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Wicked Wednesday Reads: The Power of Peppermint

Whee, it’s Wednesday! And with the holidays closing in on us, it’s time to feature the lovely L.D. Blakeley and her brand spanking new holiday romance The Power of Peppermint, now available for the amazing sale price of 99¢ from Amazon and other online retailers of fine erotic romance. Enjoy!


finalthe-power-of-peppermintThe most wonderful time of the year?

When Jamison Pritchett is roped into replacing the mall photographer at Santa’s Village a week before Christmas, he’s certain he’ll be spending the holidays recovering from a nervous breakdown. A throng of sugar-frenzied kids might be enough to send this uptight photographer back into the darkroom permanently. Inappropriate thoughts about his far-too-attractive—and far-too-young—assistant aren’t helping fight that urge to hide, either.

For Noah Hawkins, adulting is a snap. Too bad relationships aren’t. With his business temporarily closed for repairs, he’s happy to help his sister out of a jam, even if the costume he’s given to wear borders on obscene. Constantly being mistaken for a teenager is no treat either, especially when he discovers his temporary new co-worker is sexy as hell and 15 years his senior.

Can Noah convince Jamison that age is just a number? Or will Jamison resist the gift Santa seems to be handing him on a platter?

Story Excerpt

“We’re closed,” he called out.

“I know,” a familiar voice answered. Noah.

With the studio’s front shades drawn, he hadn’t noticed the other man’s approach. As he neared the door, however, he could see Noah’s unmistakable silhouette.

He opened the door. “What are you doing here?” He studied Noah’s face, trying desperately to remain impervious to his charm.

“Figured we needed to talk.” Noah brushed past Jamison and closed the door behind him.

“About what?” He fought the urge that rose up and told him to run his fingers across Noah’s chiseled jaw. “Shouldn’t you be packing for your trip?”

“Jamison. You should know better than to eavesdrop.” Noah’s tone was teasing but kind. “Or, at the very least, make sure you eavesdrop on the entire conversation.”

“I’m sorry. I mean he’s your ex. And you and I haven’t…” He trailed off, not quite sure how to finish his sentence.

“You and I might not have.” Noah pursed his lips and grinned around a half-eaten candy cane. “But that doesn’t change the fact that Travis is history. And I would imagine trolling the bars as we speak looking for someone willing to pay for his cruise.”

“Oh.” He would have been lying if he’d said he was sorry to hear it.

“So,” Noah drawled. “Just a kid, eh?” He leaned against Jamison’s desk, his lips wrapped invitingly around the minty candy.

Jamison felt himself flush. “Look, I’m sorry, okay. I didn’t mean anything by it. But let’s be real—you are significantly younger than me. And in that outfit they have you in, you barely look legal.”

“Good thing I am, then, isn’t it? It’d really suck for this—” Noah grabbed Jamison by the hips and devoured him in an absolutely soul-scorching kiss. “—to be something punishable by law, wouldn’t it?” he whispered against Jamison’s lips.

“I’m not so sure it shouldn’t be,” Jamison panted. The zing of mint from Noah’s kiss was electrifying. His heartbeat sped up as he watched the other man slowly slide the Christmas confection out of his mouth, tucking the dry end into his shirt pocket.

“Well if I’m going to be reprimanded, I’d better make it worth my while then.” Noah pulled him in for another kiss, his hands deftly untucking Jamison’s shirt. His hips rolled in a teasing rhythm against Jamison’s groin while he trailed his fingers southward.

Jamison was on fire. And when Noah reached for his belt, he sucked in a ragged breath.

“Wait—” He pulled back, lust and anxiety battling it out for control. “Someone could … the door.” He gestured toward the front of the studio.

Noah licked once more at his bottom lip, then sauntered over to the door and locked it. He double checked to make sure the blinds were completely shut.

“There. Now nobody will know we’re even here.” He headed back toward Jamison, his eyes full of promise.

“This is a bad idea. You know that, right?” Jamison was trying to convince himself more than anything. From the look on Noah’s face, he’d already made up his mind about what was going to happen.

And when Noah dropped to his knees with a dirty grin, Jamison knew too.

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Where to Buy

Amazon | ARe | Smashwords

About the Author

L.D. Blakeley is a pragmatist with a romantic soul & a dirty mind. She loves horror movies, hot sex, and happily ever afters. She’s easily distracted by shiny things, and is a slightly neurotic, highly ambitious dreamer who enjoys dabbling in photography & pretending she can carry a tune.

In another life, L.D. was a newspaper reporter, an entertainment & music writer, travel writer, website content editor, and a marketing shill. Now she prefers to spend her time writing hot, steamy fiction (with a healthy dose of romance) about intriguing, sexy men.  Although she dreams of living some place isolated with an endless supply of wine and an infinite number of titles on her eReader, she currently lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and their rock star cat.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads

A look at the numbers behind Empress of Storms

TreeRibbon01 As I sit here taking a break from Christmas preparations (today’s arts and crafts section included making 22 wired ribbon bows for the tree with on-sale Christmas ribbon, floral wire, hot glue, and the not really needed assistance of my cat Jemma. Still, 22 tree ribbons for $7.60 — BOOYAH), I decided to take a look at the sales figures for Empress. I’m very happy to note that it’s made sales every day, and it’s sold in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Australia so far, which means my legion of readers is growing, muwahahahaha.

Then I got down to business and crunched numbers. My entire production cost for the ebook and print book was $120, and advertising, giveaways, tchotchkes et al racked up another $177.56. So far based on the numbers I’ve gotten from Amazon, All Romance eBooks and Smashwords (I can’t see numbers from Smashwords’s partners and won’t get those figures until February at the earliest) income from the book has completely paid for production and 42% of the marketing budget. Considering that I’ve never written high fantasy before in my life, Empress is an MF book so my MM readers probably aren’t going to be interested, and this is the first Nicola M. Cameron outing so those who don’t know me are taking a chance on a “new” author, I’m kinda pleased with this. Yes, it’s not a huge amount of money, but frankly Empress was, as Ramón put it, supposed to be a quota quickie, TreeRibbon02something I just did to win a challenge. It turned out to be way more popular than I expected, and more and more people are asking for sequels so I should be making more money once Book Two and Three are out in 2016.

Yes, there will be sequels. Yes, I’ll be finishing the Olympic Cove series as well. No, I’m not going to stop writing MM, just expand my horizon a little. And hey, I may even be writing some non-erotic SF novels in 2016 as well! Because sleep is for the weak, muwahahahahaha…

Okay, back to the decorating, tra la…

Wicked Wednesday Reads: Cupid #holiday #christmas #erotica #romance #shifter #paranormal #pnr

Whee, it’s Wednesday and Christmas is right around the corner! Let’s celebrate this with Lucy Felthouse and her delightful new holiday romance, Cupid, now available from Evernight Publishing and other online retailers of fine erotic romance. Take it away, Lucy!

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Cupid-EvernightPublishing-Jayaheer2015-smallpreviewAs a postman by day, and one of Santa’s reindeer on a single very special night, Cassius Cupid eats, sleeps, and breathes deliveries. He doesn’t mind, but sometimes wishes that someone would send him something more exciting than bills and junk mail.

One cold January morning, Cassius gets his wish. A young woman arrives with a parcel. Turns out it’s for his housemate – but Cassius doesn’t care. All he’s interested in is Carina – the beautiful female courier.

Has Cupid finally met his match?

Story Excerpt

Cassius Cupid woke with a start, and then sat bolt upright in his bed. Shit, I’m going to be late! was his first thought.

Milliseconds later his brain switched on, and he remembered. He was on holiday. Flopping back onto the warm mattress and pillows with a contented sigh, he smiled. No work for fourteen whole days—it was going to be utter bliss. He stretched, relishing the feeling it created in his sleep-softened muscles. Ahhh…this is the life.

He knew he wouldn’t go back to sleep—hell, it was eight o’clock, which was practically the middle of the day for someone in his profession—so Cassius fell to thinking about how he was going to spend his day, not to mention the several others in front of him. God knew he deserved to relax and have some fun. He’d just emerged from the busiest part of his year, and he was more than ready to do some chilling out.

He enjoyed his job as a postman—he really did—but the Christmas period was a total killer. He idly wondered how many cards and presents he’d delivered over the past few weeks. It didn’t bear thinking about. Once you factored in the festive period itself, the weird few days between Christmas and New Year, and then the flurry of mail that got sent when everyone went back to work properly at the beginning of January, he’d racked up some serious deliveries. And that was before you even thought about his other job—which was for just one day a year, but was arguably more important than the other 364 put together.

Cassius—or Cupid, as he was known to his boss and colleagues in his second, but most important job—was not only a regular postman for the Royal Mail, but also a reindeer. For a single day of the year, Cassius had the supernatural power to transform into one of Santa’s faithful steeds and help pull that famous magical sleigh, delivering presents to excited children the world over.

Therefore, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Cassius really did eat, sleep and breathe deliveries, but not for the next fourteen days. All he planned to do was watch some TV, read some books, maybe go out hiking, meet some friends… basically anything that wasn’t delivering something to someone. Hey, he might even receive something through the post himself—preferably not the usual crap; bills and junk mail. He didn’t hold out much hope.

He lounged in bed for another ten minutes before realising he was lying there just for the sake of it. Being on holiday didn’t have to equal staying in bed all day—and certainly not for someone as active as him. He reached over to his bedside table, grabbed his glasses and put them on. Throwing off his thick duvet, he walked to his bedroom window and peeked out through the curtains, immediately glad of the effective central heating he and his housemate had forked out to have installed the previous year.

The outside world was covered in a thick layer of snow, and Cassius was mightily glad that he wasn’t out delivering letters and parcels. The stuff was treacherous enough without having to carry a heavy bag up and down driveways, paths, and pavements — most of which either hadn’t been cleared, or had been cleared badly, leaving incredibly slippery patches of ground for an unsuspecting postie to come across. God knows he’d gone down enough times, but, much to his relief, nobody had ever seen him do it. He’d always been relatively unharmed—excerpt for his pride, of course—and had been able to scramble back to his feet and carry on.

The eerie silence outside was broken by the rumble of an engine, and Cassius turned his head to look up the street—he lived in a cul-de-sac, so he knew that’s where the vehicle would come from—and watched as a delivery van made its way slowly and carefully down the road. He hoped the driver was sensible enough to try and steer over the thickest parts of the snow—the more people went over and over the same patches, packing it down, the more the road surface resembled an ice rink. And since the cul-de-sac was on a slight hill, it was easy enough to get stuck. He’d seen it so many times—even going outside one time last winter to suggest the driver go down to the bottom of the road, turn around and try reversing up the hill—an almost foolproof plan for vans with rear-wheel drive. He’d gotten a big thumbs-up for that suggestion as the driver finally got to the junction where the road became flat, and went on his merry way.

As the van drew closer to his house, he saw that the driver was a woman. That would explain her cautious driving—he’d never admit it to one of his drinking buddies, but women were far superior when it came to driving in adverse weather conditions. He even thought he’d seen some survey containing statistics that proved it.

Where to Buy

Evernight Publishing
Amazon
All Romance eBooks
Bookstrand
Goodreads

Aboreleaseblitzbutton_cupidut Lucy Felthouse

Lucy Felthouse is a very busy woman! She writes erotica and erotic romance in a variety of subgenres and pairings, and has over 140 publications to her name, with many more in the pipeline. These include several editions of Best Bondage Erotica, Best Women’s Erotica 2013 and Best Erotic Romance 2014. Another string to her bow is editing, and she has edited and co-edited a number of anthologies, and also edits for a small publishing house. She owns Erotica For All, is book editor for Cliterati, and is one eighth of The Brit Babes. Find out more at http://www.lucyfelthouse.co.uk. Join her on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to her newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/gMQb9.

 

Sometimes, Google amuses me

I was looking recently for pictures of adorable kittens (I know, like those are so rare on the Internet) and ran a search on Google with the search parameters “cute kittens.”

I was extremely amused to see the following:

CuteKittensSherlockJohn

Well, I guess Sherlock and John do sorta qualify as cute kittens…

In other news Empress of Storms continues to sell briskly, I’m working on Iron Cross and Cross Current at the same time, and the Christmas cleaning has begun, selah.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

XmasStaircaseHappy December! Of course, what that means in the Cameron manse is that I have to clean this place from top to bottom and get it decorated for the holidays (which in this house usually means Christmas, although I have been known to observe Festivus on occasion). And what with five cats and an absent-minded husband who has a tendency to leave things strewn around the house, that’s a lot of cleaning to do, plus there’s the fact that I kinda skipped a lot of cleaning during the Empress writing marathon and NaNoWriMo and Lord, you would not believe the cat hair buildup in my office…

But I digress. Holiday preparations here means putting up the library tree and the smaller one in the kitchen, draping lights over every surface that can taken them (the picture at left is a total and blatant lie — it rarely looks that nice, I can assure you) and switching out the seasonal garland over the door for a poinsettia chain. My sister goes all out at her place — it looks like Santa Claus had sex with Martha Stewart. So what are some of the holiday things you want to do this month? I’m always open to suggestions!

Oh, and since I did win this, I probably should put it up. Go me! Now I just have to get it edited and off to the agent, then go back to work on Cross Current, write the Christmas bear shifter story that my bitch of a Muse decided to drop on me yesterday, get a few other projects done and out to their patiently waiting owners, and start putting together swag for Wild Wicked Weekend and RT next year. Whee!

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