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Guiding Fate
by Tamra Lassiter
Role of Fate #4
Publication Date: May 11, 2016
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
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Melanie Woodside, ER nurse and single mom, has endured suffering of her own. Her ne’er-do-well husband bailed after learning she was pregnant with their first child. Now he’s back and threatening her new life. When a hot Marine moves in next door, Melanie has more than enough on her plate, without trying to heal her new neighbor as well. But a handsome man battling the wounds of war is hard to resist, especially when he and her son take an instant liking to each other. And having him close makes her feel safer.
Melanie Woodsideis a hero of the Iraqi conflict, according to the Marine Corps, his friends, and his family. The problem is, he feels more like a mess. Plagued by headaches and nightmares, Will just wants solitude to glue his wounded psyche back together. That means keeping his distance from his pretty new neighbor. But when her son refuses to recognize the boundaries between Will’s house and his own, neither Will nor Melanie can resist a little boy’s pleas for togetherness. If Will’s presence deters Melanie’s ex, all the better.
Can Will trust himself to be the strong, steady man they need? And can Melanie trust herself not to repeat the mistakes of her past? Fate brought them together … will it be enough to keep them here?
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I live outside Washington, D.C. with my wonderfully supportive husband and two daughters, one of which is approaching her teenage years. Help us all! If that isn’t enough, we have a Great Dane and an English Bulldog to keep us on our toes. It’s crazy around here, and I love every minute of it!
Writing is my third career. I didn’t set out to be a writer, it was just meant to be. My Mechanical Engineering degree from Virginia Tech prepared me well for my first career as an Engineer/Program Manager. My second career was in Human Resources. Long story, but I figured it out. I believe the best start for a writing career is to be a reader first, and I’ve been an avid reader my whole life. I’ve loved to read ever since I picked up my first Nancy Drew mystery in the fourth grade. Now, I love reading just about everything, but I don’t read sad books. I don’t watch sad movies either for that matter, no matter how many awards they’ve won. Life’s too short, and who needs all that strife to bring us down?
Many of my words have been penned late into the evening, which explains why I’ve never viewed whatever television show you recommend to me. I would, however, love to hear your recommendations for a great read!
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About the author: Patricia Marie Budd was born and raised in Saskatchewan, Canada. She studied mime in
Toronto and continued her theatre studies under the mentorship of Phillip Gaulier in London. Budd has taught High
School English since 1991, having been passionate about writing since early childhood; she has written for the
stage as well as novels, with her one act play produced in The Rhubarb Festival’s Special Event in 1984. She lives in
Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Patricia Marie Budd has previously written three novels, A New Dawn Rising,
Hell Hounds of High School and Hadrian’s Lover. Hadrian’s Rage (published by Clink Street Publishing May
2016) is available to buy online from retailers including amazon.co.uk and can be ordered from all good
bookstores. Visit www.patriciamariebudd.com for more information.
by pmb
I learned some really frightening facts from Stephen Emmott’s short non-fiction, Ten Billion. This book is not a sci-fi dystopia about the future. It is a fact based look at what is fast becoming our dystopian future. We will reach the unsustainable population of ten billion in just under thirty years. Emmott has even projected the deadly number of twenty-eight billion by this century’s end. I will, by that point, fortunately, be dead, but your children and grandchildren will not. Right now the planet’s resources are insufficient for supporting ten billion people, let alone twenty-eight billion.
When I was writing my dystopian sci-fi novel, Hadrian’s Lover, one of the criticisms I received was the overly large population I created for sometime in the 22nd century. Well, Stephen Emmott just justified that seemingly absurd number in his book, Ten Billion, by pointing out that “by the end of this century there will not be ten billion of us.” Rather, he goes on to say, “There will be twenty-eight billion of us.” I was eight billion short of this projected mark! The planet simply cannot sustain such a radically high number of humans. Emmott rightly warns us that we are “in an unprecedented emergency.”
A radical shift, he writes, needs to occur in the mindset of the business world in order for us to effectively combat the damage we are continuing to inflict upon our planet. “The rules of business,” Emmott explains, “urgently need to be changed, so corporations compete on the basis of innovation, resource conservation, and satisfaction of multiple stakeholder demands, rather than on the basis of who is most effective in influencing government regulation, avoiding taxes, and obtaining subsidies for harmful activities in order to maximize the return for just one stakeholder-the shareholders.” Like Emmott, I do not believe this will ever happen.
And yet, we must act. That is the key message Emmott addresses explicitly and implicitly on every page of his book. We are the problem and we must be the solution. If nothing is done then a crisis of pandemic proportions will be upon us. For, as Emmott evidences in his book, “there is no known way of feeding a population of ten billion.” Prior to this statement he pointed out that since 1980 world population has grown by a billion every decade (pp 25, 29, 32). This suggests that by 2020 we will be at eight billion, hitting the nine billion mark by 2030 and the impossible to sustain ten billion by 2040 (or sooner). I could still be alive, just turning 80. If not luckily lost in a stupor of dementia, I may well have the misfortune of being cognizant of our species final descent into madness.
This book is rife with examples of the irony of human action and inaction. One example given is what he refers to as the “irony of ironies”. Apparently “it takes something like four liters of water to produce a one-liter plastic bottle of water.” This, Emmott aptly describes as “completely unnecessarily” and goes on to call it “Water wasted to produce bottles-for water.” And, this is only one of the many examples of how we are overusing our planet’s limited fresh water resources. “In short,” as Emmott succinctly puts it, “we’re consuming water, like food, at a rate that is completely unsustainable.” Wow!
According to Stephen Emmott, there are three key reasons why the demand for food is growing (beside the obvious population growth): 1. People are eating more in developed countries, 2. People are consuming more meat than ever before, 3. Eating, particularly in wealthier countries, has become a pastime (Pages 70 & 71).
So, what are we to do? If we continue down this miserable trek as Emmott feels certain is exactly what we will do then all the dystopian fiction written predicting an apocalyptic future may become all too haunting true. Maybe we’ll wise up as a species sooner rather than too late and take Emmott’s advice in this book.
Purchase Emmott’s book on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345806476/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_img_sol_0
-pmb-
Their life was a fairy tale—until it all came tumbling down.
Hearts of the South, Book 10
Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Amy Bennett isn’t sure when her own Prince Charming went AWOL from their marriage, but she’s certain of one thing. She wants him back. She and Rob had it all: law-enforcement careers they loved and each other. Yet somehow he’s wound up sleeping on the couch and emotionally beyond her reach.
Rob is trying to put the pieces back together, but battling his own demons while starting over in a small-town sheriff’s department is pushing him—and his marriage—to the breaking point.
His very first missing person’s case threatens to end anything but happily ever after for the families involved. Then a young man goes missing too, and the pressure has Rob reaching for the nearest lifeline. The one that’s dangling by the barest of threads—his wife.
And though Amy’s grip is strong, her love may not be enough to keep Rob from slipping away.
Product Warnings
Contains a husband who’s holding too much in, and a wife who’ll do anything to get him to let go, even meet him halfway on their last piece of common ground—in bed. Also: cop bonding between cops who talk like cops.
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Tall grass, dried from the blazing summer days, crunched under their duty shoes. Heat hung over the dirt road, and not even the pools of shade cast by tall water oaks offered relief. The red clay, already rutted and dusty after the recent rains, baked under the early-afternoon sun, and a black snake sunned himself beside the ditch.
Zeke’s forlorn truck sat next to the turnoff to the sprawling fields. On one side of the dirt track, green corn stalks, tassels golden and silky, reached toward the blue cloudless sky. On the other, neat rows of peppers and squash, heavy with ripe produce, ran up to the far woods. Cicadas buzzed in a quivering rise and fall of distant sound. The police radio beeped and squawked, a garbled transmission between Chris and dispatch, a license-plate check. Around the abandoned Ford, a bubble of silence pulsed. The window was down, a cell phone and wallet on the dash. The keys, on a John Deere fob, dangled from the ignition. Empty fertilizer jugs littered the bed. A tidy stack of bushel baskets waited next to the vehicle.
Around the truck, the grass was beaten down, trodden low by farm vehicles, tractors and booted feet. Rob leaned down to better see inside the truck, but didn’t touch anything. “When was the last time you heard from him?”
“Yesterday at lunch.” Worry roughened Dale Jenkins’s voice. “His mama tried to call him last night and there was no answer, but that’s not real unusual. She called Britt this morning when he still didn’t answer, and he never came home last night.”
“Why didn’t Brittany call us?” Rob straightened and pulled out his notebook to begin jotting.
“She said it’s not unusual for him not to come home some nights.”
Really. That was new. Rob scratched down a note, but kept his face impassive. “Have you talked to any of his friends today? Other relatives he’s in contact with?”
“His grandma hasn’t heard from him. My wife’s been calling his friends, and none of them have seen or heard from him.”
Rob cast a look at the cell phone on the dash. “Did you touch anything in the truck?”
“No. When I got here and saw his stuff like that, I walked the field and through the woods down to the stream, just seeing if I could find him.” Dale wiped a hand across his tense jaw. “I been friends with Tick Calvert a long time, and my wife likes that Dateline show. I knew better than to touch anything when I didn’t find him.”
“Okay.” Rob stared at the truck, then down the turnoff and into the woods. Turning, he nodded at Troy Lee. “Will you get Parker out here with the dog? And bring me the evidence kit from the trunk.”
With his phone, he snapped a series of photos of the scene and the truck’s interior.
“Chris is on his way.” Troy Lee stopped beside him and set down the multiple-compartment box that housed the evidence kit. Rob removed two pair of latex gloves and snapped them on, one pair over the other. Rather than open the door, he reached through the open window and retrieved the cell phone. The home screen glowed to life to reveal myriad missed calls from his parents and Mike Smithwick, plus various texts from Brittany and a couple of friends. Rob swiped his thumb across the screen and the keyboard popped up for a passcode entry.
He glanced sideways at Jenkins. “Do you know his passcode?”
“Four-one-two-zero.” Jenkins cleared his throat. “It’s part of Emma’s birthday.”
Rob navigated to check for the last outgoing texts and calls, both of which dated to late the previous morning. A phone call to his mother around eleven, then a text to Brittany at twelve.
Rob placed the phone in an evidence bag, labeled and sealed it. He squinted across the field, quiet and deserted under the midday sun. “Mr. Jenkins, other than the situation with Brittany this week, has Zeke had other difficulties you know of? Has he been in any trouble or talked to you about any problems he’s had lately?”
“No.” Jenkins pushed up the bill of his battered cap with one finger and scrubbed a hand over his forehead. “He’s always been a real good boy. We weren’t happy about Britt being pregnant with them so young and not married and all, but since they got married, he works hard to take care of her and Emma.”
The grass surrounding the produce field showed no evidence of recent foot traffic. Maybe he’d never even made it into the field. “You said you talked to his friends. Is it possible he’s with one of them?”
“No.” Jenkins shook his head. “He might ignore Britt and he might ignore me, but that boy would never ignore his mama.”
Linda Winfree Bio:
How does an English teacher end up plotting murders? She uses her experiences as a cop’s wife to become a writer of romantic suspense! Linda Winfree lives in a quintessential small Georgia town with her husband and grand-dog Poe. By day, she teaches English/Language Arts and is an all-round education nerd; by night she pens sultry books full of murder and mayhem.
To learn more about Linda and her books, visit www.lindawinfreewrites.com, follow her on Twitter @lwinfreewrites, or connect with her on Facebook at https://facebook.com/lindawinfreewrites. You can also contact Linda via email at lindawinfreewrites@gmail.com.
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Beautiful Liar
by Natasha Knight
Publication Date: May 4, 2016
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Purchase: Amazon US | Amazon UK | Amazon CA | Amazon AU | iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Kobo
Slater
Everything I believed was a lie. Everything except for her, the one person I blamed for it all.
MacKayla Simone was beautiful. She was sexy as hell. She was also the setup.
One night.
Sex that rocked my world.
Rocked it to its very foundations because the next thing I knew, she and I made the headlines of every paper, every news channel across the country, and it cost me everything.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. That came when I learned who was behind the setup. That was when I understood what it meant to be destroyed absolutely.
I don’t know why I went after MacKayla. She’d been a pawn just like me. But it was all I could do, all I had left. Hell, it was the one thing keeping me from tumbling into the abyss and never coming back into the light.
Find her. Find the girl who’d f*cked me. Find her, and make her pay.
MacKayla
I didn’t know who Slater Vaughn was, but if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Not when my sister was in trouble. I would have done what I did anyway. You can judge me. You can call me a whore. But I would have done it anyway.
One night, they’d said. Make him want you, let him have you. Easiest money in the world for just one night of my life.
Only it wasn’t one night because that night obliterated Slater Vaughn, and he came after me. He told me I owed him, and truthfully, I did. Hell, maybe those years in hiding, I’d been waiting for him to find me. To punish me. To make me pay.
Maybe I sought his forgiveness all along.
But now that he had me, how far would he take this game? Slater Vaughn was a broken man. He had nothing left to lose. What was to keep him from taking me with him into his darkness?
USA Today Bestselling author Natasha Knight writes dark romance as well as spanking romance in a variety of genres including contemporary, paranormal, post-apocalyptic, science-fiction and fantasy. She is a #1 Amazon Bestseller in multiple categories forever searching in every story for that single most important element of love. All of her stories contain at least one kinky Alpha male, lots of dirty talk and a well deserved happily ever after.
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