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Tag: romance

Find Me in July Releases!

Find Me in July Releases!

I may be dating myself by saying this, but I was 14 years old in 1978 when this book takes place. My grandparents also had a condo on the lake at Breezy Point Resort and I spent my summers up there as a kid. Sort of like Jessie and Troy do in this book:) So, yes, writing this book helped me relive some very fond memories of my childhood in that special place and that is why it takes place there. Back then, me and the friends I met up there did all those things that Jessie and Troy do, including the weed on the golf course, the frisbee, playing pool at The Commander (which is still there) and boating out at Gooseberry Island. 

The other part of writing this book included researching what gay life was like in my hometown of Minneapolis back then. I do remember driving by the Gay 90’s as a teen and wondering at all the men on the sidewalk and not really understanding what was going on.

 

I was proud to find out that Minneapolis, along with New York and San Francisco, was one of the most liberal and safe places for people in the LGBTQ+ community. This was something I didn’t know about when the plot bunny for this book started screaming inside my head (and boy, did it scream). Now on to the good stuff…

Giveaway!

Three winners of the Rafflecopter giveaway will be able to pick their choice of any of my published works, including this book. There is also a prequel read for this book if you sign up for my newsletter. 🙂

And Now, A Teaser:

Troy followed Jessie to the van, parked outside his family cabin. The lone streetlight hovering at the edge of the woods lit up the side. The cool night air, still heavy with the threat of rain, shivered over his skin. As he grasped the door handle, he glanced at him.
 
Jessie gazed at him with wide eyes, holding a canvas bag in one hand and his boom box in the other. He licked his lips.
 
A rush of desire worked up Troy’s spine. Tonight, he was willing to take things further. He slid the door open and crept inside, his c*ck swelling with anticipation. He’d been looking forward to this all day, and after what Jessie had said in the men’s bathroom, things seemed different. They were closer.
 
Jessie stepped into the van and shut the door, then crawled to him and sat on the shag carpeting, his legs tucked underneath him. “So, do you want to get high first tonight?”
 
“I don’t know. Do you?” Troy placed his hand on Jessie’s cheek. He would if he wanted to.
 
Jessie brushed his cheek against Troy’s hand, focusing on him. “Yeah, I do.” He slid his baggie of joints out of the canvas bag.
“Okay.” Troy tugged the circular table out of the floor, then set it behind the front seats and pulled on the couch frame, making it into a bed. As he sat on the bed, Jessie handed him a lit joint. “Thanks.” He took a long drag, then freed a plume of smoke. His head buzzed. He gave the joint back.
 
Jessie sucked on the joint, held it, then released it. “So, I told you I wanted to try something tonight.” He held the joint to Troy.
 
Troy dragged off the joint a second time, then handed it back to Jessie. “That’s enough for me.” He had an idea what Jessie wanted to do. He was pretty sure he was ready.
 
Jessie took another hit from the joint, pinched it out and tucked it into the baggie, then set it on the cabinet counter. “So, I brought something.”
 
“You didn’t bring your Playguy again, did you?” Troy released a soft giggle and covered his mouth with his hand. The weed was getting to him.
 
Jessie smirked and shook his head once. “No, I didn’t. You goon.” He reached into the canvas bag and pulled out a jar of Vaseline, then held it up. He spread a broad grin over his face.
 
Troy widened his eyes. “I see…” It was what he’d thought. Every night, Jessie had been going on about how good it felt. “Okay, so who goes first?”
 
“Troy, you know I know what I’m doing, right?” Jessie rested the Vaseline jar in his lap.
 
“Yeah.” Troy gnawed on his lip. “So, you want to shove your finger inside my a$$.” He burst out giggling. Maybe he shouldn’t have had the second hit on the joint.
 
Jessie joined him in a round of giggles. “Do you have to say it like that?” He wiped his eyes and calmed. “Damn, man.”
 
“So, what is this supposed to do?” Troy fought to keep a straight face. This was serious to Jessie for some reason. He squirmed. This conversation was not a turn on.

Twin Souls…My Favorite Subject! by Laura Tolomei

Never as on Valentine’s Day is it more pressing to find a soul mate, if one’s lacking of course. And how ironic if once found, it needs convincing that he or her is the one, which is what happened to Martin in To Seduce A Soulmate.

EXCERPT PG M/M

Martin stretched across the table. “Just answer me honestly. Before you met me, have you ever felt you recognized a complete stranger before in your life? Or felt an electrical current run through your body merely by standing next to someone? Or felt your heart beat so fast you feared it might fall out of your chest?”

With a heavy heart, Drake realized there was no point in lying so he had to shake his head in denial, long hair flying around.

“But you did the moment you saw me, right?”

Having felt all that Martin had described, if not more, Drake’s head reluctantly gave in to tentative nod in agreement with the devil’s insight.

“And you still need more proof?”

“I don’t think these signs mean anything. My first crush was surprisingly similar to what you just described…except the recognition part, but that may be a trick of the mind.”

Martin eyed him coldly. “Suit yourself, Pirate. You’re free to believe what you like and I’m not going to convince you. It would be a wasted effort. On my part, I’m just happy to know I’m not crazy.”

Read more on To Seduce A Soulmate

And just for the record, he wasn’t. Luckily, not all soul mates are so recalcitrant, though they’re tied in a dark circle of blood, betrayal and passion from which there is often no return, like in Divinitas.

EXCERPT PG M/M

Shaun grinned. It had taken a long training to remind Halifax who he was and now that it was finally time to explain, it felt odd, maybe because their positions seemed reversed if compared to previous lives. Shifting through past scenarios, Shaun briefly analyzed their timeless relationship, searching for answers. Somehow, Halifax had always been the seducer rather than the seduced. Reversing their roles was a necessary shift, the Druid knew it far too well, but he still had to get used to it.

“Please,” the blond missionary begged, “tell me about it.”

Where to begin? From the ancient walls of Egypt or the Persian prince’s golden bed? From our love…or the betrayal that followed Shaun wondered as images kept playing in the fire.

Read more on Divinitas

Well, maybe it’s not always so complicated. Take Leon and Sean’s case in Tasting Leon’s Mark, the passionate sequel to Re-Scue, soon to be released. where redemption came after all the moment they understood how their connection worked.

EXCERPT PG M/M

As usual, Sean’s insight took Leon by surprise. The more he knew the blond beauty, the more he found his intuition extraordinary. Even more surprising, his amazing brain learned fast to make the right connections. That he was learning more about Leon than anyone else before him was a reality, which perhaps justified the hunter’s need to challenge him as if wanting to be perfectly sure he was the one. And the fact the blond beauty’s lifetime experiences had given him the edge to alter their relationship and bring it to a new balance, however frail it might prove at times, was not conclusive enough.

As Leon’s Indian guru had revealed, his karma changed every time he understood the lessons that he had not grasped in the previous lifetimes. “Life is the soul’s testing ground,” his teacher loved to repeat. “Its ultimate goal is Awareness and you can’t reach it unless you truly deserve it. That’s why life is an endless learning process that doesn’t stop in one lifetime, but continues until the soul acquires perfection by understanding its faulty patterns and correcting them.”

His lifetimes with Sean had always added extra pieces to their puzzle, inevitably changing their karma from one life to the next. Their new forms were the results of such lifetimes and through each, Leon had to admit, the real learner had been Sean. From the start, he had found the way to adapt to the hunter’s immutable challenge while working to change him, too, until his masterful plan had revolutionized their relationship.

Living together had been an important step in their development, one that Leon would have never taken if Sean had not forced the situation. Only then had the hunter understood who was and always had been the key of his development. So he had agreed to turn the page and end their bloody game, which did not seem to fit their evolutions anyway, considering how different they were from the original two who had started it in the first place. And to his amazement, he had not missed it, getting caught, instead, in a whole new sensual world.

Read more on Tasting Leon’s Mark

Read more about Re-Scue

The same that another of my favorite characters, Duncan and Chris, from my Virtus Saga, have been experiencing ever since they laid eyes on each other, for they, too, are soul mates, as confirmed by Lord Christopher Templeton’s words in The Sex Book 1:

EXCERPT PG M/M

All my father’s fault anyway, for wanting to send me, his third and youngest son, to the Caldwell’s to broaden my horizons, or so he claimed. Clinging to his two brothers, eight-years-old Chris had wanted to tell James Templeton it was a useless attempt for his convictions would never change no matter how far he went, but his young age had prevented any serious argument. Still, he was old enough to know what he wanted from life and women were definitely not on the list, in spite of what his father said or did.

Alas, nothing stopped the tragic—or rather blessed, as he later came to see it—chain of events. Exiled from his home, Fair Haven, little Chris had set out on a long journey, for which he had no taste or choice either, cursing the Caldwell’s at every step, along with anyone even remotely connected to them, until destiny had caught up with him at Black Rose’s last bend.

Twisting around the many hills leading up to the estate, he first heard a boy’s happy shout. “Ready or not, here I come.” Another curve and he glimpsed the back of him, dark head lit by Stella’s rays. “It’s no good running, Ylianor.” The boy kept yelling at a little girl. “I’ll catch you.” He seemed all set to go while Chris approached the last bend, but curiously something stopped him and he looked over his shoulder one second before Chris came into full view on the other side of the hill.

With a heart pounding so fast it could’ve dropped out at any moment, Chris had stared at the piercing black eyes transfixed, unmoving, unable to talk, think, breathe or do much else besides recognizing the dark-haired boy, though he had never set eyes on him before in his life. And that the other boy knew him, too, Chris read it clearly in the inquisitive gaze. So it happened, impossibility becoming reality as the unconscious tried to shed light on age-old connections that obviously neither had ever forgotten, though they seemed incomprehensible at present.

Read more on The Sex

Read more on the Virtus Saga

 

Laura Tolomei aka Lalla Gatta

Website: lallagatta.com

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads

 

Crossing the Street by Belinda McBride

Courtesy of www.homotography.com

Most readers who are familiar with me are aware that I like to cross genre. Gleefully, I hop from sci fi to fantasy to paranormal. I’ve done bisexual ménage, interracial, multi-cultural and BDSM as well. So it’s not surprising that I finally ended up writing (and loving) m/m romance…except that I never really wanted or intended to write m/m. I was pretty happy with my straight and bi romances. This genre is so jam packed with new and established talent, there just didn’t seem to be a point. But then, I also vowed never to write werewolves…

There’s always been m/m content in my romances. There’s something so wonderful and winsome about men in love. Many women love that fantasy, especially if they happen to be in the middle of the mix.  In my father’s side of the family, polyamory popped up more than once…(my female relations do love their men!) so I’m comfortable with that concept. I love my heroines and take pride in writing amazing, complex women. I was really quite content with the variety in my writing.

That first m/m story came about pretty much by accident. I was doing a little writing exercise on first person POV and the male character that I was writing really had nothing to say. So I switched to the heroine, who was a bit of a disreputable princess. She kept spouting this line over and over…. ”A whore is a whore…” Beyond that, she didn’t have much to say. So I’m left sitting there with a first person POV exercise where neither character was talking. When that happens, you either scrap the project or turn their world upside-down.

So I made the princess a man.

Suddenly, Hela, who was now Helios, had a lot to say. And my reluctant hero pricked up his ears, got a gleam in his eye and told me that his name was Griffin. The story picked up speed and was suddenly in the hands of my Loose Id editor with a release date. An Uncommon Whore was surprisingly successful.

So my thought was that it was a fluke…right? I really didn’t want to go down that road too far. But when the Coming Out series was proposed at Loose Id, another character that had been languishing in my files came forward with a purpose. His name was Oliver Bleu and he wanted a man of his own. I finally understand the reason some of my characters and stories didn’t fly…they didn’t have chemistry with their heroine!

Have I crossed the road completely? Well, no. I still love my heroines. I love my ménages. But writing m/m romance was such a delightful shake-up in my routine that I certainly won’t be leaving it behind. I like playing off alpha against alpha and pulling little surprises in the balance of dominance. I enjoy letting tough men show their vulnerability to another man. In a good romance, I expect some element of sacrifice, and having a character risk his self image and his machismo is such a sacrifice.

So how did you cross the street? Did you download a m/m romance to see what all the fuss was about? Did you stumble across a manga, only to discover that the pretty girl was really a boy? Tell me about how you came to read or write in the m/m side of the spectrum. I’ll randomly choose a comment and the winner can choose an e-book from my backlist.

Belinda McBride lives in far northern California with her family, which mostly consists of an unruly group of Siberian Huskies. She writes for Loose Id, Changeling Press, Dreamspinner Press and Passion in Print Publishing.

Please visit her website at http://www.belindamcbride.com

Or her blog at http://www.belindam.blogspot.com

More information on her latest release:

LAST CALL EUROPE: BLACK WOLF
M/M Paranormal/Shifter Romance

Blurb:
Siberians live for the thrill of the chase; wolves exist for the joy of the capture. On a foolish dare, Jasper O’Shea takes a gamble at the Last Call, letting fate chose his lover for the night.

Detective Brutus “Brutal” Ballantine came to the Last Call looking for something far different than a sly, clever Siberian Husky. Yet when the call comes over the sound system, he finds himself unable to resist the lure of laughing blue eyes and a happy tail.

The chase is on, but who is the hunter, and who is the prey?

(Author’s note: While this story stands alone, it features characters introduced in Last Call Europe: Devil’s Advocate.)

Read an excerpt at: Changeling Press