HelenKay Dimon's Blog, page 18

GIVEAWAY!

Today is West Virginia’s 150th birthday. Since I have a series set in WV, this seemed like a good time for a giveaway. The rules are simple – leave a comment here and say which 2 books from the series you’d want to win. They are digital, so you are welcome to participate so long as I can get those books to you through Amazon or B&N. It’s that easy. You leave a comment and are entered to win. I’ll pick winners tomorrow (Friday). Void where prohibited. Here are the books!

The newest, Book#4:

Travis Yardley thought he had everything he needed, but one look at Andrea Patterson shows him he was wrong. Andie is a gorgeous, curvy, blonde, who moves to town to manage a nearby campground. Seizing the chance to get close to her, Travis volunteers as tour guide and “bodyguard.”

After a bad breakup, Andie is looking to start over and determined to put her heart on hiatus. She’s working on her self-esteem, and she is not ready for the likes of Travis. He comes on strong, with all the energy of a guy almost ten years her junior, which is exactly what he is.

Even as Travis’s troubled past catches up with him, he pulls out all the stops to convince Andie he deserves a chance. And with the spring thaw hitting the Mountain View Resort, Andie discovers her own temperature rising whenever Travis looks her way…

And since my image uploader stopped working, here are the links to the others:

Book #3 – We’ll Be Home For Christmas

Book #2 – Lean On Me

Book #1 – It’s Not Christmas Without You

Good Luck!

Some Giveaway Info

If you want to learn a bit more about JUST WHAT HE WANTED you can check out some posts, including this one at Dirty Girls’ Good Books. If you want to win a copy, head over to Novel Thoughts and Book-A-Holic Anon – both are giving away copies right now!

Next week I’ll post some review excerpts…and giveaway copies of my upcoming Intrigues.

New Release!!!

I have a new release today! It’s the 4th book in my Holloway series. It also stars one of my favorite heroes, Travis Yardley. He’s younger (in his 20s) but has been on his own a long time and is very centered. He “gets” women…then country girl Andie moves to the small town of Holloway, West Virginia. She’s older, curvy and NOT looking for a young guy and poor Travis doesn’t stand a chance.

Travis is one of those heroes I didn’t expect. When I originally thought about the series, there was no Travis. He stepped on the page in LEAN ON ME and I was sold.

Travis Yardley thought he had everything he needed, but one look at Andrea Patterson shows him he was wrong. Andie is a gorgeous, curvy blonde who moves to town to manage a nearby campground. Seizing the chance to get close to her, Travis volunteers himself as tour guide and “bodyguard.”

After a bad breakup, Andie is looking to start over and determined to put her heart on hiatus. She’s working on her self-esteem, and she is not ready for the likes of Travis. He comes on strong, with all the energy of a guy almost ten years her junior, which is exactly what he is.

Even as Travis’s troubled past catches up with him, he pulls out all the stops to convince Andie he deserves a chance. And with the spring thaw hitting the Mountain View Resort, Andie discovers her own temperature rising whenever Travis looks her way…

You can buy it wherever you find digital books. To help here are some links:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Audible

Carina Press

Kobo

iBooks

Saturday Snippet

Today is an “author choice” day, so I thought I’d give you a peek at FEARLESS, the first book in a new Harlequin Intrigue miniseries. The hero, Davis Weeks, made an appearance in COPY THAT last year. Now he gets his own story. He hasn’t seen ex-fiancée Lara in months. In the span of ten minutes she shows up on his doorstep, an attacker follows her, Davis takes the guy down and now Davis and Lara are figuring out what to do next.

Less than ten minutes later they slipped through the kitchen and out the back door. Lara watched as Davis caught the screen before it could slam shut. Always thinking and rarely unprepared. That’s how she thought about him, and her mind wandered there often.

They hurried across the porch, the boards creaking under her sensible pumps. His sneakers didn’t make a noise. It was as if he placed each step with precision, including his run down the four steps to the muddy square of a backyard.

Her gaze focused on his butt. Not a bad focal point and certainly less scary than looking up into the eyes of another attacker. Two were enough for one day. Davis also made the staring easy. He had put on jeans and a T-shirt and carried a bag Lara wanted to believe was loaded down with clothes and essentials like shampoo but probably only contained weapons. He did love his big-boy toys, but at least he had clothes on now.

Through the haze of panic enveloping her and the sick ball of dread bouncing around in her belly, she smiled. It was not as if seeing Davis naked had ever been a hardship. He stood six-feet-one with long, lean muscles. If there was an ounce of fat on him, she defied anyone to find it. If anything, he was even more toned, more fit, than when she left all those months ago.

Looking at him now and holding his hand while they crept on boards balanced over the big puddles, she watched the muscles on his back tense and flex under his shirt. Nothing new there. The broad shoulders and military-short sandy-blond hair hadn’t changed. Neither had the rough edge to his face, complete with a broken nose from years ago that never healed quite right and a full, kissable mouth.

Put it all together and you got a man who was self-assured and strong, compelling and intriguing without being pretty. He walked by and women turned. He took a woman to bed and she didn’t want to leave again for days. Lara knew that last one from experience.

“You okay?” His question, delivered in a monotone voice, almost blended into the sounds of traffic blocks away.

“Except for the whole thing where people are trying to kill me? Yes.”

His fingers tightened around hers. “That’s the spirit.”

They walked to the six-foot fence running between his house and the next door neighbor’s, then followed it to the very back end. Unless he planned to chew his way through it, she didn’t see this as a viable way out. “Uh, what are we doing?”

“Escaping.” He trailed his hand over the wood planks.

“Did you develop the power to walk through walls?”

He shot her a sexy smile. “If only.”

Refusing to get sidetracked by the shine in his green eyes, she glanced around the yard. Nothing was out of the ordinary. You’d never know a dead man lay only a few feet away.

The strangeness of life going on, the sun shining and a lawn mower running nearby, struck her. When a person died, the world should stop, if only for a second. But nothing changed.

“Here we go.” There was a click and a panel of boards slipped open.

“A hidden door? Well, of course. Everyone has one.” She rolled her eyes, but his back was to her so he missed it. That was a shame because it really fit here.

Davis had a contingency for everything. Well, everything but her, which is part of the reason she handed back the ring and still cried over the loss.

“It’s my get-out-of-Dodge-fast plan.” After ducking his head inside and taking a look around, he held the door open and motioned for her to pass through. “After you.”

It’s not as if she had a choice. Her life had careened out of control hours ago. Now she just held on and hoped not to throw up. Her knee throbbed and the drum-crashing thumps in her head promised a killer headache any second now.

They stepped inside a fenced-off square consisting of a small shed and what she guessed was a car under that slipcover. When they reached the shed, Davis flipped open a black box and typed in a code. The gate at the back end of the enclosed space opened. It spilled out into the alleyway that ran behind his house, the same house he moved into a week after their engagement ended.

They were supposed to buy it together, even put in the offer together, but when the relationship fell apart he went through on his own. Funny how the original sales listing forgot to mention a secret car compartment at the back of the neighbor’s property.

FEARLESS

Copyright 2013, HelenKay Dimon

All Rights Reserved, Harlequin Books

_______________

Don’t forget to check out the other snippets:

Myla Jackson

Lauren Dane

Leah Braemel

Caris Roane

Eliza Gayle

Jody Wallace

McKenna Jeffries

http://shilohwalker.com/website

Taige Crenshaw

Delilah Devlin

Lissa Matthews

Felicity Heaton

Mari Carr

What I’m Reading

The title of this blog post is a tad misleading. I’m about to read this. Like, when I turn in my book on May 31st, I’m digging into this:

When Kate, single mother and law firm partner, gets an urgent phone call summoning her to her daughter’s exclusive private school, she’s shocked. Amelia has been suspended for cheating, something that would be completely out of character for her over-achieving, well-behaved daughter.

Kate rushes to Grace Hall, but what she finds when she finally arrives is beyond comprehension.

Her daughter Amelia is dead.

Despondent over having been caught cheating, Amelia has jumped from the school’s roof in an act of impulsive suicide. At least that’s the story Grace Hall and the police tell Kate. In a state of shock and overcome by grief, Kate tries to come to grips with this life-shattering news. Then she gets an anonymous text:

Amelia didn’t jump.

The moment she sees that message, Kate knows in her heart it’s true. Clearly Amelia had secrets, and a life Kate knew nothing about. Wracked by guilt, Kate is determined to find out what those secrets were and who could have hated her daughter enough to kill. She searches through Amelia’s e-mails, texts, and Facebook updates, piecing together the last troubled days of her daughter’s life.

Suspense Time

I have a new romantic suspense coming out in July called FEARLESS. It centers on a formerly engaged couple now broken up, starts with a murder, takes place in beautiful Annapolis, MD and deals with the NCIS. I actually apologize in advance to the NCIS. I know you are all decent, hard-working people, but that angle didn’t work for the story, so…yeah.

I got my first review for the book from RT Book Reviews and it goes like this:

“Dimon just keeps ratcheting up readers’ pulse rates with a tightly wound plot, punctuated with explosions, gunfire and passion.”

I like it – thank you!

Saturday Snippet

Today is an “author choice” day, so I thought I’d give you a peek at JUST WHAT HE WANTED (June, Carina Press), the 4th book in my Holloway series. This one stars Travis, the old soul but young-in-years plant nursery foreman who has been in the last two books. Honestly, I pretty much love this guy. I never intended to write his story. He just showed up on the page in LEAN ON ME and I couldn’t let him go. Take a look at his first meeting with Andie, our heroine, who Travis is expecting to be “Andy” (ie a guy)…

Andie Patterson stomped her foot against the loose ground and patted it down with the back of the shovel. She hadn’t intended to replant the shrubbery, but she’d tripped over the wild branches for the tenth time in two days and, well, that was that.

She’d moved from Philadelphia to the middle of nowhere West Virginia to get back to her country roots. She just hadn’t planned to have those roots all over her. Dirt now streaked across her faded “I’m the Boss” T-shirt. At least she wore a matching look. The clumps of wet mud missed her olive shirts and went right to skin.

If her ex-boyfriend could see her now. He appreciated fine wine and the opera, considered loosening his tie casual dress and practically lived in the office. She had no idea how they lasted ten months.

The sound of tires against gravel grabbed her attention. She had four cabins booked and all but one couple had sprinted out of there early this morning for a climb before the hot sun baked the trails. Cassidy, the woman Spence introduced as Mitch’s girlfriend even though Andie barely knew who Mitch was, led the activities. She was some sort of expert climber, and many of the calls coming in for new reservations wanted to book time with her.

The twosome that stayed behind likely had other activities in mind since they checked in to celebrate getting engaged. Andie put them on the far end for privacy.

A guy climbed out of the pickup. Through the rolled-down window she could make out a dark T-shirt and sandy brown hair. Then he shut the door and started toward her.

Damn. The heavens sure did shine on country boys. This one had a confident walk to match the could-lift-a-bus shoulders. Add in the faded blue jeans and skin that looked smooth enough to eat off of, and a woman could get a bit breathless.

She would have if he weren’t, like, twenty. Good grief, it was a wonder he could even grow that sexy scruff around his chin at his age.

Doing a little dip with her gaze, touring it all over him, made her feel like a dirty old woman even though she was right on the edge of thirty-five. Not that she was quite ready to look somewhere else. Not when the young hottie stopped right in front of her.

He was six-feet of hello-there-handsome. She ignored that and pretended to be a mature professional, though him looking like that didn’t make it easy. “Good afternoon.”

Up close, only a few feet away, she got a nice view. Green eyes, not dark or almost brown. A pale shade of green.

He smiled. “I’m looking for Andy Patterson.”

And he had one of those deep voices with a slight southern lilt. Man, he got sexier by the second. “You found her.”

His smile faltered. “Excuse me?”

The cute one seemed a bit slow. “I’m her.”

“Her?”

The conversation seemed stuck. She tried again because it was either that or look in on the cabin the writer guy checked out of that morning. She never saw him so much as open a window in the two days since she arrived. She seriously considered setting off a disinfectant bomb and hunting down a hazmat suit.

But she had another male to deal with at the moment. “You seem to like asking questions.”

“What?”

Well, that didn’t work. She thought the 38Ds would give him a hint, but she spelled it out anyway. “You’re looking for Andy with a ‘y’ but it’s Andie with an ‘ie’.”

“Ma’am?”

“You don’t need to call me ma’am.” Mostly because it made her feel ninety.

“Okay.”

The poor thing looked like he’d been hit with a big stick. “Andie as in Andrea, but no one ever calls me that. Well, not more than once.”

“Andie.”

“There you go.” He’d stopped frowning and making every response sound like a question. She decided that amounted to progress. Of a sort.

JUST WHAT HE WANTED

Copyright 2013, HelenKay Dimon

All Rights Reserved, Carina Press

_______________

Don’t forget to check out the other snippets:

Caris Roane

Eliza Gayle

McKenna Jeffries

http://shilohwalker.com/website

Taige Crenshaw

Delilah Devlin

Lissa Matthews

Myla Jackson

Lauren Dane

Jody Wallace

Leah Braemel

Mandy M. Roth

Felicity Heaton

Mari Carr

Selena Blake

Corcoran Team

I have the covers for the first two books in my new romantic suspense series from Harlequin Intrigue. The first, FEARLESS, comes out in July 2013. The second, RUTHLESS, comes out August 2013. The heroes in these books are brothers and were introduced as secondary characters in last year’s release, COPY THAT. The books are standalones, but you should totally feel free to buy/pre-order them all.

Here are the covers. As you can see, Harlequin redesigned the Intrigues covers between July and August. I’ll let you decide which style you like better.

My Deal With Readers

I was reading comments by an author over the weekend and she was complaining about “when” her readers bought her books. Her point: if all of her readers bought her book in the same cycle – her preference was on her actual release day – then she had a better chance of making a bestseller list.

I think this might be a good time for me to reiterate the deal I have with my readers. It goes like this:

I will write the best book I can for you.

That’s it. That is the sum total of our deal. I owe you the best book I can write in that moment. You do not owe me a damn thing. Not a review or a purchase on a specific day. Nothing. You can buy the book whenever you want, however you want, in whatever form you want. You can get my book from the usual channels (like Amazon, B&N, BAM or wherever you shop), at a used bookstore, from a friend or from a library. That is your choice – always.

Your money and time are important and when you choose to spend either on me, I am humbled and deeply grateful. But it is not your job to make my career. Yes, I understand that if people don’t buy my books then I might not be able to continue a specific series or write for a specific publisher. Those are my concerns, not yours. Those issues do not – IN ANY WAY – impose an obligation on my readers. I don’t worry about my readers’ careers and it is not their job to worry about mine. They should read and enjoy. Period.

I read my first romance in 1998(ish). A co-worker handed me three romances and told me to enjoy a happy ending for a change. I made my career as a custody litigator then and dealt with non-happy endings all the time. Those used books were gifted to me. I did not pay for them. I loved the authors – Jayne Ann Krentz, Linda Lael Miller and Julie Garwood – and ruthlessly hunted down every book in their backlist, some from used bookstores. If anyone had told me that I had to buy these books in a specific way, I would have told them to kiss my ass. Honestly, I probably would have used nastier words.

A few years later I read my first Harlequin series romance (that wasn’t a backlist title of an author I already read) when I got one free in the Goody Room at RWA’s yearly conference (it was by Susan Mallery). I have read hundreds since then. I read my first digital book because a friend gave me a gift card and I used it at Ellora’s Cave (for Lora Leigh books). I buy ebooks the majority of the time now.

You’ll notice a theme here – free, free, free. Free books and used books led me to new authors. In fact, thanks to three free books from a friend, I discovered an entire new genre. That led to a new career. Those three free books literally changed my life.

I continue to buy thousands of dollars of books per year, in print and in digital. I buy what I want, when I want, how I want. I buy books for other people. I talk about books. When I finish some books, I pass them to friends who I think will like them. In other words, I give them used books so they don’t have to buy them. I give books away to the Salvation Army and Operation Paperback and others. And, yes, I even buy used books now and then. My money, my time, my choices. No apologies. That’s the gift I got as a reader. That’s what I want my readers to have.

New Cover!

I have a new cover to show you!! This is for JUST WHAT HE WANTED, the 4th book in my Holloway series. It’s a standalone, so you don’t need to read the other ones first…but feel free to buy them all.

Travis Yardley thought he had everything he needed, but one look at Andrea Patterson shows him he was wrong. Andie is a gorgeous, curvy blonde who moves to town to manage a nearby campground. Seizing the chance to get close to her, Travis volunteers himself as tour guide and “bodyguard.’

After a bad breakup, Andie is looking to start over and determined to put her heart on hiatus. She’s working on her self-esteem, and she is not ready for the likes of Travis. He comes on strong, with all the energy of a guy almost ten years her junior, which is exactly what he is.

Even as Travis’s troubled past catches up with him, he pulls out all the stops to convince Andie he deserves a chance. And with the spring thaw hitting the Mountain View Resort, Andie discovers her own temperature rising whenever Travis looks her way…