Discover winter charm in a Crystal Castle!

Hello, friends! Today kicks off a series of holiday guest posts featuring talented authors who will share a little about themselves and their books. I asked them each to answer a few holiday-related questions. Let’s get started with author Jennifer Ivy Walker. Welcome, Jennifer!

–What’s your favorite holiday tradition and why? I love making homemade Christmas Spice Cookies with my children—and now my grandchildren. I love sharing my own grandmother’s recipe and have been passing down this tradition for over thirty years now.

–What’s your favorite holiday movie and why? I love “It’s A Wonderful Life” with Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. It’s poignant and emphasizes the value of love, family, and friendship, especially during the holidays.

–What’s your holiday “specialty?”  My holiday specialty is homemade pecan pie!

–A favorite holiday travel story to share? It’s always fun when out of state family members come to Florida for Christmas. We wear tank tops and go to the beach to enjoy the balmy weather!

    Enthralled with legends of medieval knights and ladies, dark fairy tales and fantasies about Druids, wizards and magic, Jennifer Ivy Walker always dreamed of becoming a writer. She fell in love with French in junior high school, continuing her study of the language throughout college, eventually becoming a high school teacher and college professor of French.
     Her new release, “Winter Solstice in the Crystal Castle,” is a steamy medieval romance between a flame-haired, fire-hearted French princess descended from Viking Valkyrie and the solitary, sullen knight who suffers an impossible love for her. Readers who enjoyed The Wild Rose and the Sea Raven trilogy will recognize several of the main characters in this new novel as well.
     Explore her realm of Medieval French Fantasy. She hopes her novels will enchant you.

perf5.000x8.000.indd

Book blurb:

Gabrielle is a flame haired, fire hearted French princess who dreams of becoming a Valkyrie warrior queen like her Viking ancestors from Normandy. Sent to Paris to learn the proper etiquette for a future French queen, she is called home to le Château de Beaufort for a forced marriage to a man she loathes when her father the king’s precarious health takes a sudden turn for the worse.

Chivalrous, solitary knight Sir Bastien de Landuc suffers an impossible love for Gabrielle, the unattainable princess he can never have. Without a title of nobility, he is ineligible to compete in the tournament for her hand in marriage, despite his unparalleled equestrian skills and inimitable swordsmanship.

Yet, Yuletide wishes for a wondrous winter solstice in the glorious Crystal Castle might make impossible dreams come true.

Can the valiant knight win the coveted hand of his Viking Valkyrie?

A favorite quote from the book:

“I shall be a warrior queen,” she’d told him, emerald eyes ablaze with fierce pride as she’d blocked and parried his blows. “A Valkyrie shield maiden, like my ancestor, Brunnhild.” Agile and graceful as a dancer, she’d spun with stunning elegance and surprising force, disarming him with a glorious, gloating grin. “And I shall defend this kingdom with my sword… thanks to you.”

Connect with Jennifer at https://jenniferivywalker.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Winter-Solstice-Crystal-Castle-Christmas-ebook/dp/B0CHG3ZQ8J/

Sounds enchanting, right? Tell us about your holiday traditions or books!

Happy reading, everyone!

Darlene

Book birthday: scoring a second chance

Today, please welcome authors Liz Crowe and Desiree Holt! These two romance authors have teamed up for a joint project that is hot off the press. Take a peek at Numbers Game!

Former pro football player and coach Duncan “Hatch” Hatcher fumbled his career and marriage. Now divorced and ready to tackle his future, he has an opportunity to redeem himself as coach of his college alma mater’s football team. But how can he turn the team’s losing streak around and keep the secret of his downfall buried when the school agrees to a documentary that will allow a lovely journalist to dig her way into his past…and into his heart?

Former pro football player and coach Duncan “Hatch” Hatcher fumbled his career and marriage. Now divorced and ready to tackle his future, he has an opportunity to redeem himself as coach of his college alma mater’s football team. But how can he turn the team’s losing streak around and keep the secret of his downfall buried when the school agrees to a documentary that will allow a lovely journalist to dig her way into his past…and into his heart?

Olivia Grant’s ex-husband almost wrecked her journalism career while he definitely did a number on her self-esteem. The documentary on Duncan Hatcher is the perfect way to rebuild both. As a freshman in college, she’d had a crush on the senior football hero, but he hadn’t known she existed. She never expects the sparks that fly between them as they work on the project nor the struggles they must face if they both want to win.

The book, a contemporary romance with a sports theme, is available in a number of retail outlets. Pick up your copy here: UNIVERSAL BUY LINK

Excerpt:

Excerpt:

Hatch winced at the memory of how goofy he must have sounded to the lovely woman he was going to be having a fair bit of contact with this season. Olivia Grant was, without a doubt, beautiful, not to mention sexy as hell. She was a natural reporter, putting him at ease, even in the face of his high-school-ish reaction to her at first. But dear Lord, the crap he’d said? That shit about her being “better than she thought” at the race? And “looking for a foot in the door”? He’d sounded about as slick as the grandpas he’d been named for.

He groaned and pressed his forehead to the leather blotter on his new desk. After his divorce, he’d made a point not to notice women, something that was a bit of a self-imposed penalty. But there was no not noticing Olivia. Her soft, dark blonde hair that kept dropping over one of her deep green eyes as she’d look down at her notes, then back up at him. That smile, and those full, barely lip-sticked lips. And there was no denying she had a body that would be hard to shake out of his brain. Scott had told him she used to play soccer here, a few years behind him as an undergrad. How he’d not known her… Granted, he hadn’t been a big partier then, kept mostly to himself and his close group of friends and, as always, focused on the game.

But damn. He’d missed out on something then, without a doubt. He felt his face flush red and his entire body begin to react in ways that didn’t really serve him well as a fully grown man, with plenty of experience under his belt, so to speak.

Thankfully, she’d left before he could embarrass himself any more.

Home. Shower. Beer. Stare at a string of old movies on the giant television screen. Anything to get the lovely Olivia Grant and all her many attributes out of his head. She was, after all, the media. And everyone knew how he felt about the media.

It was get-a-grip time—on all parts of himself.

This was his chance at redemption. The opportunity was a godsend, considering the sorry state he’d left his life in on the west coast, and he didn’t intend to do anything to screw it up. He couldn’t afford to get distracted by a single thing. But how the hell was he going to do that when Olivia Grant might prove to be the biggest distraction of all?

Introducing Desiree:

USA Today best-selling and award-winning author Desiree Holt writes everything from romantic suspense and contemporary on a variety of heat levels up to erotic, a genre in which she is the oldest living author. She has been referred to by USA Today as the Nora Roberts of erotic romance, and is a winner of the EPIC E-Book Award, the Holt Medallion and a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice nominee. She has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning and in The Village Voice, The Daily Beast, USA Today, The (London) Daily Mail, The New Delhi Times and numerous other national and international publications. 

FACEBOOK AUTHOR PAGE

www.facebook.com/desireeholtauthor 

FACEBOOK PROFILE

http://www.facebook.com/desiree01holt 

TWITTER

 @desireeholt

FACEBOOK AUTHOR PAGE

www.facebook.com/desireeholtauthor 

FACEBOOK PROFILE

http://www.facebook.com/desiree01holt 

TWITTER

 @desireeholt

Pinterest: desiree02holt

Signup for my newsletter and receive a free book:
https://desireeholt.com/newsletter/

Introducing Liz:

Liz Crowe is a Kentucky native and graduate of the University of Louisville living in Central Illinois. She’s spent her time as a three-continent expat trailing spouse, mom of three, real estate agent, brewery owner and bar manager, and is currently a social media consultant and humane society development director, in addition to being an award-winning author. With stories set in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, inside fictional television stations and successful real estate offices, and even in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her books are compelling and told with a fresh voice. The Liz Crowe backlist has something for any reader seeking complex storylines with humor and complete casts of characters that will delight, at times frustrate, and always linger in the imagination long after the book is finished.

TWITTER

http://www.facebook.com/lizcroweauthor

FACEBOOK AUTHOR PAGE

INSTAGRAM

https://www.instagram.com/etlizcrowe/

http://www.lizcrowe.com

WEBSITE

https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/r2a2q5

NEWLETTER SIGN UP/FREE BOOK

Happy book birthday to Liz, Desiree and Numbers Game, and happy reading to all of you!

Darlene