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5 STARS ✮ ALL THE FEELS ✮ JAY MCLEAN ✮ LOGAN

| On
Saturday, September 30, 2017

LOGAN


Preston Brothers #2


by

Jay McLean


 ✮✮✮  5 STARS  ✮✮✮  ALL THE FEELS  ✮✮✮











As a kid, Logan Preston was a brat. 
Through his teens, he became the bad boy. 
Now, at nineteen, no one knows what the hell to expect.

High school dropout, Logan Preston is a 
good-for-nothing stoner. 
A black sheep. 
A disappointment. 
The worst Preston Punk of the lot.
At least that’s how everyone in his small town 
makes him feel. 
But Logan Preston has secrets. 
Secrets so dark and so deep below the surface that the only way he can fight them is to stay high, high, high. 
He wears cockiness as a mask. 
Arrogance as his armor. 
Until one girl, one night, asks one life-changing question: 
What's beneath the bravado, Logan Preston?












Did you hear that? That was Jay McLean shredding my heart.

There have been so many fantastic books this year and it's impossible to name one favorite but LOGAN is definitely among the top five of 2017. This book is also one of the hardest I've read in recent years and because of the theme one of the most important ones.
It's challenging to sort through my feelings for Logan and Aubrey and write a somewhat coherent and spoiler-free review.




Logan is the Preston brother who just seems to go with the flow, without direction in his life. His favorite pastime seems to be getting high on marijuana but that would be simplifying it. Nobody really knows what's festering inside him.
When Aubrey, the girl with the scarlet hair and freckles, moves into town Logan doesn't see her wounded soul. In fact, these two clash and are verbally at each other's throat at every chance. But slowly, slowly, slowly they find that they have more in common than they thought.

“You look like a leprechaun.”
“You smell like a venereal disease.”
“You want to get out of here?”
“Yeah.”

Following Aubrey's and Logan's journey to You + Me is delightful and sprinkled with hilarious moments, and gut wrenching when everything escalates and the house of cards he built, held together with spit and baling wire, comes crashing down.

Logan's one of the tortured heroes you can't stay mad at. I tried when my heart was dragged over a cheese grater by the author but to no avail. I loved him, despite him playing unfair and lashing out. His smiles and laughter are an illusion and underneath his skin the wound never healed. But he is also sweet and affectionate. He was perfectly imperfect, he left me raw and hurting for him.

I am lost.
I am high, floating.
I am low, beneath the earth’s surface.
I am night. She is day.
I am darkness. She is light.

Aubrey was a wonderful heroine who had her own demons to battle and she often was her own worst enemy. Her need to protect herself by not showing how much Logan means to her is crushing and sad, but she is also forgiving if the person deserves it. She pulled my heartstrings with a deep-seated loneliness and fear of getting hurt again.

“One day…” Aubrey whispers. “I’ll be your Mary, Logan. I’ll be the one to take away your pain.”


We are re-united with the rest of the Preston family and while I love each and everyone of them Lachy and his dad have a special place in my heart. The way the youngest Preston brother connected with Aubrey was moving, touching, heart-warming. This little one is wise beyond his years yet allowed to be a kid because his whole family goes to great lengths to make it so. They are such a solid support system and safety net that you know, even if things seem hopeless, everything will be OK in the end. I also hope for a story for Tom - even though his wife was the love of his life...if somebody can do a story about him justice it's Jay.

Ms. McLean impressed me with LUCAS last year. This year she upped the ante and I am so thankful that she gave me the chance to read and review this little masterpiece of New Adult romance. The author combines the dry humor I love so much with visceral storytelling and if you want to hop on an emotional roller coaster there is no better ride than this one.


“What if we try, Red? What if we try, and what if that was all I could promise you? Will that be enough?”

LOGAN is the second in the PRESTON BROTHERS series and can be read as a standalone.










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COVER REVEAL ✮ BOOK TRAILER ✮ NICOLE ARCHER ✮ FIELD TRIPPED

| On
Friday, September 29, 2017



Field-Tripped

Release Date: October 30, 2017
A new standalone holiday romance from Nicole Archer.
 
I was done with games. But playing with her is so much fun.
Ten years ago, I was all set to compete in the winter Olympics. Then I lost everything—my career, my best friend, and my girlfriend.
After that, I stopped playing games for good. I swore never to go back to Colorado. Too many bad memories. Plus, she’s still there.
Now I live a simple life as a creative director at Shimura Advertising in New York. All is good, until my boss cons me and my coworkers into spending two weeks in Colorado at Proton Sports’ sleep-away camp for adults, pitching their business. Turns out Proton’s idea of a pitch is making the agencies battle each other in a bunch of ridiculous winter games.
Guess who owns the rival company? Her. And she’s out to get me. I might just let her win.




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BLOG TOUR ✮ KATHARINE ASHE ✮ THE DUKE

| On
Thursday, September 28, 2017









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…




The Duke
by Katharine Ashe

Series
Devil’s Duke #3

Genre
Adult
Historical Romance

Publisher
Avon Books

Publication Date
September 26, 2017






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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.


Katharine’s Links


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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.





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COVER REVEAL ✮ LH COSWAY ✮ CRACKS DUET

| On
Thursday, September 28, 2017

We are excited to reveal the cover for 

L.H. Cosway's 

Cracks Duet












So,hypothetical scenario. An alien species comes to earth, but we share no common language. We can only communicate through pictures and sounds. At first, they see our art, hear our music, gaze upon our sacred lands and they’re dazzled by the beauty. But then, as they explore deeper, they see all the stuff we’d prefer to hide; the pain, the cruelty, the pointless wars.

If you were one of the aliens, would you let us live or wipe us out?

Heavy question, I know, but I didn’t always think this way. Life used to be simple. I was a typical city girl with small dreams that were big enough for her. Then I met Dylan O’Dea. He changed how I saw the world, opened my eyes.

For him, the sky was always falling. I guess that was why he achieved so many great things. The constant fear of catastrophe was an excellent motivator. It’s kind of poetic that he came back to me 16 minutes and 59 seconds into Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7.

Dylan showed me the crack in everything. How our world is a contradiction of beauty and ugliness. How we choose to ignore the awful and gloss over it with the palatable. How you need just a tiny drop of something unsavoury to create every great scent.

Pretty deep for a pair of teenagers living in a block of council flats in inner city Dublin, right? Probably. But that wouldn’t always be our lot. We’d part ways, cross oceans and come together again. Dylan would create perfumes adored by women across the globe and I would be the one who first showed him the magic of flowers.

My name is Evelyn Flynn and I’m going to tell you about the cracks.








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