Allison Temple's Blog, page 5

A Free Day in Seacroft

Folks, the BookBub gods smiled on me, and Top Shelf is free until December 7 (and always free on Kindle Unlimited). Grab your copy while you can!

Get it Now

Too Many Giveaways

So it’s possible I got a bit excited about Toy Story and signed up for way (way way) too many giveaways this month.

Good problem to have, right?

If you’re on the hunt for free books, let me help you out! Each of the graphics below will take you to a different giveaway. Help yourself to however many you want! These giveaways are only open for a limited time, so get on it!

New Free Read!

I’m busy in my writing cave working away on a new trilogy for you. But in the meantime, can I interest you in 15,000 words of sexy fun?

Tyler’s got a box of sex toys and a hopeless crush on his upstairs neighbour, Gray, but ne’er the twain shall meet. Or will they? When Tyler’s latest package of fun gets caught in a mailroom mix up, the adventure has only just begun. This is one weekend Gray and Tyler won’t soon forget!

Available on Prolific Works!

Get It Now!

Teaser: Hot Potato

Hot Potato is here in just over two weeks! This is the last (for now) Seacroft book and I can’t wait to share Avery and Linc’s sweet and awkward friends-to-lovers story.

You can pre-order Hot Potato on Amazon now, or catch up on Top Shelf and Cold Pressed (but don’t feel like you have to. Hot Potato will definitely read on its own) before Hot Potato’s release day on September 16.

And if you need a little long weekend reading right now, check out the opening scene of Hot Potato below!

Avery had always been good at numbers. Good at understanding how they fit together. In his life, he had several important numbers:

27—the decimals of pi he memorized in eighth grade to impress girls.

14—the age he realized he was way more interested in impressing boys.

9—(although it seemed longer) the seconds of silence between the time he said, “I’m gay,” to his parents and when his dad said, “Get out.”

3—the nights he slept at a shelter for homeless LGBT teens before his aunt and uncle found him and brought him to live at their house.

And now, two more numbers to add to the list with a certain immediate urgency.

5—how many minutes the internet said it would take to microwave a sweet potato all the way through.

4—(give or take a few seconds) the minutes it took Avery to fall so deeply asleep on his couch that he didn’t notice the sweet potato catching fire and filling his kitchen and his open-concept living room/dining room with smoke.

Fortunately, the alarm he’d had installed the week before moving in did its job and went off, screaming like an air-raid siren.

Avery was upright and scrambling for the alarm panel before he was even fully awake. His pulse thundered, and his brain was goopy sludge as he stared at the keypad and tried desperately to remember the temporary code the technician had punched in.

Of all the numbers to forget.

“You’ll want to change this to something you can remember easily, but that no one can guess.”

Yeah, thanks for that. Avery had meant to. Too many numbers to pick from, though. So he’d procrastinated and figured he’d get around to it eventually. Except now the alarm whooped and made his head hurt as he futilely stabbed at keys and tried to think what combination the technician might have used. Nothing was working.

0000?

1234?

Was it even a four-digit code?

His pocket vibrated, and he fumbled for his phone. The screen showed the name of the alarm company.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Yes, hello sir, we’re receiving an alarm signal from your property,” the voice on the phone said formally.

“Yes. Yes,” Avery gasped. “It’s fine. Just a false alarm.” He’d find a towel to wave under the smoke detector, open some windows—did his windows even open?—and it would be fine.

“False alarm?” The operator sounded uncertain, but what did he know? To him, Avery couldn’t possibly be more than a flashing dot on a computer monitor.

“It’s fine. Just my dinner. Nothing to worry about.”

“So you don’t require the fire department?”

Oh God, that would be the worst. Avery did not need the spectacle of first responders in front of his building.

On cue, flashing lights filled the small space at the top of the stairs to his basement apartment. Avery bounded up to the door and stared in horror at the big red truck parked at the curb.

“I’ll call you back,” he said into the phone.

“Sir? Sir?”

But Avery was already pulling open the door and running out over the lawn.

Teaser: Cold Pressed

Cold Pressed is out in 2 weeks! This juicy friends-with-benefits romance features Oliver, who you may have met in Top Shelf, who meets Nick, a divorced single dad with a complicated personal life. Sparks fly, but neither one of them has time for a relationship. A little no-strings sex though? They’ve got time for that? What could go wrong?

Spoiler: Everything. Everything could go wrong.

You can pre-order Cold Pressed on Amazon and it will be in your inbox on July 15, or if you want to, you can read the opening right now!

Chapter 1

If it had been anyone but Brian, Nick would have laughed the suggestion off as ridiculous in an instant. If it hadn’t come at the end of a double shift, Nick would have recognized the terrible idea before Brian even finished talking.

Instead, because he liked Brian, and because he was hours past when he should have gone home, Nick didn’t see it coming until too late.

“When’s the last time you had fun?” Brian asked.

“That depends on your definition of fun.” Nick’s eyes felt like sandpaper, and his stomach was curdling after he’d downed one too many coffees to push through the darkest hours of his night shift. Fun sounded like a ham sandwich and a warm bed. Nick was a man of few needs.

“Well . . . just . . . fun. Go out. With someone. Have a few drinks. Maybe a meal. You know. Fun.”

Nick stretched his arms overhead and glanced at the clock. He had seven minutes to go, and then he was out of here. The day shift would arrive any minute now, and it didn’t matter if someone had the plague. They were going to drag their asses to this desk, and Nick was out.

“We go out all the time,” Nick said. Their guys’ nights had been happening less since Brian had gotten back together with his wife, but Nick could only be happy for him about that.

“No, not with me.”

Nick’s eyes were bleary, but as he blinked, he realized Brian was blushing.

“I don’t understand.”

“Jess wants to set you up on a date.” Brian’s whole face was strained. The lines around his eyes creased into deep furrows. His lips pressed tight, and his throat bobbed up and down like he was trying to swallow a goldfish.

“Jess wants to—”

“Please say no.”

“Then why would you—”

“Because I told her I’d ask you, and I can’t say no to anything she says these days. But you can. Please say no, and then we can forget this whole thing.”

Now Nick was blushing too. Hopefully this was not the moment a call came in for a five-alarm fire or an MVA. He wouldn’t be able to function, and the way Brian’s face was trying to pucker in on itself was hilarious.

Brian swallowed his goldfish and exhaled loudly. “I told her we shouldn’t bother you. That you hardly ever talked about dating anyone, but she said that was all the more reason to ask. Forget about it. I’ll tell her it was a bad idea.”

Nick was happy that Brian and Jess were back together. But if the joyful reunion was turning to matchmaking, that might not be such a good thing after all.

“Is it someone I know?”

“No. I don’t really know him either.”

Him. That put a different color on it. Not many people knew about Nick’s bisexuality, but Brian was an exception. After fifteen years working together for the Seacroft Fire Department, he and Brian didn’t have many secrets left. Brian had stuck with him after the accident that cut Nick’s firefighting career short, and Nick had been there to help Brian mourn the end of his marriage and then celebrate its sudden recovery last fall. No point in keeping things from someone who had your back for almost half your life. Brian was always discreet, no matter what Nick told him.

That discretion didn’t apparently extend to the wife Brian was obviously still trying to win over, however.

“It was her idea,” Brian said, as if he had read Nick’s mind. “I don’t know how she knew about . . . ” He waved vaguely toward Nick. “Look, forget about it. It’s a stupid idea, but I told her I’d ask. You know Jess. She gets excited about things.”

Brian deserved to be happy. But Nick’s warm and fuzzy feelings about Brian’s domestic bliss had limits. He kept his private life private for a reason.

“I’ll think about it.” He pulled himself to his feet. Two minutes to go.

“No, forget I said anything.” Brian stood from the chair he’d pulled up so he could sit by Nick’s desk. He appreciated Brian’s willingness to hang out at dispatch, while most of the other firefighters stuck to the dorm room and lounge on overnight shifts. “I’ll tell Jess you weren’t up for it. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, though, you know. For you to meet someone. You spend a lot of time by yourself.”

“It’s complicated.” Nick gave him a tired smile.

Brian squeezed Nick’s shoulder. “Yeah, I know.”

Coming Soon: Cold Pressed.

So I know the dust is barely settled on Top Shelf, but are you ready for more Seacroft? There’s a cover reveal (and this might be my favourite cover for the whole series) coming next week, but maybe you’d like a blurb?

Cold Pressed will be out in July!

No strings attached is all Oliver can offer. He's hiding a broken heart that holds him back from diving into a new relationship, but he'll go on a blind date to make his family happy. Just one date, though; he doesn't have time for love to derail his plans.

Divorced and demoted to the night shift, Nick has his own problems. He's got an ex-wife who needs him and a kid with one foot in juvie. The last thing Nick needs is to butt heads—or other body parts—with a tempting hipster who wears a sad smile on their blind date. 

Their chemistry can’t be denied, though, in an argument or in bed. No strings sex is uncomplicated and that's what Nick and Oliver need. But getting into bed together is one thing. Staying out of each other’s hearts soon becomes so much more complicated than either one imagined.

Cold Pressed is an 80k contemporary MM romance. It features a smouldering bisexual single dad, a broken-hearted hipster with a thing for beet juice, and a friends-with-benefits arrangement that blooms into the HEA you've been looking for.

Teaser: Top Shelf

Top Shelf is out on May 20, but you can read the beginning of chapter 1 right now!

Chapter 1

The exterior of Martin’s new workplace did not inspire confidence. Dog Ears Book Shop was a two-story brick building on Seacroft’s main street. The sign out front was painted in large black and white spots that were probably meant to look like a Dalmatian, but actually looked more like a cow. The ‘Help Wanted’ sign was still in the window. If that was an indication of his new employer’s faith in his abilities, Martin’s career in bookselling would be short.

He’d been told to be here by eight-thirty, and he was early. There was a diner next door, and he’d popped in to grab a tea to go. That had been ten minutes ago, and now the bookshop’s locked storefront staring back at him made him worry. What if he’d made the job offer up? What if this was just another punch line on the cruel practical joke that was his life lately? Not being able to hold down an obscure academic position was one thing. Not being good enough to work at a lonely used bookstore in a sleepy seaside community was another issue completely. His thesis supervisor had always said life was not a pony farm, but Martin didn’t even want the whole farm anymore. A seat at the trough would do.

A dark sedan pulled up to the curb. Martin hunched into his tea, avoiding eye contact with the driver. They didn’t need to see him like this.

“Thanks, Mom!” A teenage girl with hair like coiled springs got out of the passenger side. She leaned in and spoke to the driver for a minute, before slamming the door and waving as the car pulled away. She smiled when she spotted Martin.

“Are you the new guy?” She hiked her backpack up on her shoulders. Martin nodded, and her smile spread. “Doctor Lindsey, I presume!” She stuck out her hand for him to shake. He juggled his tea and his bike helmet before reaching for her.

“It’s just Martin,” he said.

“I’m Cassidy. Mrs. Green said you’d be starting today. I’m supposed to show you the ropes.” She pulled a ring of keys out of her backpack and stepped around him to the door. She appeared to be younger than any of his former students had been. It said a lot that someone who didn’t even have a high school diploma would be training him.

“Have you worked here long?” he asked as she fumbled with the lock. She jammed her hip against the doorframe, and then rattled the doorknob before twisting the key. The heavy old door swung open on groaning hinges that shattered the quiet Saturday morning. A jogger running by turned as he passed. Martin ducked his head while Cassidy waved.

“Since I was in tenth grade. I started working after school, and then Mrs. Green let me work full time over the summers. Now that I’m back at school, I’ll mostly be here in the afternoons and on Saturdays.” She walked in and flicked a switch by the door. Ancient strings of incandescent lights flared to life. Martin’s next question caught in his throat as the bookstore loomed in front of him.

He’d been in once before, when he dropped off his resume, but he hadn’t bothered to stay. It might have even been Cassidy he’d handed his CV to for all he knew. It had taken him two tries to walk through the front door, and then he’d finally run in, thrust the paper at the person behind the cash, and fled. It had been embarrassing, but getting this far was an improvement from the trajectory his life had taken in recent months. His doctor had said he should be proud.

Oddly enough, despite that frantic and hasty attempt at applying for a job, he still remembered the smell of the store as he walked in. It was something damp and forgotten, and the space held an incredible sense of age and weight.

Heavy dark shelves of every height and width lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Books were stacked up and down, lengthways and sideways. Martin had read a lot in his life, and he had never seen so many books all in one place.

“Welcome!” Cassidy held her arms out, as if she spoke for every title and every writer represented in the giant space. She glanced over her shoulder. “It’s kind of like the TARDIS, isn’t it?”

“Bigger on the inside than the outside?”

Cassidy’s smile grew. “You watch Doctor Who?”

Martin shrugged, ignoring the little thrill in his chest at the normalcy of this conversation.

“I missed the last few seasons,” he said. “It stopped being good after David Tennant left.”

“I guess we’re not going to be friends after all.” Cassidy’s green eyes narrowed, but her smile didn’t fade.

Feeling a little braver, Martin stepped around a low table stacked with picture books and a sign that read ‘For When They Won’t F*ing Sleep.’ Beyond that, a bookshelf was labeled with ‘100 Ways to Cheat on Your Diet.’ Most of the titles below the sign were pastry cookbooks and European travelogues.

“I made that one,” Cassidy said, as Martin examined the sign. It was done in chalk, the lettering alternating orange and green, with what looked like a steaming plate of spaghetti and a glass of wine nestled underneath it.

“It’s very nice.”

“Let me give you the tour. We won’t be open for another half hour.”

The TARDIS reference turned out to be fairly apt. Every time they came to the end of a teetering row of bookshelves, Cassidy would turn and take him in a new direction. Somehow though, they never wound up at the front of the store again. Sometimes the shelves were broken up with ancient and overstuffed armchairs before the books continued. There didn’t seem to be any logic to the way they were organized. Instead of standard headings—fiction, non-fiction, travel, mystery—each section was labeled in the same cheeky blackboards as Martin had seen up front. ‘Pets.They’re Better Than Kids’ and ‘Old Dead Guys Say Famous Things.’

“Wouldn’t it just be easier to organize them by genre?” he asked as they wound their way down another aisle.

“Why? It’s more fun this way.” Cassidy seemed to know exactly where they were, despite the fact that Martin was hopelessly turned around. They passed a shelf labeled ‘Books To Read On Dark Nights.’

“But how do people find what they’re looking for?”

She glanced over her shoulder at him, and for all there had to be over ten years between them, Martin suddenly felt like a kid asking stupid questions of a weary parent.

“Have you ever worked in a bookstore before? Mrs. Green said you had.”

“In college.” It had been humiliating to have to put that little nugget of experience back on his resume.

“When you go to buy a book, if you want a recommendation, do you ask for a contemporary mystery, written in the last two years, by an American writer?”

“Yes?”

Cassidy snorted. “Well, that’s not how most people work. Most people come in here, and they say they want something a little funny, a little sad. Something about families, but not something where someone dies. It’s easier if we organize them this way.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense!”

They passed a shelf called ‘We Didn’t Know Where Else To Put These.’

“It will.” She turned another corner, and suddenly, they were back where they started. A cyclist went by, followed by a woman with a stroller. They didn’t so much as glance through the window. Martin felt like he’d been on a kind of quest that had lasted a thousand years, only to return home and find that no time had passed at all.

“So the first thing to do is tidy up the kid’s section.” She pointed to the picture book table. “The Mommy and Me group will be here at nine-thirty.”

“Mommy and me?”

“Yes, and then the knitting circle will be here at noon.”

“Knitting circle?” Martin checked around again. “Like people? Here? Knitting?”

“Sure! Didn’t Mrs. Green tell you?”

“Tell me about what?” Here it was. He’d expected a quiet day of recommending classics and wheezing on the layer of dust that coated everything. It had all seemed too easy, and now he would find out why.

“Oh. Well. A used bookstore is only so popular. Most people just get their stuff online these days. So Mrs. Green figured out that if we get people to come for other things, they might stick around and buy a book or two. It’s Mommy and Me at nine-thirty, knitting circle at noon, and the feminist poetry circle at three on Saturdays.”

That didn’t sound too bad.

“Do I have to learn to knit?” He was pleased he could find humor over the increasing rattle of his heart.

Cassidy laughed, curly hair bouncing on her shoulders. “It couldn’t hurt.”

No, it was bad.

Cover Reveal and a Giveaway!

It’s here!! I’m so pleased to share the cover for Top Shelf with you. Designed by the amazing Cate Ashwood, I have loved this cover since the first proof landed in my inbox.

Seb and Martin’s small town slow burn romance will be available on May 20, but you can enter to win an advance copy one of two ways.

Join my Facebook Reader group and comment on the giveaway post.

Sign up for The A-List newsletter and you’re automatically entered.

Meet Seb and Martin

Top Shelf, the first book in my new Seacroft series is coming next month! There’s big stuff planned. Cover reveals. Advance copies for a few lucky readers :) For now, meet Seb and Martin:

Martin is a ghost. Well, not really, but he might as well be. Job gone, home gone, self-respect gone, and no one even seems to notice. The only person who really sees him is Seb, the artist who lives above the used bookstore.

Seb haunts the edges of Seacroft in search of beauty. He knows how to excavate the hidden value in abandoned things—whether it's in the pages of forgotten books or in Martin's stuttering attempts to rebuild his life—and transform them into works of art.

Two lost souls, Seb and Martin discover the strength they need to face eccentric townies and their dysfunctional families together. But as friendship sparks toward something more, neither man wants to risk what they’ve only just found. It takes two to fall in love, but it will take the whole community to bring their beauty to life.

Top Shelf is an 83k slow burn friends-to-lovers MM romance. It features an anxious professor, a drama queen artist, a bookstore that might be haunted, and a full-blown heart-eyes HEA.

To stay up to date on release news, join my newsletter, The A-List. I’ll even throw in two free short stories right now! 

Get Going Down for Free

Hey, who’s that over on the Prolific Works blog today?

Going Down is a short gay romance featuring the sexiest game of Truth or Dare ever played in an elevator.

The last place that Lucas Sanderson wants to be is his ten-year high school reunion. Nothing has changed. The bullies are still bullies. The headmaster is still stuck in the last century. And Bentley ‘Call me Ben’ Hammersmith IV is still so charming Lucas can’t even be mad at him for forgetting Lucas’s name.
All he has to do is give a speech, have a few drinks, and then he can get the hell out one last time.
Of course, what happens next involves beautiful Ben, an elevator with no power, a call center with no clue, and a game of Truth or Dare not even Lucas could see coming. Never has he ever had a night like this one.

Grab your copy now.