RELEASE DAY: Anna Clayton "Christmas Love"

Blurb:

Dee Wallace's father died six months before her mother made her spend Christmas Day with a man Dee hated, the bully from school and a house full of strangers. There she meets Max Portland, who somehow made everything about her first Christmas without her father better.

Over the next several years, Dee and Max come together at Christmastime and the timing is never right for them to be together. How many Christmases does it take to grow up and fall in love?

 

 

Author:

Anna Clayton lives in upstate NY with her husband, kids, dogs, cats and a bunch of other pets.  When she's not playing matchmaker in her stories, she loves to read, cook, hike and connect with readers.

 

 

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Excerpt:

 

Christmas Day, 1998

 

Deidre Wallace wanted the world to cancel Christmas.

It wasn’t fair. Everything went on like normal for everybody else, but her world would never be the same again.

Her dad was gone. He’d died six months ago, and she missed him even more today than when he had first passed away.

Now she had to sit in the backseat of the car while Mom drove them to his house for Christmas dinner. She hated him. He had been there when Dad had died, and he should have saved her dad.

Just last week Deidre's mom had forced her to sit down so they could watch the movie Home Alone together. If that kid had made it through the holidays and could fight off burglars, she should be able to stay at home for just a few hours without a problem. She’d tried that argument before they’d left the house. Her mother wasn’t having any of it.

“Jingle Bell Rock” came on the radio, and her mom began to hum along. How could she? Why did she think that it was okay to feel happy when everything about their lives felt wrong?

“Can you shut off the radio?”

Dee's mother glanced over her shoulder before reaching out to the dashboard to turn the volume down. “I thought you liked this song, Dee. Remember how you and Dad used to dance around the living room when it would come on?”

Of course she remembered. Dee remembered everything about her dad, which was more than she could say for her mother. “Yeah, I remember. That’s why I don’t want it on.”

She saw her mother’s shoulders slump, and she pressed the power button on the radio. “Honey, I know you miss Dad, but it’s okay to remember all of the good about him. Especially this time of the year. You know how much he loved the holidays.”

Dad hadn’t just loved Christmas. He’d made it magical. For as long as she could remember, every year on November first, he would head out to the garage, climb up into the storage rafters, and bring down box after box of holiday decorations.

Every day until the weekend before Thanksgiving, he’d come home from his factory job and yell, “Dee! I need your help finding my Christmas spirit!” right after closing the front door. Dee would drop whatever it was that she’d been doing to run and body slam into him for a hug.

He’d picked her up and hugged her with her feet dangling above the floor up until last Christmas. Dee thought that she had grown too tall, and she'd told him she was too old to be treated like a little kid anymore. At twelve, she was probably getting kind of mature for everything else, too, but she wasn't ready to give up the tradition with her dad.

No matter how grown-up she felt, she still hugged him when he'd call her to the door, and when she did, she’d inhale the scent of tar from his work at the factory. She didn’t care that it wasn’t that great of a smell. It was her favorite because it was his.

They’d make their way to the garage where he’d place his hands on his hips. Dad looked like the most handsome man in the whole world when he stood there. She’d loved his curly, dark brown hair, huge grin, and how he always wore T-shirts with cartoon characters on them. He'd been perfect.

Dad’s mouth would slowly drop from a smile into a frown before he’d sigh and say, “Well, pumpkin. I can’t decide what we should put out today. There’s too much to choose from. Should we just cancel Christmas and forget about it this year?”

For years she'd screamed “No” and dashed to a box, opened it, and grabbed the first thing she could get her hands on. This past year, her dad had played along when she just grinned and he gestured with his hand to give her the okay to dig in. On really good days, Dad would let her pick two or three decorations to put out around the house.

Mom always watched from the couch when they'd come into the house and would say things like, “I really don’t think we have room for all of those decorations” and “It looks like the Christmas spirit threw up all over our house.” Dad and Dee would laugh while Mom shook her head and smiled.

When the house was all decorated, Dad would take her to visit Grandma and Grandpa at least once a week for hot chocolate and cookies. Mom would stay home because she'd said she didn’t want to intrude on their time together. Dee knew better. Her Mom didn’t always get along with Dad's parents. No one ever talked about it, but it hadn’t been that hard to figure out. Even when they'd go over for other holidays and birthdays, Mom would always have a reason why she wouldn't be able to go.

The best part about Christmastime was when Dad would dress up as Santa, knock on the windows, wave, and leave treats outside the door for everyone. He'd done it up until their last Christmas together. Her parents had said time and again it wasn't her dad, but she knew it was him in the Santa costume. Dee would have known his eyes anywhere.

Dad even did his Santa routine on Christmas Eve. He’d put on his suit, fill his bag with presents, and make a ton of noise as he shuffled around the Christmas tree and placed the gifts around it. Dee could tell he knew she’d always watched from the stairs.

RELEASE DAY: "Secondhand Shadows" by Elizabeth Belyeu

  

Blurb:
It's supposed to be a symbiotic relationship: the Shadow serves and protects the human Lumi, the Lumi feeds and cares for the Shadow. But when Damon’s Lumi died young and severed the bond between them, he declined to go with her like a good little Shadow. Yes, it hurts. Yes, he's cold and hungry all the time. And yes, his own people call him an abomination. But for the first time, Damon's life is his own, and he’s never going back.

Or so he thinks, until he meets Naomi, a pregnant college student… and bonds to her as his new Lumi. Which has never happened to a Shadow before.

Naomi has enough problems on her plate, juggling college and a crappy survival job, preparing for a baby, and getting over her cheating ex-husband. The last thing she needs is a dark, brooding fellow like Damon depending on her physically and emotionally, and hating her for it. But a vigilante among Damon's people has his sights set on Naomi – and they both know Damon is her only chance for survival.

 

About the Author:

Elizabeth Belyeu is 29 years old and lives in Alabama, where she supports herself, her cat, and her steadily growing TBR pile as a library assistant. She graduated from Troy University in 2008 with a bachelor's in English (Creative Writing minor). This is her first novel, but she has been writing since she could hold a pencil, and plans to continue until she is too senile to type.

 

 

Now available on

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Excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE

Elevator Ghosts

NAOMI

 

“…hardly the Dread Pirate Roberts, Dad. Can you really see him ripping someone’s throat out with his teeth?”

I froze outside my English professor’s office door, and decided I did not want to interrupt that conversation. My hand didn’t get the memo and knocked anyway. I snatched it back and bit it, but it was too late.

From inside came silence, then Dr. DiNovi’s voice. “Come in.”

I debated running away instead. Or waddling away, since the U.S.S. Third Trimester wasn’t achieving warp speed anytime soon. But I opened the door.

We all do dumb things.

Dr. DiNovi was sitting at his desk in a perfectly normal way, which was all wrong. Dr. DiNovi was a feet-on-the-desk, head-in-the-clouds kind of guy, not a feet-on-the-floor, head-in-his-hands kind of guy. I’d never seen his bald spot before, peeking out of dark hair like a moon on a cloudy night. Maybe he grew the beard to compensate for the bald spot. He looks good with the beard, in a professorial kind of way.

The other guy in the room did not look professorial. He looked grim and dark and scruffy and altogether Strider-like. All he needed was a cloak. The leather jacket, I decided, was a satisfactory modernization.

Of course, if he was Strider, I was apparently a Ringwraith, because he was looking at me like he couldn’t decide whether to run away or run me through. I fully expected him to snarl.

“Ah, Naomi,” Dr. DiNovi said. “Come to throw your term paper on my tender mercies?” His voice was casual and cheerful and did not match the way he kept glancing from me to Strider.

“Yes, sir.” It was hard to look away from Strider, but easier than continuing to look at him. He reminded me of a firework my grandfather lit once, that sizzled and smoked and then went quiet — just before blowing up in his face and burning his beard off. So talk quick and get out of here before he explodes. “I need an extension, sir. Please.” Dr. DiNovi was not famous for cutting anyone a break on deadlines. I had marshalled all kinds of arguments to cover the fact that I flat forgot about my term paper. I could not remember any of them now. Please, sir, I’m very pregnant. I cry easily, and if you make pregnant women cry you go to hell. I’d hate to see that happen to you, sir.

Dr. DiNovi gestured at Strider. “I don’t know if you’ve met my son, Ga—”

“Damon.” His voice was rough, as if he’d been screaming. Without meaning to, I looked back toward him, and he flinched. So did I. He seemed to burn my retinas.

“Damon,” Dr. DiNovi continued, “this is one of my Brit Lit students, Naomi Winters.”

“Naomi,” he repeated, his voice even more choked, as if my name were razors in his mouth. He glanced at his father. “I have to go.”

I was still standing more or less in the doorway. I tried to dodge him, and he tried to dodge me, and my shoulder bounced off his. He hissed — seriously, hissed, a sort of gasp between clenched teeth — and was out the door and gone.

I bit my lip and glanced at Dr. DiNovi, my cheeks going hot even though I hadn’t done anything. That’s why I always got in trouble when my little brother broke something. “Guilty” is my default expression.