New Release Spotlight & Review: Thrill Of Love by Melissa Foster

Thrill of Love
The Bradens at Peaceful Harbor, MD #6

By: Melissa Foster

Releasing October 4, 2017
World Literary Press

Thrill of Love

The Bradens at Peaceful Harbor, MD

Do you believe in fate?

World-renowned mountain climber and nature photographer Ty Braden never believed in second dates, much less heart-pounding, steal-his-breath love. But that was before a trip to Saint-Luc, where he met funny, strong, and entrancingly beautiful Aiyla Bell, a ski instructor and fellow photographer whose hopes and dreams, and love of the outdoors, aligned perfectly with his—and whose kisses alone turned him inside out.

After spending five magical days and four sweet, soulful nights falling in love, Aiyla couldn’t imagine a day without Ty. But when he asked her to go with him on his next assignment, his reputation for having women at his beck and call stopped her from upending the life she’d worked so hard to create.

Months later fate steps in when a chance encounter brings Ty and Aiyla together for a five-day wilderness event held in the Colorado Mountains. Their deep, passionate connection is stronger than ever, and Ty is bound and determined not to lose her again. But when tragedy strikes and their worlds are turned upside down, their love faces the truest test of all.

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As a rule, I drive into any new Melissa Foster novel blind, knowing, undoubtedly, I'm going to be reading something special. Ty and Aliya's story definitely fits that criteria in this heart-warming latest instalment from The Bradens of Peaceful Harbor. 

Five days spent with a woman he just met during a trip to Saint-Luc, Switzerland changed Ty Braden's life. He never thought he'd ever met 'The One', so meeting Ailya Bell was a welcome shock in his life. Yet, he's left disappointed when she not only turned down his invitation to travel with him on his next adventure but wanted to severe ties too. Months later, fate has them attending the same event in Colorado, only can Ty convince Ailya to take a chance on him?

Ailya Bell left Saint-Luc and Ty Braden believing fate would bring them back together again. Rejecting his offer to travel with him on his next adventure because of a concern about his womanising reputation. It clouded her judgement enough for her to put her future in the hands of fate. A few months later their paths cross again in Colorado, only can Aiyla overcome the nagging doubt about Ty's past to have a relationship with him?

Trill of Love packs an emotional punch as life gets really tough for our protagonists. There's heartfelt dialogue aplenty as the adorable pair have to face some tough decisions about their tentative relationship and future. I love Ty's 'dive in feet first', 'no holding back' attitude as he embraces problems full on with passion and dedication. His unswerving belief in himself to do what is right for his loved ones. Aliya's self-belief that fate would bring her face to face again with the man she fell in love within Switzerland. Her independent, tough spirit and unwavering determination when faced with life changing issues.

Melissa has delivered a heartfelt novel with a tragic narrative and yet it retains all the elements her fans love about her writing. A story like Ty and Aliya's needs a support network of family and friends and they are abundant, as the loved-up duo face life head on and come out the other side with their happy ever after. As always, Ms Foster's books are standalone but once you've read one, you'll want to read more as you become acquainted with the adorable secondary characters. Lastly, I'd like to see Jon Butterscotch again because...hello!..Hot Doctor alert!

***arc generously received courtesy of the publisher World Literary Press***

“Do you believe in fate?”

His warm breath coasted over her cheek, and she swallowed hard, paralyzed by the sound of the deep, seductive voice she’d heard in her dreams so many times she wasn’t sure it was real. Her heart thundered against her ribs, and she forced her shaky legs to work. She turned, both of them rising at the same time, bringing all six-plus broad, muscular, feet of Ty Braden into focus. Oh God. It’s really you. His silky brown hair was in desperate need of a trim, stopping just short of his shoulders and framing his rugged features. The mix of longing and shock in his golden-brown eyes unearthed a storm of memories—her hand in his, his lips on hers, deep conversations as they shared their hopes and dreams, which were as perfectly aligned as the stars in the skies of Saint-Luc.

“Ty” came out ridiculously breathless. She wanted to scale him like a mountain, to kiss his hot, sensuous mouth again and feel him holding her as he once had. But she couldn’t do any of those things. She was frozen in place, and that was probably a good thing. He was still Ty Braden, the world-renowned mountain climber and photographer, with a reputation as a player that preceded him.

In an effort to regain control, she shifted her gaze away and managed, “What are you doing here?”

“It’s fate,” he said confidently, as if he believed in it. “Fate has brought us together for another five days.”

She forced herself to meet his gaze, her heart thundering at the prospect of more time with him. “You don’t believe in fate, remember? You believe people are in charge of their own destiny.” Their last night in Switzerland, he’d asked her to leave with him the next day and travel with him “to see where things end up.” Oh, how she’d wanted to throw caution to the wind and join him. But she’d worked years to build the life she had always dreamed of, and she couldn’t risk it all to be one in a long line of Ty’s women. She’d fallen hard for him—fallen in love with him—and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to confront the rumors about his reputation. Instead, she’d said, Do you believe in fate? And though he’d said he didn’t, she always had, and she’d said, if this is meant to be, we’ll meet up again. They’d agreed not to exchange phone numbers or addresses, and not to track each other down by any other means, but to truly leave their future in fate’s hands.

“I think that’s changed, Aiyla.” He said her name like he’d been waiting to say it for all these months. He stepped closer, so close she could smell something minty on his breath. “I can’t believe you’re here. After all this time, you’re really here.”

The longing in his voice confused her even more. She looked into his eyes, and memories swamped her. She remembered the feel of him holding her in his arms as they fell asleep fully clothed and waking to his sweet whispers and gentle kisses. Cuddling under blankets as snow fell around them and they reminisced about their childhoods and families. She felt like she already knew his five siblings, though she’d never met them. A lump rose in her throat, and she shifted her gaze over his shoulder to try to regain control. Two female competitors were whispering and watching them. Her stomach knotted again. Why did the only guy she’d ever fallen for have to come with a womanizing reputation? He hadn’t seemed like a player in Saint-Luc. He hadn’t even tried to sleep with her until that very last night, when she knew he’d been picking up on all of her sexy signals. Signals she’d then dashed with one sentence. She’d been seconds from going back to his hotel room when he’d stepped away to answer a call. The brief moments it had taken him had given her a chance to clear the lust from her head enough to make a more rational decision. He probably thought she was a cocktease, but it wasn’t merely sex she’d been avoiding. She’d thought she was saving her heart. And she’d regretted that decision ever since.

Melissa Foster is a New York Times & USA Today bestselling and award-winning author. She writes sexy and heartwarming contemporary romance and new adult romance with emotionally compelling characters that stay with you long after you turn the last page. Melissa’s emotional journeys are lovingly erotic and always family oriented–perfect beach reads for contemporary romance lovers who enjoy reading about wealthy heroes and smart, sassy heroines.

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New Release Spotlight: The Duke by Katharine Ashe

The Duke by Katharine Ashe 

Series Devil’s Duke #3

Genre Adult; Historical Romance

Publisher Avon Books

Katharine Ashe continues her lush and sensual Devil’s Duke series with a sweeping story of unbreakable love.

Six years ago, when Lady Amarantha Vale was an innocent in a foreign land and Gabriel Hume was a young naval officer, they met . . . and played with fire.

Now Gabriel is the dark lord known to society as the Devil’s Duke, a notorious recluse hidden away in a castle in the Highlands. Only Amarantha knows the truth about him, and she won’t be intimidated. He is the one man who can give her the answers she needs.

But Gabriel cannot let her learn his darkest secret. So begins a game of wit and desire that proves seduction is more satisfying—and much more wicked—the second time around…

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He saw her for the first time ever in a storage cellar with rain slashing at her face, standing atop a crate, struggling to fasten a window, and the first words he heard from her lips were, “Damn and blast it to Hades!”

Before he could duck his head beneath the lintel and move forward, she turned to him eyes the color of cloverleaves

and lit like lightning.

“Don’t gape, you big column of shark bait,” she shouted. “Help me!”

A blast of wind struck the building and the shop above them shuddered. Her grip slipped over the window latch.

Gabriel shoved his shoulders through the narrow doorway and in three strides crossed the room. The wind blew

hot and punishingly hard through the opening, but she did not release the latch. Covering her hand with his, he drove

the frame shut.

The building moaned, and Gabriel found himself looking down upon a nose both freckled and wet, lips both lush and damp, lashes both long and dripping, and cloverleaves that had gone entirely round. Her features were English, fine, and not unattractive. After five months at sea, he would have been one sailor in a million to resist following the trail of rainwater down her pale throat in which her pulse beat visibly to the gown laced tight around her collar, sodden, and clinging to her curves.

Sweet curves.

“Remove your hand from mine and your eyes from where they have fallen out of your head,” she said in such

an altered tone that he barely heard it below the groaning of the walls and the pounding of the rain. Rather, the

pounding of his pulse.

Too long at sea.

He removed his eyes and then his entire self. Stepping back, he offered his hand for her descent from the crate.

She lifted a single brow.

“I beg your pardon,” he said roughly, withdrawing his hand once again.

She grasped her sodden skirts and climbed nimbly down. “You are pardoned, Shark Bait. This time.”

“Lieutenant,” he corrected.

Swiftly scanning the room with those eyes that even in the murky light of this day were like the green of Highlands

mountains, she untied the ribbons at her throat, removed her dripping bonnet, and tossed it atop a barrel.

“Have you got a handkerchief?”

He reached into his waistcoat and proffered the square of linen. She glanced at his outstretched hand, then at his

face, then at his hand again, and did not move forward.

“You are a giant beast of a man, aren’t you?” she said.

“So I’ve been told.” He set the linen on a crate and backed away, curling his fingers into his palm that had

easily encompassed her whole hand. Taking up the kerchief, she unfolded it with trembling fingers and wiped the rainwater from her face. Wind and rain battered the building in frenzied fury, filling the tiny space with sound.

“I wonder how you go along aboard a ship.” Her gaze passed up and down him anew. “The crown of my head

is barely to your chin yet I found the quarters aboard our ship frightfully cramped. Unless naval ships are much

more spacious, you must spend every day bent over.”

“Aye, but only the part o’ the day belowdecks.”

The lush lips twitched. When she withdrew her gaze to look about the room, he felt the loss of that reluctant smile in his chest like the loss of air.

Nonsense. He was muddled with exhaustion from preparing the Fairway for the storm. This storage room beneath the shop was minuscule, heavy with heat, and packed with sacks of rice and grain, barrels of sugar and ham, wooden parts for furniture, skeins of silk, boxes of nails and other tools, and even one small keg of gunpowder. She strode the circumference of it, rounding him, and then halting where she had begun.

The wind blasted against the shop above and she tilted her face upward to peer at the ceiling that hung an inch above

his head. Biting her lips between her teeth, she drew a hard breath, and then looked at him again.

“I suppose you have experience with storms of this sort,” she said.

Not of this sort. But spots of pink sat upon each pale cheek now. She had tucked her hands into her soggy skirts

to hide their quivering. She was making a valiant effort to conceal her distress—more valiant than many a sailor

he’d known.

“ ‘Twill blow over soon enough, lass.”

“That was a lie,” she said, a dart forming between her brows. “Why did you lie to me?”

“I didna—” He bit back his retort. But his patience was frayed. There had been no sign of the Theia entering the harbor, though he had stood in the downpour until the swells were rising so suddenly and steeply over the quay he had finally been obliged to shelter here. And now this: a sharp-tongued English girl with the manners of a stevedore.

Gabriel didn’t care much for social niceties. But a man wasn’t made First Lieutenant of a ship of the line at twenty-three by failing to mind his tongue.

Minding his behavior was another matter entirely.

He bent his head and a stream of water cascaded from his hat brim. He glanced at her through the waterfall. “Would you be fretting if I remove my hat?”

The cinnamon spots that trailed over the bridge of her nose and across her cheeks crinkled together to make one big cinnamon blotch. “Why on earth should I?”

He set his hat upon a crate. Wrapping her arms about herself she watched him closely.

“Well?” she said. Some of her hair had escaped the knot at the back of her head and clung wetly to her brow

just as the fabric of her gown clung to her hips and legs.

Copper hair striated with gold.

Softly rounded hips.

Long legs.

The damn pulse in his head was a snare drum. He knew men whose cravings for feminine flesh got the best

of them when they finally came into port. He had never been one of those men. Women weren’t to be enjoyed

like a randy stallion taking a mare, rather with as much appreciation as a man savored a tumbler of fine brandy,

or a sublime piece of music, or a painting by an Italian master—a Michelangelo or Botticelli.

Sweet curves.

Her garments were fine, her speech cultivated, and she was old enough to know that her damp gown was not in

the least modest at present.

The stallion was winning.

“ ‘Twill be some time before the storm passes,” he said in too husky a voice. “ ’Tis miles wide.”

The brilliant cloverleaves popped round again.

“Miles?” Beneath the freckles and agitated flush, her skin was smooth—cheeks, brow, hands. She had not been

in the islands long, and she was little more than a girl.

After nearly a decade at sea, Gabriel could barely remember boyhood.

“You’ve just arrived?” he said.

“Two days ago on the Camelot.”

Gabriel knew it. As first officer on one of His Majesty’s finest ships of the line, it was his responsibility to know

the merchant vessels that docked at English ports.

“No one warned you o’ hurricanes?”

“No.” She had remarkable features: mobile and bright and expressive. “Should they have?”

“It’ll be hours still.” And it would leave a mighty mess of destruction.

“How many hours?”

“No’ till morning.”

With a long inhalation, she released her arms from about her chest. “Then we should make ourselves comfortable,” she said with newly crisp decision and swept him with another perusal, lingering ever-so-briefly on the medals pinned to his coat. “If you can. You are as wet as I, yet you look like a toy soldier, standing there so erect and unbending. I suppose sailors are accustomed to being soaked through, of course.”

“If they’re bad sailors, aye.”

Pleasure flared in her eyes. “Now, make yourself useful and help me search these crates for a woolen shawl or blanket. For I am soaked through.” She set to her task on the nearest crate, but the lid was nailed shut and her fingertips strained at the wood.

He went to her side. Scent arose from her damp hair and skin. She smelled like a memory. He withdrew the knife from his coat and pried open the lid.

“It seems that you are useful after all,” she said with a half grin that abruptly turned something very sharp in

his gut and made him want to tell her the truth. Urgently. All truths. Truths about the hurricane and truths about the

depths of the sea and the stars in the heavens and every one of the sins that made him a beast indeed.

“Lass, ’tis as likely as no’ that before this night is o’er, the sea will top the wharfs an’ swallow this building.”

“And we in it.”

“Aye.”

“I see.” For a moment she said nothing. “After we find blankets we should look for a deck of cards or a backgammon board in these crates. For if we are to die tonight, we had better enjoy our final hours on earth, hadn’t we, Shark Bait?”

“Lieutenant.” He could not look away from her eyes. Black clouds without blotted the tropical sun, allowing

only the most reluctant light into this room, yet her eyes sparkled.

Backgammon. She had the body of a siren and the innocence of a girl.

“You’ve a disliking for sailors, it seems,” he said.

“The officers aboard the Camelot confined me to my quarters for the entire duration of the journey. They said it was not suitable for me to be atop, but I think they simply did not want me to witness them drinking the day away every day.”

More than likely they did not trust themselves with the pretty little siren wandering about.

“I think you are trying not to smile, Shark Bait. Will you attempt to deny that sailors drink excessively?”

“No.”

“So, you understand the reason for my dislike.”

“Because hardworking men are fond o’ spirits?”

“Because they refused to share their spirits with me.”

They found blankets woven of soft wool and tins of biscuits. They had no lamp, which Gabriel said was for the better, and she accepted that without comment. As the storm lashed the shop above and water trickled through the seams of the window, and darkness fell, they found a cask of new rum. She said that she had never tasted rum, and asked if, being a Scot, he preferred whiskey. He replied that he did, but that any grog in a storm would do.

She smiled so readily, as though her lips were more accustomed to smiling than not. Despite her obvious breeding,

there was no maidenly modesty in her frankness. It was on the tip of his tongue to say that over both whiskey and

rum he already preferred her.

She discovered sugar, which he added to the rum to make it more palatable for her, and she sipped warily. As

the daylight waned and she explored the contents of crates and barrels, she darted glances at him—frequently.

She spoke with ease but she came no nearer to him than necessary. When the black night consumed every last wisp of light she ceased speaking. As the hurricane shook the walls, Gabriel settled onto the ground with his back against a crate. Closing his eyes, he made himself picture the Theia bobbing violently at anchor in some nearby port, its decks flooded in foam but its crew and officers tucked into some terrestrial haven.

No time left for repentance. He had thought he and Jonah would have plenty of time. Sailors perished every day at sea, but somehow he had believed them untouchable.

Invincible, Gabe. That’s what the storytellers will say of us someday. Invincible.

In the heavy darkness, her scent came to him again. Like home. Not the mossy grass of the mountains of Kallin, nor the wildflowers that carpeted the hills of Haiknayes. She smelled of woodland fir: crisp and warm and rich.

The room rattled and he felt her settle silently at his side.

“How did you come to be here in this cellar?” she said very quietly. She was close to his shoulder, closer than he

had anticipated.

“I was watching for a ship. You?”

“I walked to post a letter and got caught up with exploring. Everything here is so different and interesting. I

was far from the hotel before I thought to turn around.” She made a sound that might have been a sigh. “I failed to heed the warnings.”

“Dinna fear, lass. ‘Twill be morning before long.”

“You are lying again, Shark Bait.” Then he felt the pressure of her body against his arm, her shoulder leaning

in. “But this time I don’t mind it.”

He did not move. He could not move. He wanted her bone and flesh pressing against his so simply. Perhaps in

these final hours that had come far too soon in his life, God was offering him mercy, a moment of innocent pleasure

after all the moments of sinful pleasure he had seized.

Something bumped against his leg. Then her fingers slipped beneath his hand. Her clasp was unhesitating, her

fingertips brushing across his palm then pressing tight against his knuckles. Palm to palm with her, he strove to

breathe and his heartbeats flew at twelve knots.

“You are lying to comfort me,” she said, “so that I will not dwell on how we are about to die.”

“Am I?” Only thin wooden walls and ceiling separated them from death, and yet the touch of a girl’s hand was all

he cared for now.

“You are,” she whispered clearly and softly beneath the storm’s scream. “It seems that I will be obliged to reconsider my poor opinion of sailors. One sailor, at least.”

Blindly he turned his face to her. He was in fact a beast of a man, and she was a little thing that he could crush

with a single arm, and he knew he should not be holding her hand, not even in this circumstance.

He bent his head closer. “Aye?”

She did not reply and her hand remained snugly in his and the night raged on.

KATHARINE ASHE is the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of historical romances reviewers call “intensely lush” and “sensationally intelligent,” including her acclaimed Devil’s Duke Series, and My Lady, My Lord and How to Marry a Highlander, 2015 and 2014 finalists for the romance industry’s most prestigious award, the RITA®.

Katharine lives in the wonderfully warm Southeast with her beloved husband, son, dog, and a garden she likes to call romantic rather than unkempt. A professor of European History, she writes fiction because she thinks modern readers deserve grand adventures and breathtaking sensuality too.

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