©2014 Zondervan – Excerpt used with permission

Reggie exploded out the door and into the pack of waiting press. The chilled air reached for her, and she longed for Tallahassee’s late September heat.

“Princess, over here.”

“What do you think of Hessenberg?”

“Are you really the great-granddaughter of Princess Alice?”

“Are you going to sign the entail?”

Cameras clicked and buzzed in her ears and her forward motion stopped when she sank into the mud of media.  Read More

Justice For Abby is on sale now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes!

Nowhere to hide…

Fashion designer Abigail Harris has been rescued, but her nightmare is far from over. Determined to put her harrowing ordeal behind her and move on, she struggles to pick up the pieces of her life while eluding the men who want her dead.

The Mid-Atlantic Sex Ring is in ruins after Abby’s interviews with the police. The organization is eager to exact their revenge before her testimony dismantles the multi-million dollar operation for good.

Abby’s safety rests in the hands of former US Marshal, Jerrod Quinn. Serious-minded and obsessed with protocol, Ethan Cooke Security’s newest agent finds himself dealing with more than he bargains for when he agrees to take on his beautiful, free-spirited client.  Read More

Synopsis
The girl with the curves! Sometimes life seems straightforward, but what happens when there are curves along the way. Does it seem fair that some get the straight road and others the winding road?

When curvy Harley finally gets the job of her dreams after twenty job applications, she’s in for a big surprise. Sebastian Forrest, her new boss is the man she’d love to hate. For a while Sebastian goes against her and makes her feel like she isn’t good enough, but there’s a reason, and soon Harley will find out why.

The road isn’t straightforward and the more Harley gets to know Sebastian the more her heart warms to him. But soon she finds out something that takes her back to her bitter past and forces her to ask some difficult questions.

The girl with the curves is the first in the series of Positive Curves.  Read More

Abused constantly by her husband, Elliana is determined to make her marriage work. As a daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher, divorce is unheard of in her family, not to mention that it could cause her father to disown her if she even discussed it.

When Elliana’s husband, Mark, who is a part of the Search and Rescue Team in the US Navy, is transferred from Pensacola, Florida, Elliana travels with him, leaving her mother and father behind.

Alone and afraid in a small California town of Mountain View, Elliana takes on a job as a receptionist at a well-known advertising firm. Shortly after her employment, her boss, Kate, notices Elliana coming to work wearing more makeup than usual and disengaging herself from her colleagues. Coming from an abusive marriage, Kate is familiar with the signs of domestic abuse and brings it to the attention of the Human Resources department in hopes to get Elliana some help. With Elliana being across country from her family, Kate knows exactly how hard it is to get out of that particular situation.
When Griffin Reid, the most eligible bachelor on the West Coast arrives at the advertising agency for a meeting with the company’s CEO, he is utterly shocked when he sees the battered receptionist seated behind the desk, trying her hardest to paste on a smile. When their eyes meet, Griffin if fully aware that he is looking at his soul mate. During his meeting, he asks the CEO of Elliana’s situation and is stunned of what Dave reveals to him. With tension settling in his gut, he is determined to rescue her from the hands of the monster who is hurting her, and Griffin stops at nothing to prove how much he loves her. Read More

Fantasy anyone?

During a mystery writers’ conference a couple of weeks ago (yep, I write those, too) I was talking to another author (male) and the subject of what women want came up.
Well, the subject was 50 Shades of Grey. When authors get together they always want to talk about books that sell millions of copies.

If we could figure out the formula, we’d sell millions, too!

The conversation went beyond book sales, though. The guy was truly wondering why millions of women bought and read the book. Read More

War’s Passion, Sons of War book 1
By Lia Davis
Published by: Fated Desires Publishing
Genre: paranormal romance, dragon-shifters
Heat level: 4 flames

Series blurb:

Blurb:

After losing her parents in a brutal attack from a monster straight out of her nightmares, Gwendolyn Preston tries to pick up the shattered pieces of her life. Along with her best friend, she moves to a small fishing village on the coast of Maine to find a new life away from the nightmares that haunt her. Just when she believes her life could go back to normal, the deliciously dark and handsome Markus Sullivan disrupts her hopes to grieve in peace. Read More

Gothic Shivers (or Romance with a Dash of Horror!)

Crumbling manor houses, gloomy corridors, ghostly apparitions and eerie secrets. Just a few of the reasons why gothic romance has enthralled readers for over two centuries

Gothic romances are all about setting, uncertainty, and an element of creepiness that makes the romance all the sweeter. The hidden story is as important, perhaps more important, than the explicit. Think ghostly shadows rather than chain-saw wielding serial killers. Fingertips of nervous and sensual excitement are trailed down the spine in equal measure. The dark atmosphere is integral to the suspense, and the most frightening elements are often implied rather than stated outright. Our heroines have a tendency to ignore common sense and explore dark houses or stormy cliff-top castles, but they are also brave, loyal, and determined. The gothic heroine will fight for the man she loves, even if she has a sneaking suspicion he may be trying to kill her. Our brooding heroes are misunderstood by everyone, including the heroine at first (see above). Read More

I love travel, and I’ve been fortunate enough to actually have lived or visited many of the places I’ve written about. The problem is that my knowledge is modern. So, in order to move my characters from one place to the next, I have to research what the city, town, or area was like back in the Regency era. Sometimes this is disappointing. For example, When Huntley and Caro visited Ulm, Germany, the city was not beautiful with the high spire of the cathedral. Instead, city was war damaged, the walls were in ruins from being bombarded, and the spire was still around forty years away. However, what was almost exactly the same, was Innsbruck, Austria. It had not suffered from the war, and many of the same buildings in the town today, existed in 1817.

Innsbruck was an elegant town with tall painted houses. Their hotel was a few blocks from the river and right in the middle of the main shopping area. They were shown the most luxurious quarters they’d had thus far on their journey. Tall ceilings were decorated with carved, brightly painted beams. A large bed with royal blue and gold hangings stood against one wall. From the windows, he glimpsed the Inn River and the snow-covered mountains beyond.

They’d arrived in time for luncheon, which Huntley had ordered served in the parlor adjoining their bedchamber.

“What do you think?” he asked as he set down his serviette. Read More

Some secrets are better left dead.

Rachel James’ ex-husband is released from prison determined to reclaim her and her little girl — the child is his key to controlling the James fortune. Rachel flees to Denver with the child who hasn’t uttered a word since her daddy went to prison.

Contractor Patrick Thorne wants nothing to do with another of his parents’ charity cases. He failed his own wife so abysmally she took her own life as well as his unborn son’s. After two years, it’s time to concentrate on the bid he’s won and the saboteur trying to destroy his construction firm.

There’s no room for trust in either of their hearts. But trust is all that will untangle the secrets that dominate their lives, free a little girl of her silent prison, and save them all from a serial killer who stands too close.

Prologue

Four weeks….

Two days….

Sixteen hours….

…‘Til death. Read More

Love Triangles

Have you ever been torn between two men? Two loves, each powerful enough to potentially eclipse the other? I can honestly say I’ve never had that experience, and it’s hard for me to imagine how it could be possible. My experience of love is of something complete, exclusive, and all-encompassing. But the idea of a love triangle is a popular one in fiction and other art forms, and I have to admit to finding it fascinating. When my novel In the Dark begins, the main character, Josie, has two men in her life—one she wants but doesn’t trust, and swears she will never love, and another whom she trusts with her life, but who hasn’t yet made much progress trying to capture her heart. I guess this is the version of a love triangle I can imagine—one in which the person choosing between two others is conflicted, and not quite ready to say the L word about either one.

Josie’s not really trying to figure it out, or particularly hoping that either of them will be her soul mate. She thinks she knows what she has to do, and that she will skip town and leave them both in the dust when she has done it. After all, they each take a turn making her feel safe one minute, and scared for her life the next. She’s ready to run. She doesn’t believe in soul mates anymore, anyway, and the idea that she could have real feelings for a guy again after the mother of all bad break-ups is, to her, the best reason of all to stay away from both of them. And yet she feels drawn to something about each of them. Johnny is funny, affectionate, and—let’s face it—awesome in bed. Peter is calm, in control, sensitive, and trustworthy. And he looks like a particularly handsome menswear catalog model. There’s not a lot of overlap between their good qualities, but maybe that’s what makes the dilemma possible in the first place. Read More

The technique whereby a person’s beliefs, or what they think they know to be true, are altered. People have been suspending disbelief ever since they could communicate. A hominid embellishing the story of taking down his prey; a tribal elder keeping alive the tale of his peoples’ origins; or a sixteenth century actor and playwright whose famous Sonnet 18 - compares a lady to a summer’s day. All edging out what our senses, or common sense, tells us is true.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, nineteenth century poet and philosopher used the term “a semblance of truth.” So if you tell me the hero of a contemporary romance lived in a building with four walls made of uncontained water, I would have to take my business elsewhere. Or not. True, it’s a contemporary romance and not sci-fi or paranormal, but maybe the hero is a scientist on the cutting edge of force field technology. Maybe the contemporary romance has elements that bleed into other sub-genres. Convince me. Some writers assume since they are writing fiction, it’s the reader’s responsibility to use his or her imagination when given a scenario that falls outside the realm of the five senses or the world of physics. The responsibility, as I see it, lies with the writer. He or she lays the groundwork, and if they’ve done a credible job, the reader suspends disbelief. Read More