Showing posts with label Jessie Lane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jessie Lane. Show all posts
Close Encounters Of The Sexy Kind by Jessie Lane & Abbie Zanders
Title: Close Encounters of the Sexy Kind
Author: Jessie Lane and Abbie Zanders
Genre: Sci/fi Romance
Release Date: April 17, 2018
Destiny’s not just for Earthlings…
Detective Ryan Winslet is a by-the-book kind of girl. The one and only time she allowed her personal feelings to cloud her judgement, the results were devastating. Now she’s getting a chance to make things right, but a certain sexy nightclub owner is muddying the waters.
Tiberius Maximus isn’t the first Aequorian prince to be exiled to Earth. Like his ancestors, he came, he saw, and he conquered. He’s vanquished his enemies, gained a fiercely loyal family, and runs an incredibly successful nightclub that might push a few legal human boundaries. The only thing he doesn’t have is the life mate he so desperately craves – until a salty blonde saunters into his club one night.
When the no-nonsense detective meets the exiled prince, their chemistry is off the intergalactic charts. Tiberius is convinced she’s the one for him, but Ryan’s not taking the bait. Sure, he’s über hot and seems like a great catch, but he’s also involved in some fishy business and thinks he’s from another planet.
Should she follow her head and throw him back? Or follow her instincts… and her heart… and jump into the deep end?
Tiberius sat back and sipped his drink, content to observe. It was amusing to watch the females compete for Donny’s attention. They flirted openly, made lewd suggestions, and sometimes even managed to grope him when he got too close. None of them realized, apparently, that Donny was in a happy, committed relationship with Jay. Donny’s flirtatious behavior was nothing more than his natural, outgoing joie de vivre. The eager females would receive nothing more than a friendly smile and excellent service in exchange for their generous tips, for it was only Jay he sought out at the end of every shift.
Tiberius was in the process of raising the glass to his lips when a voice cut through the din and rang like a crystal bell in his head. “Thanks, but no thanks. And just so you know, I’m a cop and she’s my best friend. If you so much as hurt her feelings, I will be back here, and not for a social call, get me?”
The voice set his nerves and loins tingling. He scanned the crowd, searching for the source.
“Everyone should have such fierce friends. She is in good hands with me, I assure you.” That was from Quintus.
“She’d better be.”
Tiberius stood, his heart thundering in his chest, his mind whirring at tornadic speed. There!He spotted Quintus first, tall and dark, his head bobbing above the majority of shorter humans as he moved away. And there, where he had been, a golden-haired female swathed in blue.
As if drawn by an unseen force, he moved toward her. A fierce, possessive need washed over him. He needed to get her away from the lascivious interests of the worked-up crowd.
Never before had he had such an instant and all-consuming reaction to the mere sight of a woman, in this realm or any other. Dare he hope that his prayers had been answered?
The odds were astronomical, yet his soul cared not. Neither chance nor logic entered into the equation. If the gods had decided to bless him with a mate, then they would also ensure their paths crossed at a location and timing of their choosing. Why not here? Why not now?
He stopped only a short distance away. She was looking in the other direction.
He took a moment to rake his eyes over her. Loose waves of golden silk cascaded over curves that made his mouth water. She was smaller than he had originally thought, barely reaching his neck, even in heels.
As if sensing his presence, she turned. Big, blue-green eyes, the perfect color of an Aequorian sea, widened as her gaze rose upward. He couldn’t help feeling pleased when her skin flushed a lovely shade of pink and her lips parted slightly. With his superior senses, he could hear her heart speed up and feel the heat radiating from her body.
“Oh,” she said.
Oh, indeed.
They stared at each other for a long moment, until the spell was broken when an overexuberant patron plowed into her back, pushing her forward, right into Tiberius’s waiting arms.
Energy coursed through his body, firing every nerve and lighting him up from the inside out.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, righting herself.
He wasn’t. It took every ounce of discipline he possessed not to pull her right back into his embrace.
When another surge of the crowd threatened, he placed his hand on her lower back and firmly but gently guided her out of harm’s way. “May I purchase a beverage for you?”
She blinked then shook her head slightly as if to clear it. “Thank you, but no. I was just leaving.”
Leaving? No, he couldn’t allow that. Not until he knew more about her and this inexplicable pull she seemed to have on him.
“Unacceptable.”
“Why unacceptable?”
“Because I have only just found you.”
“Does that line usually work?”
“I do not know. You are the first woman to whom I have spoken those words.”
Her eyes softened, then she cleared her throat. “Oh, you’re good.”
He grinned. “Does that mean it is working?”
She laughed, the sound filling his chest with light. “Kind of, yeah. But I really was just leaving. This”—she waved her hand around her—“isn’t really for me.”
“Then perhaps you will allow me to suggest a quieter venue, one where we may talk and get to know each other. There is a small eatery just down the street. I have been told it is quite good.”
She considered him for a moment then nodded. “Yeah, okay. Why not?”
Copyright © 2017-2018 Abbie Zanders & Jessie Lane.
All rights reserved.
Jessie Lane is a best-selling author of Paranormal and Contemporary Romance, as well as, Upper YA Paranormal Romance/Fantasy.
She lives in Kentucky with her two little Rock Chicks in-the-making and her over protective alpha husband that she’s pretty sure is a latent grizzly bear shifter. She has a passionate love for reading and writing naughty romance, cliff hanging suspense, and out-of-this-world characters that demand your attention, or threaten to slap you around until you do pay attention to them.
She’s also a proud member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA).
Abbie Zanders is a sucker for romance and promises her readers two things: happily ever afters, always, and no cliffhangers, ever. Alpha males and strong heroines are a given.
Abbie was born and raised in Northeastern Pennsylvania, USA. With degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics, she worked for more than twenty-five years as a software engineer, designing and writing financial applications, though she has also held second jobs as a deli clerk, pub waitress, restaurant baker, and secretary. She has been crafting stories since elementary school. She is a very busy wife and mother of three (including a set of identical twins). Besides being an avid reader and writer, she also loves animals (especially big dogs), classic muscle cars, and 80's hair bands.
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Purrfect Santa: Howls Romance by Jessie Lane & Chasity Bowlin
Title: Purrfect Santa: Howls Romance
Author: Jessie Lane & Chasity Bowlin
Genre: Paranormal Romance Novella
Release Date: December 12, 2017
A woman afraid to love …
Nikki knows what it is to lose those you love. With her focus on her orphaned sister, she hasn’t given herself the chance to process her own grief over the loss of their parents. Life is chaos and the last complication she needs is a mate.
A lion alone for too long …
Joe Miller knows chaos. Being orphaned as a child, he’s never had a family to call his own. Crashing with a friend for the holidays, he’s hoodwinked into playing Santa Claus at a local mall. The last thing on his mind is finding a mate.
A love worth the risk …
With her baby sister on her hip, sadness in her eyes, and a longing in her heart, Nikki waits in line with her sister to see Santa. From the moment he scents her, Joe is in deep. It’s going to take everything he has to convince Nikki the love outweighs the risk to her heart. Luckily for Joe, he has fate and Nikki’s adorable baby sister on his side. After all, who can say no to the Purrfect Santa at Christmas?
Chapter One
If one more kid tried to pull his beard, he was going to roar.
Joe looked at the small spawn of Satan currently sitting on his lap and held in the urge to growl. The kid was maybe five years old, had blonde hair, blue eyes and dimples galore. His first thought was she was adorable. Now, after she’d pulled on his Santa beard during the picture, he knew better. She was nothing but trouble. If he really were Santa, he would give her coal in her stocking and a letter advising her parents to put her in the naughty corner.
“Smile, Santa!”
The photographer’s words were more of a warning than a cue to get ready for the second picture. So Joe played his role, ho ho ho’d, and smiled for the camera while the brat on his lap asked him for a pony.
There had been a time when Joe hadn’t dreaded Christmas so much. Back when he was a kid and everything about Christmas had still seemed so magical. Not so much anymore. It sucked when you spent the holidays alone. To say he was a bit bitter about the holiday season was an understatement.
Which was part of the reason he couldn’t believe he was here at The Mall of the Smokies, being the damn Santa. How had he gotten wrangled into this position again?
His buddy Sam. Buddy. So much for never leaving a man behind, he thought. There he sat, covered from head to toe in red velvet that was none too fresh and none too clean, thanks to the boozy sweat of the previous wearer. Of course, he’d also had more than one kid with a leaky diaper on his lap that day.
And Sam, where was Sam? Nowhere to be seen.
Joe and Sam had served together in the Marine Corps, but once Sam had completed his term of service, he’d come back home to help run the family business, a lodge in the mountains of East Tennessee. Joe, having nowhere to go after getting out of the service himself, had taken Sam up on his offer to crash at the Bearadise Lodge.
There was just one catch. The Lodge was sponsoring Santa’s Workshop at the local outlet mall, and they were short one Santa. Apparently, the old Santa had been fired for drinking on the job.
Damn that Sam!
After only one day of being Santa, Joe could see why the previous hire had been driven to drink. These kids were hell on his nerves. Like the blonde brat who was once again pulling on his beard. He was just about to give her a little growl when she hopped off his lap and ran giggling to her mother, who gave him an unapologetic glance before dismissing him entirely.
This job would have been so much easier if he were in a shifter-run community. Then he could growl all he wanted. Instead, he was dealing with humans and had to keep his feline traits under wraps.
As the next kid, a little boy about the age of four, climbed on to his lap and proceeded to fart, Joe did his best not to cringe. Bullets and bad guys he could deal with. Snot-nosed kids were apparently his downfall. He’d only been at this for a day and he was thinking of telling Sam he could shove this Santa job where the sun didn’t shine. Joe didn’t even want to think about doing this until Christmas Eve. Three days away. Three long, miserable, endless days of bratty kids, droopy diapers, and disaffected parents more interested in their phones than their kids.
In fact, as the next kid proceeded to sneeze all over him, Joe considered walking out right then.
But then something happened that kept him glued to his seat. His sharp lion senses caught a new smell among the crowd. Peppermint and sugar cookies.
Mate, his lion roared inside his head.
The one person that was cosmically meant for him and him alone. The woman that Mother Nature deemed his. He scanned the crowd until he finally saw her at the end of the line, waiting to come see him.
Short, with generous curves that would fill his hands, she had black hair pulled to the top of her head in a messy bun. He wondered what color her eyes were, being too far away to see them. Scanning the rest of her body, he suddenly stopped when he came to the thing that shocked him the most.
A kid on her hip.
Was it her child? From this far away, he couldn’t scent the small one. Had someone already laid hands on his mate? His lion roared again, only this time it was in protest. No one should touch his mate but him! He would slaughter the man who had dared give his mate a cub.
“SANTA!” the elf behind the camera shouted.
Joe snapped his attention back to the man he was going to eviscerate for taking his concentration away from his mate, only to find a scared human staring at him. It was then he realized the child on his lap was shaking in fear.
The elf inched forward to whisper so the others in line couldn’t hear. “You growled at him, Santa! Say you’re sorry.”
His stomach sank. To say he felt like a colossal piece of shit was an understatement. He had been so wrapped up in his emotions that he had let his lion slip out a little in public, which was a big hell no in the shifter rules. Joe looked at the little boy on his lap and gave the kid a big smile, trying to play off what had happened. “How would you like a stuffed lion for Christmas? They go grrrrrrr.”
The little boy looked at him with wide eyes that slowly turned from fear to curiosity. “You can make a stuffed lion that growls?”
Joe nodded. “Sure can. I can put the elves to work on it right away if that’s what you want.”
The little boy scrunched his face up in thought but then shook his head no. “I really want a bike for Christmas, Santa. Can I have that instead of the lion?”
Relieved that the boy was no longer scared, Joe gave him a big grin and a wink. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yippee!” The boy squealed as he jumped off Joe’s lap and ran to his mother, who was waiting for him next to the photographer.
Joe watched as the boy happily walked away, then quickly turned his attention back to his mate, who was watching him from the back of the line with big wary eyes. The mating scent was too strong. He couldn’t tell whether or not the child was hers, but that didn’t matter.
She was his.
And if that meant he had to accept another man’s cub into his home to claim his mate, then that’s what he would do. Although he would take great pleasure in rubbing his scent all over both woman and cub every chance that he got. Just to make sure that everyone knew that they were now his and his alone.
If one more kid tried to pull his beard, he was going to roar.
Joe looked at the small spawn of Satan currently sitting on his lap and held in the urge to growl. The kid was maybe five years old, had blonde hair, blue eyes and dimples galore. His first thought was she was adorable. Now, after she’d pulled on his Santa beard during the picture, he knew better. She was nothing but trouble. If he really were Santa, he would give her coal in her stocking and a letter advising her parents to put her in the naughty corner.
“Smile, Santa!”
The photographer’s words were more of a warning than a cue to get ready for the second picture. So Joe played his role, ho ho ho’d, and smiled for the camera while the brat on his lap asked him for a pony.
There had been a time when Joe hadn’t dreaded Christmas so much. Back when he was a kid and everything about Christmas had still seemed so magical. Not so much anymore. It sucked when you spent the holidays alone. To say he was a bit bitter about the holiday season was an understatement.
Which was part of the reason he couldn’t believe he was here at The Mall of the Smokies, being the damn Santa. How had he gotten wrangled into this position again?
His buddy Sam. Buddy. So much for never leaving a man behind, he thought. There he sat, covered from head to toe in red velvet that was none too fresh and none too clean, thanks to the boozy sweat of the previous wearer. Of course, he’d also had more than one kid with a leaky diaper on his lap that day.
And Sam, where was Sam? Nowhere to be seen.
Joe and Sam had served together in the Marine Corps, but once Sam had completed his term of service, he’d come back home to help run the family business, a lodge in the mountains of East Tennessee. Joe, having nowhere to go after getting out of the service himself, had taken Sam up on his offer to crash at the Bearadise Lodge.
There was just one catch. The Lodge was sponsoring Santa’s Workshop at the local outlet mall, and they were short one Santa. Apparently, the old Santa had been fired for drinking on the job.
Damn that Sam!
After only one day of being Santa, Joe could see why the previous hire had been driven to drink. These kids were hell on his nerves. Like the blonde brat who was once again pulling on his beard. He was just about to give her a little growl when she hopped off his lap and ran giggling to her mother, who gave him an unapologetic glance before dismissing him entirely.
This job would have been so much easier if he were in a shifter-run community. Then he could growl all he wanted. Instead, he was dealing with humans and had to keep his feline traits under wraps.
As the next kid, a little boy about the age of four, climbed on to his lap and proceeded to fart, Joe did his best not to cringe. Bullets and bad guys he could deal with. Snot-nosed kids were apparently his downfall. He’d only been at this for a day and he was thinking of telling Sam he could shove this Santa job where the sun didn’t shine. Joe didn’t even want to think about doing this until Christmas Eve. Three days away. Three long, miserable, endless days of bratty kids, droopy diapers, and disaffected parents more interested in their phones than their kids.
In fact, as the next kid proceeded to sneeze all over him, Joe considered walking out right then.
But then something happened that kept him glued to his seat. His sharp lion senses caught a new smell among the crowd. Peppermint and sugar cookies.
Mate, his lion roared inside his head.
The one person that was cosmically meant for him and him alone. The woman that Mother Nature deemed his. He scanned the crowd until he finally saw her at the end of the line, waiting to come see him.
Short, with generous curves that would fill his hands, she had black hair pulled to the top of her head in a messy bun. He wondered what color her eyes were, being too far away to see them. Scanning the rest of her body, he suddenly stopped when he came to the thing that shocked him the most.
A kid on her hip.
Was it her child? From this far away, he couldn’t scent the small one. Had someone already laid hands on his mate? His lion roared again, only this time it was in protest. No one should touch his mate but him! He would slaughter the man who had dared give his mate a cub.
“SANTA!” the elf behind the camera shouted.
Joe snapped his attention back to the man he was going to eviscerate for taking his concentration away from his mate, only to find a scared human staring at him. It was then he realized the child on his lap was shaking in fear.
The elf inched forward to whisper so the others in line couldn’t hear. “You growled at him, Santa! Say you’re sorry.”
His stomach sank. To say he felt like a colossal piece of shit was an understatement. He had been so wrapped up in his emotions that he had let his lion slip out a little in public, which was a big hell no in the shifter rules. Joe looked at the little boy on his lap and gave the kid a big smile, trying to play off what had happened. “How would you like a stuffed lion for Christmas? They go grrrrrrr.”
The little boy looked at him with wide eyes that slowly turned from fear to curiosity. “You can make a stuffed lion that growls?”
Joe nodded. “Sure can. I can put the elves to work on it right away if that’s what you want.”
The little boy scrunched his face up in thought but then shook his head no. “I really want a bike for Christmas, Santa. Can I have that instead of the lion?”
Relieved that the boy was no longer scared, Joe gave him a big grin and a wink. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Yippee!” The boy squealed as he jumped off Joe’s lap and ran to his mother, who was waiting for him next to the photographer.
Joe watched as the boy happily walked away, then quickly turned his attention back to his mate, who was watching him from the back of the line with big wary eyes. The mating scent was too strong. He couldn’t tell whether or not the child was hers, but that didn’t matter.
She was his.
And if that meant he had to accept another man’s cub into his home to claim his mate, then that’s what he would do. Although he would take great pleasure in rubbing his scent all over both woman and cub every chance that he got. Just to make sure that everyone knew that they were now his and his alone.
Jessie Lane is a best-selling author of Paranormal and Contemporary Romance, as well as, Upper YA Paranormal Romance/Fantasy.
She lives in Kentucky with her two little Rock Chicks in-the-making and her over protective alpha husband that she’s pretty sure is a latent grizzly bear shifter. She has a passionate love for reading and writing naughty romance, cliff hanging suspense, and out-of-this-world characters that demand your attention, or threaten to slap you around until you do pay attention to them.
She’s also a proud member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA).
Chasity Bowlin lives in central Kentucky with her husband and their menagerie of animals. She loves writing, loves traveling and enjoys incorporating tidbits of her actual vacations into her books. She is an avid Anglophile, loving all things British, but specifically all things Regency. She also writes steamy contemporary and paranormal romance.
Growing up in Tennessee, spending as much time as possible with her doting grandparents, soap operas were a part of her daily existence, followed by back to back episodes of Scooby Doo. Her path to becoming a romance novelist was set when, rather than simply have her Barbie dolls cruise around in a pink convertible, they time traveled, hosted lavish dinner parties and one even had an evil twin locked in the attic.
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