid, a little boy about the age of four, climbed on to his lap and proceeded to fart, Joe did his best not to cringe. Bullets and bad guys he could deal with. Snot-nosed kids were apparently his downfall. He’d only been at this for a day and he was thinking of telling Sam he could shove this Santa job where the sun didn’t shine. Joe didn’t even want to think about doing this until Christmas Eve. Three days away. Three long, miserable, endless days of bratty kids, droopy diapers, and disaffected parents more interested in their phones than their kids.

In fact, as the next kid proceeded to sneeze all over him, Joe considered walking out right then.

But then something happened that kept him glued to his seat. His sharp lion senses caught a new smell among the crowd. Peppermint and sugar cookies.

Mate, his lion roared inside his head.

The one person that was cosmically meant for him and him alone. The woman that Mother Nature deemed his. He scanned the crowd until he finally saw her at the end of the line, waiting to come see him.

Short, with generous curves that would fill his hands, she had black hair pulled to the top of her head in a messy bun. He wondered what color her eyes were, being too far away to see them. Scanning the rest of her body, he suddenly stopped when he came to the thing that shocked him the most.

A kid on her hip.

Was it her child? From this far away, he couldn’t scent the small one. Had someone already laid hands on his mate? His lion roared again, only this time it was in protest. No one should touch his mate but him! He would slaughter the man who had dared give his mate a cub.

“SANTA!” the elf behind the camera shouted.

Joe snapped his attention back to the man he was going to eviscerate for taking his concentration away from his mate, only to find a scared human staring at him. It was then he realized the child on his lap was shaking in fear.

The elf inched forward to whisper so the others in line couldn’t hear. “You growled at him, Santa! Say you’re sorry.”

His stomach sank. To say he felt like a colossal piece of shit was an understatement. He had been so wrapped up in his emotions that he had let his lion slip out a little in public, which was a big hell no in the shifter rules. Joe looked at the little boy on his lap and gave the kid a big smile, trying to play off what had happened. “How would you like a stuffed lion for Christmas? They go grrrrrrr.”

The little boy looked at him with wide eyes that slowly turned from fear to curiosity. “You can make a stuffed lion that growls?”

Joe nodded. “Sure can. I can put the elves to work on it right away if that’s what you want.”

The little boy scrunched his face up in thought but then shook his head no. “I really want a bike for Christmas, Santa. Can I have that instead of the lion?”

Relieved that the boy was no longer scared, Joe gave him a big grin and a wink. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Yippee!” The boy squealed as he jumped off Joe’s lap and ran to his mother, who was waiting for him next to the photographer.

Joe watched as the boy happily walked away, then quickly turned his attention back to his mate, who was watching him from the back of the line with big wary eyes. The mating scent was too strong. He couldn’t tell whether or not the child was hers, but that didn’t matter.

She was his.

And if that meant he had to accept another man’s cub into his home to claim his mate, then that’s what he would do. Although he would take great pleasure in rubbing his scent all over both woman and cub every chance that he got. Just to make sure that everyone knew that they were now his and his alone.

Jessie Lane is a best-selling author of Paranormal and Contemporary Romance, as well as, Upper YA Paranormal Romance/Fantasy.
She lives in Kentucky with her two little Rock Chicks in-the-making and her over protective alpha husband that she’s pretty sure is a latent grizzly bear shifter. She has a passionate love for reading and writing naughty romance, cliff hanging suspense, and out-of-this-world characters that demand your attention, or threaten to slap you around until you do pay attention to them.
She’s also a proud member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA).
Chasity Bowlin lives in central Kentucky with her husband and their menagerie of animals. She loves writing, loves traveling and enjoys incorporating tidbits of her actual vacations into her books. She is an avid Anglophile, loving all things British, but specifically all things Regency. She also writes steamy contemporary and paranormal romance. 
Growing up in Tennessee, spending as much time as possible with her doting grandparents, soap operas were a part of her daily existence, followed by back to back episodes of Scooby Doo. Her path to becoming a romance novelist was set when, rather than simply have her Barbie dolls cruise around in a pink convertible, they time traveled, hosted lavish dinner parties and one even had an evil twin locked in the attic.
HOSTED BY:

Friday, December 29, 2017

Taken by a Highland Laird by Sky Purington



Taken by a Highland Laird
The MacLomain Series
A New Beginning
Book 2
Sky Purington       

Genre:  Time Travel Fantasy Romance

Date of Publication:  December 18th, 2017

ASIN: B075R825PZ

Number of pages:  280
Word Count:  87,500

Cover Artist:  Tara West

Book Description:

The last thing Lindsay expects when she visits Milly’s home in New Hampshire is to be thrust back in time to thirteenth century Scotland days before the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Worse yet, captured by the English. Using her wits and ability to wrap men around her little finger, she survives long enough to be rescued by a band of Scotsmen. One of them, a rigid Highland chieftain determined to protect his country, rarely lets her out of his sight. A man, as it turns out, who is immune to her allure…or so it seems.

From the moment Clan MacLomain decides to save Scotland’s history, Laird Conall Hamilton knows he needs to be part of it. What he does not foresee is a beautiful twenty-first century actress crossing his path. More so, that they end up caught in an obligatory kiss that sparks an infamous battle. A kiss, as Fate would have it, that takes them on an adventure through time to both the Action at Earnside Skirmish and the Action at Happrew.

Joining first Sir William Wallace then King Robert the Bruce, Conall and Lindsay end up on a journey that will leave neither unscathed. Though determined to keep each other at arm’s length, desire simmers, reeling them ever closer. Inner demons are faced as they navigate a powerful connection neither saw coming. A bond so intense and passionate that it might very well help them defeat the enemy and save a nation.

Amazon      

Excerpt #1

“You could slow down some,” she muttered under her breath as none other than Laird Conall Hamilton yanked her through the woods toward Stirling Bridge.
“Not if they are to believe you are my prisoner,” he stated blandly, his hold on her wrist an unbreakable vice grip.
Naturally, ever the hero, he had volunteered to bait the English alongside her. At least six foot five with broad shoulders and endless muscles she was no match for him physically. But maybe mentally. Time would tell. Lindsay sighed as she stumbled along and put up a believable struggle. The truth was, Conall was as smart as he was strong and that, amongst other things, was getting on her nerves.
Sure, being flung back in time to days before one of the most famous battles in Scottish history was daunting, but she had handled it. She had worked her magic with Hugh Cressingham then even John de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey. As she was so good at when it came to men, she had been what they needed her to be. But then that’s what she did for a living.
She acted, and she did so very well.
Again and again, over and over, no matter where she was.
“The bloody Sassenach are watching you, lass,” Conall muttered. “They want you back.”
“That’s what we’re counting on,” she reminded, nearly tripping on a root.
Fog drifted in thick waves through the damp, pine-scented forest, obscuring far more than she would like. It hid things from her. Kept something from her. Up until this point, she had been strong but something about that, not being able to see beyond the fog, sent shivers through her. A chill and dread that, of all things, had her clutching the ring in her pocket for comfort.
Guidance.
Protection.
But why would she feel that way?
Even as she shook her head against the idea, she slid the Claddagh ring on. Unfortunately, it didn’t affect her fear in the least. If anything, it made her feel more vulnerable. Or was it really the ring? She frowned as her eyes went to Conall.
“So what is your plan once we get close?” she said. “Because I thought I should be the one to put on the show seeing how I am a professional actress and you’re ah…well, rather transparent.”
“I suspect you will put on a show,” he acknowledged, clearly not all that impressed as he pulled her along. “I’ll be curious to see how well you perform.”
Like Adlin and Bryce, he said ‘you’ instead of ‘ye’ when speaking with her. Evidently, it was how medieval MacLomains made it easier for twenty-first century women to understand them.
“So why are you so upset?” Lindsay arched her brows, about over his attitude given their current circumstances. “Might it be because I spent the night in William’s tent?”
Conall scowled. “Why would I care if you spent the night in his tent?”
Lindsay rolled her eyes. “Because you have been smitten with me since the night all of you saved me from the English.”
“Is that what you think?” His voice remained bland. “Or could you have misconstrued my vigilance in protecting a lass who tempts her own demise at every turn as affection?”
She dodged another root, growing more irritated by the moment. “So ending up in the enemy’s camp against my will was tempting my own demise?” She inhaled deeply at his gall. “Are you serious?”
“Ending up in Cressingham’s arms was tempting something,” he returned. “And God only knows what you were up to in the Earl’s tent.”
She narrowed her eyes at the back of his head. They might have met a few days ago, but this was the most he had ever spoken to her. Where she had hoped they might be able to speak sooner, now she was of the mind he had spared her.
“Why don’t you say what’s really on your mind, Conall,” she said. “Because I highly doubt it has anything to do with me being in anyone’s arms but William’s—”

That’s all she managed to get out before he whipped her around and backed her against a tree. Half a breath later his lips were on hers.

About the Author:

Sky Purington is the bestselling author of over thirty novels and several novellas. A New Englander born and bred who recently moved to Virginia, Sky was raised hearing stories of folklore, myth, and legend. When combined with a love for nature, romance, and time-travel, elements from the stories of her youth found release in her books.

Purington loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at Sky@SkyPurington. Interested in keeping up with Sky’s latest news and releases? Either visit Sky’s website, www.SkyPurington.com, subscribe to her quarterly newsletter or sign up for personalized text message alerts. Simply text 'skypurington' (no quotes, one word, all lowercase) to 74121 or visit Sky’s Sign-up Page. Texts will ONLY be sent when there is a new book release. Readers can easily opt out at any time.

Love social networking? Find Sky on Facebook and Twitter.

Website:   www.skypurington.com