You up there. Go away. #mfrwhooks

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I, Effing Feline, have been selecting snippets from my pet human’s WIP, The Seven Foot Cupid. We haven’t met the cupid yet, but today my feline literary genius has inspired me to introduce another important character.

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On a planet with a new human colony, unexpected dangers abound. Ember Dayle is one of the intrepid people whose job it is to deal with the unexpected . . . but today’s her first day back after an accident. The plastic surgery to her face looks good, but it doesn’t look like her. Ember continues to explore the strange new hole in the ground that forms a ‘skylight’ into an important cave.

Meanwhile, down in the cave her destiny awaits her.

Tyler Estrella didn’t know how many tens of thousands of years this volcano had been extinct, but he sincerely hoped it stayed extinct—because he was inside it. Or at least inside one of the tunnels that had carried lava from the caldera to the sea.

He couldn’t see much of his surroundings—too dark—but what he could see was like a fairy’s dusk. With his flashlight off, the only light came the small skylight and the bioluminescent lichens clinging to the walls and ceiling. The lichens gave the tube a lovely, dim ambience as he ate his sandwich—two pieces of pumpkin-grass bread with slices of spiced onion-brute lunchmeat.

The meat was canned, of course. These were field rations. Thousands of lichens glowing at the same time made it possible for him to see the field rations, though just barely.

He was four-thousand feet up Mount Addoray, the most massive volcano in the known galaxy. Not the tallest—an extremely gentle slope led up to a summit only about seven-thousand feet high—but its lava had been so watery it spread out to create the largest landmass on this planet.

Passion Island.

Humanity’s home.

Tyler’s home.

There was a sudden noise, though there was no one to cause it. A dull thud. Then another.

The unexpected sounds startled him so much he dropped his sandwich. It seemed he had company,

By the time he reached the skylight, three lumps sat on the cave’s floor. They were partly covered by a rainfall of dirt, but he recognized rucksacks. All holidays end, as the saying went. That didn’t mean he had to like the end of his blessed privacy.

He shaded his eyes to stare up at the intruder’s boots and legs dangling into the skylight. He cupped his hands around his mouth and called, “You up there. Go away, damn it.”

Be sure to visit the hooks by other fine writers in the Book Hooks blog hop.

The Seven Foot Cupid

Book One in the Passion Island Trilogy

A locked-in-together romance

Ember prides herself on handling anything her newly colonized planet can throw at her. After a head injury shakes her confidence, she’s determined to prove herself again. She gets her chance when she’s ordered to explore a mysterious new cave.

Tyler, an explorer from a rival town, is given the same task. Like Ember, he’d been in an accident – – but his entire team died, leaving him drowning in survivor’s guilt. When he meets Ember, he’s drawn not only to her beauty and toughness, but by how well she deals with her accident.

Booker, a naïve Apprentice Cupid for a secret organization, receives his first assignment: get Ember and Tyler together. His strategy: lock them in an abandoned cabin together so they ‘get to know’ each other.

He doesn’t realize he’s locked them in with . . . something else. Something dangerous. Something no human has ever seen.

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This is a hint of what will happen soon.