Ten years ago Tristan Shane had failed to pick sides and he paid with the ultimate price—his family. Enslaved as a post-apocalyptic gladiator, he is now faced with a similar dilemma, serve the despot Queen and murder her innocent sister, or face certain death himself. What will he choose?
Tristan Shane was a moderate before the nuclear and economic crisis which plunged the world into darkness. While his sister Aidia ran off to fight the rebel’s war he desperately tried to hang onto normalcy and lost his wife and children in the process. Spending the next ten years as the Crown’s favored and the mob’s favorite Gladiator, he never expects to meet the Queen’s sister, Alexandra, a Healer.
She claims to be the much whispered about Savior sent to heal the wounded Earth and oceans, the one who would bring about her cruel sister’s dethroning. But is she? Or is she just a fraud? But he quickly learns her erotic touch has the power to heal his heart and his to save her life. But as the passion heightens and the danger increases will they have forever or will he have to give up everything to save the planet?
Excerpt:
“What is it you want, Veronica?”
She leaned in close and whispered seductively, “Why, you know I only want you, Tristan.”
He snatched her up by her throat, pinned her against the wall and kissed her passionately, brutally, and without clemency. When he pulled away she was smiling with a darkness that made him angry. She was a power-hungry mongrel who played on her husband’s weaknesses and jealousies. Tristan hated her. And he hated himself for f***ing her. But this was his life. He let go of her and walked away.
“Is my poor Gladiator jealous? There’s really no need for that, is there? You know you’re my favorite.”
“What is it you really want, Veronica?”
She came up behind him and seductively began to ease off his armor. He was covered in sweat and blood and he felt her shiver against his body. And as always there was a twinge of nausea that would precede the raw animal aggression.
She turned him around. He looked at her. There was no doubt about it; she was beautiful. But she was poisonous—a rattlesnake with crystal green eyes and flaming red hair. Her father had promised peace and a return to normalcy and democracy in the wake of economic and nuclear disaster, and instead this was what had become of the world. And she was no doubt always enjoining her father to maintain her life in this fashion. He loathed her. He detested her. And every time he had sex with her his intense hatred for himself deepened a little bit more.
“My dear, sweet Gladiator, as much as I’d like to celebrate your victory with you tonight, my husband wishes me to share his bed. But fear not—I do have a consolation prize for you.”
His skin began to crawl. Veronica had a twisted way of looking at what constituted a consolation prize; it was usually just a groupie who wanted to watch what the queen did with the equivalent of rock stars of the former United States of America. And he usually did the dog and pony show. But sometimes Veronica required something to prove his loyalty to her. That would be more complicated.
“What is it this time?”
She smiled. His response had given her the mistaken impression that he cared.
“The rebels have been restless. And it seems there is a young woman we have in our prison whom they want terribly. Well, frankly, they are in two minds as to what to believe. It is rumored she is the mythical Healer. The one meant to find her soul mate, so together they will lead our Nation out of the so-called darkness into which it has plunged itself.”
“And what do you want me to do?”
“Oh Tristan, why are you being so defensive? I just want you to find out whether she really is the Healer, and report to me if she is.”
“And then, what?”
“And then you let me handle it,” Veronica said, sliding back into the evil skin that was her natural state. “The rebels have no idea what it takes to run a country.”
The image of his wife being raped and murdered flooded him and it was all he could do not to throttle the queen right then and there.
“So can I count on you to do this for me or do I need to find someone else who can?”
He was no one’s hero. But she had said young woman. And he couldn’t just allow his wife’s fate to be visited upon some other unsuspecting girl. “I’ll do what I can.”
Veronica ran her index finger down his cheek and whispered, “Good boy, Tristan,” she purred. “Guard! She’ll be delivered before the night is over. I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to you, but I expect that you’ll have had enough time to gain her trust by then.”
Tristan’s stomach churned. The Healer? In the beginning there had been whispers of it. But he had never believed in such a thing. It had been years since the crown had feared anything. And now this. He said nothing as the queen was escorted away. He was left to think about the young woman he might be forced to turn over in the end.
Almira Sands has been running all her life from her abusive father Jack. She knows one day the running will end and only she or her father will be left standing. What she doesn’t expect is to be kidnapped by Daniel Logan.
Daniel Logan is a mercenary who only intended to use Almira long enough to get to safety, but when she takes a bullet and almost dies he finds himself questioning who he is and what he does and saves her life.
On the run and falling in love they are forced to decide: a life on the run together, or face her father, the man who has the power to separate them forever.
Excerpt:
I felt his hand tapping on my face and heard his voice coming from what seemed like a million miles away. “Almira. Almira, wake up.”
My eyes slid open for a moment and I saw him as he was. Older, stronger, maybe crazier for helping me now than he had been then. My eyes drifted closed. I was back in the past with him carrying me out of my father’s estate and into his waiting car. I was so doped up on pills and heroin at the time I couldn’t think beyond ‘help me get out of here.’
Then Daniel’s voice called again, this time from the present day. “Don’t you dare die on me! Not now. Not after all of this.”
My eyes opened again, and he was standing over me. I managed to scan the room and saw a beautiful woman preparing to work on me.
“If you fail her, I’ll come looking for you.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, Danny. You know I do good work. If I didn’t, you wouldn’t have called me in on this.”
I gazed up at Daniel and said raggedly, “Yeah, Daniel, don’t be so dramatic.”
His head jerked downward and he took my hand; images of our brief time together flooded me: him carrying me… throwing me in the shower... of us naked in the shower, making love. Suddenly I felt hot all over—well, as hot as can be under the circumstances.
“Daniel, don’t go…” I murmured. Daniel let go and pulled up a chair, lighting a cigarette.
“I’m giving you something for the pain but it’s still going to hurt. Put that out,” Jasmine said as she worked over me, digging out the bullets; the pain was mind numbing. Tears rolled down my cheeks as he took my hand again and I crushed it.
With each dig into my body to retrieve those goddamn bullets, memories flooded my head. The night Daniel and I spent together surfaced. Suddenly I felt at peace…
“I’m losing her, Daniel.” Jasmine’s voice sounded like a faint echo.
“Stay with me, kiddo, stay with me.”
I opened my eyes but I wasn’t in the present. I was in another time, another place. I felt hands pressing down on my chest. Air rushed down into my lungs.
“Save her damn it!” Danny’s voice was so like it had been all those years ago.
I could see us that night as we made love. Hear his voice. “You don’t know what kind of man I am,” he’d said.
I’d known exactly what kind of man he was then.
His mouth captured mine. His air breathed life into me, desperately pulling me back from the brink.
I opened my eyes, coughing and sucking in air as he held onto my face, his gaze burning into me, reminding me of why I had slept with him in the first place. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said. “Do you understand me?”
“Is she gone?”
He looked up toward Jasmine. “No.”
“Then get her the hell out of here because I don’t trust her.”
“Ungrateful bitch.”
Daniel leaned back. Before he could stop me, my hand shot up and I nailed her in the mouth with a hard sucker punch.
“Crazy—”
Daniel stood up. “I suggest you choose your next words very carefully,” he warned her.
My eyes slid shut. I heard a door slam, and before I lost consciousness completely, I heard a faint whisper. “This time I refuse to let you go.”
A human rebel against the Capturian Forces, Caliope was enslaved for five years and tortured. She never expects to meet James, a half-breed too human for his own good.
Their connection is electric.
Their love is forbidden.
Their daughter may be Earth’s only hope.
Excerpt:
When I woke I was in a small room, naked except for the salves on my skin and a warm blanket wrapped around my body. I looked around. James was sleeping in a chair next to the bed with a shotgun at his side. I tried to sit up and his eyes flickered open.
“Keep still. They’ll sense you.”
His nearness was enough to make me yearn for his touch. Relationships between Capturians and humans were taboo by their very nature. But James himself was an anomaly. He was the offspring of a Capturian Master and his female human slave. He never talked about it, but I knew it left him with a bitterness and heaviness that not even the oldest of human survivors had.
He’d been a guard on the slave ship I’d originally been sent to, early on in the fighting. The ‘experiments’ had been torturous. During my first six months there, they tried to break me. Every night I was in tears. Angry, bitter, terrified tears. When I slept there was no relief, either, as I was haunted in my dreams by the things they had done to me in the day time. Eventually I lost all sense of time or place. I was about to fall on my sword when James was assigned to watch me and make sure I didn’t rally the other human slaves. Instead of plunging me into utter darkness and suspending me in air, he’d come to me, that first night, and held me through it.
Jack Harris is a former FBI Agent haunted by his failure to save his fiancee’s life. Starr Elizabeth is just as broken as he is, but on a day they’d rather not think about their pasts redemption is just a breath away. Can two damaged souls breakthrough to one another to find their much needed healing? Or will their past drive them apart forever?
EXCERPT:
Jack Harris woke up to the sound of himself screaming. He reached for his gun and cocked it and was about to pull the trigger until the sound of glass breaking caused him to focus. Starr Elizabeth stood at his bedroom door frozen in place. He lowered his weapon.
She didn’t look scared, the raven haired young woman ten years his junior had been through enough in her own life to be able to deal with him. “Nightmare?” She asked calmly as she stooped down to pick up the broken glass at her feet. Starr never looked scared. Never acted scared. But there were nights when her torturous screams chilled him to the bone.
She wasn’t his lover but a valued friend. Someone who had pulled his ass out of the fire on more than one occasion and put up with enough of his bullshit to know when to call him on it. Starr disappeared for a moment and returned to the door but didn’t come in any further. It was a rule she’d given herself. She’d only agreed to his gift of shelter if she worked for her keep.
“Yeah. Nightmare.”
“Angela?”
“Yeah, Angela.”
For a moment it looked as if she might cross the threshold to come comfort him. A look of tenderness flitted across her delicate features.
“Do you have your cigarettes?”
“You know you can come in here. I don’t bite,” he said softly.
“I don’t need to come in there. You have company.”
He looked over beside him and a blonde woman was passed out in the bed with him. Apparently he was naked. Thank god he was beneath the covers from the waist down.
“Starr--,”
“If you want a cup of coffee I’ll put on a pot. It’s six o’clock. This is my time to be up anyway.”
Kate Lynd/Amy McCorkle is an award winning blogger and 2nd place finisher in the 2011 Preditors & Editors Reader’s Choice Award for Best Romance Short Story for No Ordinary Love. She also writes as Amy McCorkle. Her books include Another Way to Die, GLADIATOR (releasing August 2012), and Set Fire to the Rain coming soon. Her official website is http://AmyLMcCorkleKentuckyAuthor.webs.com, reviews, guest posts, and her random thoughts are posted at her blog, http://Creative-Chatter.blogspot.com, and she is peppered all over Facebook and Twitter under Amy Leigh McCorkle and @Kate_Lynd.
All books can be purchased at: http://museituppublishing.com/bookstore2/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=495&category_id=9&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1&vmcchk=1&Itemid=1
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