Get Wicked with an excerpt and giveaway!

Not too much longer to wait for Wicked, my first New Adult Paranormal Romance.

December 8th, 2014

Things are about to get Wicked in New Orleans.

Twenty-two year old Ivy Morgan isn’t your average college student. She, and others like her, know humans aren’t the only thing trolling the French Quarter for fun… and for food. Her duty to the Order is her life. After all, four years ago, she lost everything at the hands of the creatures she’d sworn to hunt, tearing her world and her heart apart.

Ren Owens is the last person Ivy expected to enter her rigidly controlled life. He’s six feet and three inches of temptation and swoon-inducing charm. With forest-green eyes and a smile that’s surely left a stream of broken hearts in its wake, he has an uncanny, almost unnatural ability to make her yearn for everything he has to offer. But letting him in is as dangerous as hunting the cold-blooded killers stalking the streets. Losing the boy she loved once before had nearly destroyed her, but the sparking tension that grows between them becomes impossible for Ivy to deny. Deep down, she wants… she needs more than what her duty demands of her, what her past has shaped for her.

But as Ivy grows closer to Ren, she realizes she’s not the only one carrying secrets that could shatter the frail bond between them. There’s something he’s not telling her, and one thing is for certain. She’s no longer sure what is more dangerous to her—the ancient beings threatening to take over the town or the man demanding to lay claim to her heart and her soul.

Pre Order today

Amazon (print and digital and audio is available)

iBooks

(Wicked will be available on B&N and Kobo upon release)

I’m sharing with you the first EVER excerpt from Wicked today! Ah! This is the beginning of the book, straight from Chapter 1, my lovelies!

***

Chapter One

Sweat dotted my brow. Tendrils of red hair clung to my neck. My legs felt like I’d been sitting in a sauna. I was pretty sure there was a waterfall of sweat coursing between my breasts, and that alone put my mood somewhere between slapping someone and pushing them in front of a trolley.

It was so hot and sticky humid that I was seriously beginning to believe that New Orleans was one of the seven circles of hell and the outdoor seating area of the Palace Café was the gateway. Or the waiting room.

A fat drop of sweat slipped from the tip of my nose and smacked off my Philosophy of Human Person text, leaving a little damp circle in the middle of a paragraph I could barely see through the sheen of sweat blinding me.

I always thought the title of my class was missing an ‘A’ somewhere in there. It should be Philosophy of A Human Person. But oh no, that wasn’t how Loyola rolled.

The small table rattled on its legs as a large iced coffee slammed down directly in front of my book. “For you!”

As I peered over the top of my sunglasses, my mouth watered like I was one of Pavlov’s dogs. Valerie Adrieux plopped into the seat across from me, her hand like a claw on top of my iced coffee. A mix of Spanish and African heritage, Val had an absolutely beautiful skin tone, a rich and flawless shade of brown, and she looked awesome in bright oranges and blues and pinks and every freaking color of the rainbow.

Like today, Val wore a loose, orange halter that defied gravity, a purple necklace, and as I glanced down, I saw a turquoise peasant skirt. She looked as if she had stepped off a catalog featuring urban chic. If I wore any color other than black, tan, or gray, I looked like an asylum escapee.

Sitting up straight, ignoring how the backs of my thighs stuck to the chair, I made grabby fingers at the iced coffee. “Gimmie.”

She arched a brow. In the sunlight, Val’s hair had a burnt auburn sheen to it. Pretty. Mine looked like a fire engine. Scary. No matter the level of humidity, her head full of corkscrew curls always looked great. Again, pretty. Between the months of April and November, the curl in my hair got lazy and turned into a frizzy wave. Again, scary as hell.

Sometimes I wanted to hate her.

“Don’t you have something else to add to that?” she asked.

This was one of those times.

“Gimmie . . . my precious?” I added.

She grinned. “Try again.”

“Thank you?” I wiggled my fingers toward the coffee.

She shook her head.

I dropped my hands in my lap with a tired sigh. “Can you point me in the right direction of what you want to hear? Play a game of hot and cold or something?”

“While I love that game most of the time, I’m gonna pass.” Lifting the iced coffee between us, she smiled broadly at me. “The correct response would be, ‘I love you so much for getting me iced coffee that I’d do anything for you.’” She waggled her brows. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Leaning back in my chair, I laughed as I kicked my legs onto the empty seat to my left, stretching out the muscles. The reason I was probably sweating so much was because I was wearing lace-up boots that ended just below my knees and it was like two-hundred degrees, but I was working tonight, and flip-flops really weren’t conducive to getting the job done or hiding the things necessary to get said job done. “You know I can totally just kick your ass and take the coffee, right?”

Val stuck out her lower lip. “That’s not nice, Ivy.”

I grinned at her. “It’s true though. I could ninja-kick your ass all up and down Canal Street.”

“Maybe, but you would never do such a thing because I’m your best-est friend-est in the world-est,” she said with another wide smile, and she was right. “Okay. What I want isn’t a big deal.” She moved the straw jutting out of the iced tea close to her mouth, and I groaned. “Not at all.”

“What do you want?” My second groan was lost in the hum of foot traffic passing the café, and the sound of sirens most likely heading toward the Quarter.

Val shrugged one shoulder. “I have a date Saturday night—a hot date. Well, hopefully a hot date, but Daniel has me on the schedule to work the Quarter, so . . .?”

“So, let me guess.” I reached behind me, draping my arms over the back of the chair. Not the most comfortable position, but it helped me air out. “You want me to take your shift in the Quarter . . . on a Saturday night? In September. Smack dab in tourist hell?”

Her head bobbed an enthusiastic yes. “Please. Pretty please?” She shook the iced coffee, and the chunks of ice rattled in the plastic container enticingly. “Please?”

My gaze moved from her hopeful face to the iced coffee and stayed there. “Sure. Why not? Not like I have a hot date.”

“Yay!” She shoved the coffee forward, and I snatched it out of the air a half second before she dropped it. A heartbeat later, I was slurping away happily, totally transported to a chilly, caffeinated heaven. “You know,” she began, placing her elbows on the table, “you could have a hot date, if like, you went out on a date once every year or so.”

I ignored that comment and continued drinking at brain freeze speed.

“You’re really pretty, even with all that hair.” She made a circle with her hand in the general vicinity of my head as if I didn’t know I looked like a Q-tip with my hair piled atop it. “And you have really great boobs and a total tap-that-ass kind of ass. I’d totally do you.”

I continued to ignore her as a dull ache started behind my eyes. I so needed to slow down on the coffee, but it was so damn good.

“Do you even like boys, Ivy? You know, I swing both ways. I’m more than willing to help a girl out.”

I rolled my eyes then immediately winced. Lowering the iced coffee, I pressed my palm to my forehead. “Ow.”

Val snorted.

“I like boys,” I grumbled as the icepick sensation faded. “And can we not talk about boys or swinging both ways or helping me out? Because this conversation is going to lead to the lack of orgasms in my life and how I need to get naked with some random dude, and I’m not really in the mood to talk about that.”

“What do you want to talk about then?”

Taking a slower sip of the coffee, I eyed her. “How come you’re not sweating?”

Val tipped her chin back and laughed so loudly an older couple strolling by with matching fanny packs stared at her. “Babe, I’m born and raised in Louisiana. My family can be traced back to the original French settlers—”

“Blah, blah. Does that somehow mean you have some kind of magical ability that makes you absolutely resistant to the heat while I’m drowning in my own funk?”

“Can take the girl out of the north but can’t take the north out of the girl.”

I snorted at that. It was true. Having moved to New Orleans only three years ago from northern Virginia, I still hadn’t adapted to the weather. “Do you know what I’d do for a polar vortex right about now?”

“Not have sex, that’s for sure.”

I flipped her off. Truthfully, I didn’t even know why I didn’t miss a single day when it came to taking my birth control pills. I guessed it was habit from when it actually mattered.

She giggled as she leaned against the table, her dark brown eyes surveying my philosophy book. “I just do not get why you’re going to college.”

“Why not?”

The look on her face suggested the heat had fried a few of my brain cells. “You already have a job—a job that pays extraordinarily well, and you don’t really need to get another one like some of the others do. We don’t have a lot of bennies, and we have probably the shortest lifespan of any job out there that doesn’t involve sky diving without a parachute, but that’s another reason to not waste your time on that crap.”

My shrug was my response. To be honest, I wasn’t sure why I started going to Loyola a year ago. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was the weird need to do something most twenty-one-year-olds were doing. Or maybe it ran deeper than that, and whatever that was, was the reason behind taking sociology with a psychology minor. I toyed with the idea of being a social worker, because I knew I could do both things if I wanted to. Maybe it had to do with what happened to—

I cut those thoughts off. No reason to go there today, or any day. The past was in the past, dead and buried with the entirety of my family.

***

To celebrate the upcoming release of Wicked, I am giving away a ton of paranormal books that are either New Adult or got that New Adult flavor for you.

Contest Rules and What Not

International

Ends Monday, November 18th 11:59pm

Winner will be notified via email

Winner must claim prize w/in 48 hours of notification

Author is not responsible for lost or damaged prizes

Prizes cannot be swapped out

a Rafflecopter giveaway