New Release Spotlight: Making Chase by Lauren Dane

Making Chase by Lauren Dane

Series Chase Brothers

Genre Adult Contemporary Romance

Publisher Carina Press

Publication Date August 28, 2018

The Chase boys. Ridiculously hot and notoriously single.

All of Petal, Georgia, is waiting for the last Chase brother to fall. At least, that’s how it feels to firefighter Matt Chase, who’s getting a little anxious himself. His brothers have all found love—why hasn’t he? But fate, in the form of a curvaceous hairdresser, is about to change that.

Salon owner Tate Murphy has come a long way from her trailer-park roots, taking care of her seven siblings along the way. Even though she’s put the past behind her, she knows someone like Matt Chase is way out of her league. But that doesn’t stop her from getting a good eyeful every chance she gets.

When a car accident throws them together, Tate gets more than an eyeful—she gets the whole package. Not that she’s complaining. But when small-town bias and her own insecurities get in the way of their relationship, Matt will have to prove he doesn’t care where she came from…only where she goes.

The Chase is on. One small town. Four hot brothers. And enough heat to burn up anyone who dares to get close. Don’t miss the other books in the series: Taking Chase, Giving Chase and Chased.

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Matt opened up the box and the heady scent of cookies greeted his senses. Mouth watering, he read the note, ascertained the cookies were from Tate, the woman he’d helped out earlier in the week after the car accident. He vaguely remembered her from school. Perhaps a year or so behind him, definitely not from his circle though.

Knowing she wasn’t a terrorist, he gave in and shoved a chocolate chip cookie in his mouth. And moaned. Holy shit, that was the best thing he’d ever eaten, even better than Maggie or his momma’s cookies though he’d never admit it to them. An oatmeal cookie followed. Nope, that was the best cookie he’d ever eaten. Peanut butter chips in oatmeal cookies? Fabulous. Thank goodness she’d been okay after she’d gotten whacked by that car. The world couldn’t live without this cookie-baking goddess.

Looking at the outside of the box, he realized the address was the beauty salon just across the way. He’d have to go and thank her in person.

He’d saved some folks, helped at quite a few accidents and emergencies and fought fires in and around Petal for the last decade. Still, he could count the number of times he’d received a thank you note on one hand. It felt good to be appreciated.

Finishing up in the late afternoon, Matt grabbed what was left of the cookies, knowing he’d have to work out extra after the dozen or so he’d scarfed down since the mail came. He’d had to hide them from the rest of the weenies at the station who’d have swiped them if they’d known. And with cookies as good as the last five in the box, he wasn’t gonna share.

He’d never been inside the beauty salon though he’d seen it just about every day for years. He had a vague idea that the women in his life got their hair done there, but that was the extent of it.

When he opened the door, the jingle of pretty wind chimes greeted him first, followed by the pleasing sound of feminine laughter. Oh how he loved the sound of a woman’s laugh.

Smiling, he headed toward it. He saw her before she saw him. Her hair was the prettiest blonde he’d seen on a woman and unless he was mistaken, she came by it naturally. It hung in a high ponytail and still cascaded down her back in a long spiral curl. Those wide blue eyes of hers were set off by some floaty-looking blouse that was a sort of pinkish-orange. He was sure they had a name for it, women always had names for colors like that. He’d say that Nicholas had light green walls in his room but Maggie had told him they were sea-foam green. He’d just looked at his brother over her head and Kyle rolled his eyes back at him.

She was short. Like really short. And all curves. Her musical laughter cut off when she caught sight of him and then began to choke.

Dropping his things on a nearby counter he rushed to her, concerned as she waved him off, her eyes widening as she backed away.

“She’s all right,” one of the other women said.

Tate recovered and turned a shade of red he was sure they had a name for too, but it was clear she’d either injured herself or was mortified.

“Fuckety fuck,” she muttered as she tried to catch her breath.

“Are you all right?” He touched her arm.

Her blush deepened as she nodded, sending her ponytail swaying. “Fine. Um, can’t breathe and swallow at the same time. Apparently I forgot that.”

He grinned. “I’m Matt Chase. I just wanted to come by to thank you for the cookies.”

“Oh…oh, I’m glad you got them. I should have just brought them over but I didn’t know when I’d get the chance to get away and my family was sort of trying to steal them and if I hadn’t wrapped them up they’d have ended up at the University of Georgia with my kid brother and sister.”

He couldn’t stop grinning. The woman was like one of those little dogs with all the energy. “It’s fine. They’re really good. Like criminally good. In fact, and if you repeat this, I’ll deny it, they’re the best cookies I’ve ever eaten. You missed your calling you know. You should have opened a bakery.”

“Her cookies are a drop in the bucket. She makes a peach cobbler that’ll bring tears to your eyes and the most perfect scratch biscuit you ever tasted. That’s until you try her chicken paprika,” one of the women, clearly a relative, told him proudly.

“Stop it now. I already said you could have Saturday off.” Tate winked and the other woman laughed. “Oh, my manners! I’m Tate Murphy. Aside from bleeding all over you the other day, I figure we haven’t been formally introduced.”

He shook her hand, still wearing a stupid grin.

“This is my sister Anne and the sister just younger than her, Beth.”

He nodded to all of them and noted they all had the same nose but they were redheads with green eyes while Tate had blue eyes and blonde hair. She was also a lot shorter than the other sisters, who were at least five-seven or so.

“Nice to meet you all. I think I know your brother Tim. He and I were just a year apart in school. We had a few classes together. Redhead right? Green eyes? Freckles?”

“That’s our brother.” Tate grinned.

“He’s a nice guy. Tell him I said hello. Well, I don’t want to keep you all. I just wanted to thank you for the cookies.”

“Well, thank you for helping me. A few cookies are nothing in comparison.”

He liked her smile. Wide, open.

“I’ll see you around then.” And he realized that he’d never bumped into her at all around town. Which was sort of silly considering they worked right across the street from each other.

“Night, Matt. Nice to meet you. Your mother talks about you all the time.”

He stopped as he’d reached the door and heard her laugh. “You knew that’d get me, didn’t you?” he said, looking back over his shoulder at her.

Her eyes widened in mock surprise. “Me? I have seen you naked though. With a cowboy hat on even.”

He groaned, knowing the picture. His momma did love to show that picture of him at about eighteen months old, naked as a jaybird wearing a cowboy hat.

“Are you imagining me naked now?” he teased back and she blushed bright red again. He toyed with asking her what women would call that shade of red but decided against it. He winked and waved. “See you around, Tate Murphy.”

He whistled all the way to his truck.

The story goes like this - While on pregnancy bed rest, LAUREN DANE had plenty of down time so her husband took her comments about "giving that writing thing a serious go" to heart and brought home a secondhand laptop. She wrote her first book on it before it gave up the ghost. Even better, she sold that book and never looked back.

Today Lauren is a New York Times bestselling author of over fifty novels and novellas across several genres.

Website http://www.laurendane.com/

Facebook http://www.facebook.com/AuthorLaurenDane

Twitter https://twitter.com/laurendane

Goodreads https://goo.gl/pg3R22

Amazon https://amzn.to/2uDfIHF

To celebrate the release of MAKING CHASE by Lauren Dane, we're giving away a $25 Amazon gift card to one lucky winner!

LINK: http://bit.ly/2Lujyw8

GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS: Open to internationally. One winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Carina Press. Giveaway ends 9/3/2018 @ 11:59pm EST. Limit one entry per reader. Duplicates will be deleted.

New Release Spotlight & Excerpt: The Glass Diplomat by S.R. Wilsher

The Glass Diplomat by S.R Wilsher

In 1973 Chile, as General Augusto Pinochet seizes power, thirteen-year-old English schoolboy Charlie Norton watches his father walk into the night and never return. Taken in by diplomat, Tomas Abrego, his life becomes intricately linked to the family.

Despite his love for the Abrego sisters, he’s unable to prevent Maria falling under the spell of a left-wing revolutionary, or Sophia from marrying the right-wing Minister of Justice.

His connection to the family is complicated by the growing impression that Tomas Abrego was somehow involved in his father’s disappearance.

As the conflict of a family divided by politics comes to a head on the night of the 1989 student riots, Charlie has to act to save the sisters from an enemy they cannot see.

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Charlie is a journalist and uses his position and expertise on Chile to pursue Tomas Abrego, who he believes was involved in his father’s disappearance. This extract is from Charlie’s column and is a follow-up piece to an interview Abrego gave him. This is also the point where the title, The Glass Diplomat, comes from.

An assassination attempt isn’t a reliable indicator of a universal hatred of a singular politician. One man with a gun isn’t the universe. One man with a grudge may be no more than mental illness. Nor is one article, this one for instance, going to provoke the departure of Augusto Pinochet from power. It isn’t even a strong enough basis for the chatter of such a cause to begin. Despite the attempt on his life, Pinochet may continue to claim, and quite legitimately I must add, he enjoys widespread support throughout the country. Because I’m not Chile. I’m a biased perspective many miles from the centre of all that is happening.

Yet he’s going to need to accept I’m not a lone voice standing at the head of an imaginary line of people trying to whip up unrest. I’m the tail. I’m reporting the many voices of more noteworthy people than me calling for him to seek legitimacy. I’m asking the question ordinary Chileans aren’t allowed to ask their unelected leaders. I’m asking the outside world to turn an eye on Chile for a moment and question the actions of a state that believes it’s answerable to no-one, particularly its own people. I’m calling on the British government to use its influence to make life better for the Chilean people.

I accept I could have been more diplomatic in my first major interview, and I did abuse my personal connections to help me get on in my new professional world. I’m going to forgive myself, though. Because, as we talked, it developed into a chilling interview made interesting more by what he artfully refused to say than what he contrived to tell me.

He was much more evasive than he needed. Unsurprising, given his eye on a bigger political prize at home in the next few months. Although you do have to wonder why Chile is bemused by their poor public relations when they pass up easy opportunities to set their human rights record straight. Or at least straighter.

I concede I may have been naïve in what I imagined he would talk about. Given the attempt on Pinochet’s life, I thought it an opportune moment for us to discuss those topics that might lead a Chilean citizen to try and kill the Chilean President. I asked him if he would like to chat about the Chilean Secret Police, or the ‘Caravan of Death’, or the ‘Kill the Bitches’, sickening little slogans that have become attached to the governing of Chile in recent years. He didn’t want to, angrily so I thought.

When I quizzed him about the death of Philip Encarro, he became even more perturbed. He claimed criminals killed him. Apparently they murdered a man who fought for the underdog, a relatively poor man who’d been able to walk freely around the worst areas of Santiago unharmed for years, and who died in a manner more consistent with a right-wing slaying than a kidnapping gone wrong. Not normal criminal fodder. Instead of seizing the opportunity to set the record straight for those of us in Europe puzzled by the stories emanating from that spectacularly lovely slither of South America, he considered me impertinent for raising the issue. I’m not sure what he imagined we would discuss.

Since our interview, I’ve received several calls suggesting I’ll die a horrible death if I ever return to Chile. After spending thirty uncomfortable minutes with the Chilean Ambassador to London, who seemed to deny the Chilean Police had any secret section, I’m wondering who made the threats.

Given his connection to the death, via his daughter’s alleged relationship with the charismatic Raoul Encarro, I asked him about that as well. He denied it, played it down considerably. A missed opportunity I thought, for the right to lean to the left and make a connection to enrich all of Chile, instead of only those with the right background, or connections, or all those other prejudices allowing privilege to rampage through society and for the inequality to not only continue but to escalate.

In fairness, Senor Abrego followed the government line and denied it all. He played it all down, to the extent that Chile became a small paradise all nations should emulate. In the end, Tomas Abrego sounded like a butcher happy to sell you a sausage, but not talk about its contents. When people refuse to talk about the unsavoury side of their business, you have to wonder what it is they are afraid they’ll be caught out by. The truth maybe?

A man of substance would have spoken to me differently. A politician to be remembered would have used his own words, not follow the party line. A statesman would have convinced me.

Tomas Abrego is no more than a man of glass. I think of him that way because of a description of him given to me years ago.

‘He’s endured all these years by giving the appearance of transparency. He gives the impression of strength, yet he’s only strong when he’s supported, and really he’s weak when alone. He’s brittle-weak like glass.’

I can’t disagree. Although I do see it differently. Perhaps it’s testament to his ability as a man of glass, to be on either side, or to swap sides seamlessly. The kind of man who doesn’t give himself away with words, and who disguises his actions and creates an aura of integrity.

Yet I think of it more as when you look through a window, and you think what you see is reality. But the glass hides you from that. On the other side are the wind and the rain and the noise. The glass shields the storm, and it mutes the sound, and it stifles the truth. That is Tomas Abrego to me, the lie on the inside of the glass.

It didn’t occur to me to write until I was twenty-two, prompted by reading a disappointing book by an author I’d previously liked. I wrote thirty pages of a story I abandoned because it didn’t work on any level. I moved on to a thriller about lost treasure in Central America; which I finished, but never showed to anyone. Two more went the way of the first, and I forgave the author.

After that I became more interested in people-centric stories. I also decided I needed to get some help with my writing, and studied for a degree with the OU. I chose Psychology partly because it was an easier sell to my family than Creative Writing. But mainly because it suited the changing tastes of my writing. When I look back, so many of my choices have been about my writing.

I’ve been writing all my adult life, but nine years ago I had a kidney transplant which interrupted my career, to everyone’s relief. It did mean my output increased, and I developed a work plan that sees me with two projects on the go at any one time. Although that has taken a hit in recent months as I’m currently renovating a house and getting to know my very new granddaughter.

I write for no other reason than I enjoy it deeply. I like the challenge of making a story work. I get a thrill from tinkering with the structure, of creating characters that I care about, and of manipulating a plot that unravels unpredictably, yet logically. I like to write myself into a corner and then see how I can escape. To me, writing is a puzzle I like to spend my time trying to solve.

Twitter: @srwilsher

Website: http://www.srwilsher.com