Trigger by Kirsty-Anne Still Release Blitz

Title: Trigger (Pericolo #2.5. Full length standalone)

Author: Kirsty-Anne Still

Release Date: Sept 18, 2015

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~*SYNOPSIS*~

I used to watch her through the lights. I watched as her body turned and twisted as she morphed into my siren.

I wanted her—I craved every ounce of Ryleigh Turner. But I knew once I had her, all I would do was corrupt every inch of her pretty little soul.

Valentinos aren't made for tales of love. We star in the horror stories you fear.

We're the monsters that make you scared to ever hope again.

It's time that she realises that.

****

He's watched me for months, given me every reason to allow my curiosity to start killing me slowly.

He makes the world melt away; he makes me want to throw all my inhibitions away and greet him personally. But every time the music ends and the lights lift, he vanishes, crushing my hopes.

Until one day, a moment of chance happens.

How does a man like Dante Valentino cope with a woman as messed up as me?

Easy.

I let him have every inch of my tainted soul.

***

Not all love stories have a beautiful start.

Some just need a perfect trigger.

**This is a dark romance with intense scenes of murder and sex. There is coarse language used throughout. Not for the faint hearted.

~*EXCERPT*~

I hit my brake, stopping midway down the deserted road, and turn to her. Now that I can force my entire attention upon her, I stare her down from the perch where she’s laughing hysterically.

“Are you deaf or just stupid?” I ask her, anger flaring into my words. “You’re a bit of fun, something I don’t often have. I told you how you were part of a game to me. You enlisted this choice and I will give you the chance to leave, but that chance will go away. You wanted to be inquisitive enough to follow me to that fucking club and not leave then you’ll stand by my side and witness what is that men like me do. You’ll see how the other fucking half lives, Ryleigh. You’ll live, eat, and breathe my life until you can’t cope. You hear me?”

“And when does my get-out card expire?” she asks in a lamenting tone, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Why?” I ask her, cocking a brow at her with incredulity. “Want to use it already?”

“No, you asshole, I want to know when you can stop holding it over my fucking head.” She scowls at me, her eyes glowering with anger. “Now deflate the ego, calm your temper, and fucking drive, Dante.”

I remain unmoved but offer one more question. “I can take it away now if that’s what you want?”

“Then do that!” she roars, throwing her arms up in the air. “Don’t give me a fucking chance to run away. If you want to drag me down with you, then just fucking do it. I can’t be dealing with the games that go with it. I’m stupid, I’m deaf, I’m whatever you want me to be, but don’t be like all the other men in my life who have treated me as if I’m not capable. Don’t treat me as if I’m going to fucking crack and break, as if I’m not worth the leap of faith. Be different and have a little faith in me without even knowing all that much about me.”

I notice the ebb of desperation that resonates in her tone. She’s almost diluted the rife fury in the air, bringing us back down to a new level of understanding. I see her chest heave on heated breaths, and she looks almost exasperated. There’s a lot to this woman I don’t know, and while I’ll take pleasure in breaking her down piece by beautiful piece, I know she won’t be an easy feat.

“I’ll leave it on the table until midnight,” I mutter, twisting back to face the steering wheel, preparing to continue our journey. “After tonight, it’s gone.”

“Whatever,” she murmurs, carelessly. “I won’t need it.”

“We’ll see,” I tell her, putting my foot on the gas to accelerate. “You want me to do my worst. It’s all about to begin when you set foot outside of this car again.”

~*TEASER*~

~*PLAYLIST*~

~*ABOUT THE AUTHOR*~

I used to be just another Fanfiction writer! That was until one person showed real interest in my work. And then another, and then another, until I had this whole group of people reviewing like crazy and wanting original work from me. I’d spent years writing for free online, I didn’t believe I had it in me to publish something!

But I’m glad I did!! I never imagined pushing my work and striving to reach my ultimate. I never imagined I’d be the girl who started The Viper Rooms! But who am I to deny the inspiration when it hits?

I love writing, it’s a lifeline. I love creating a world that others fall into. I love having the control to make a whole new world. It’s like a dependency, an addictive one. It’s one of the things I’m extremely proud of.

As much as I complain, I love the mini dialogues that go on in my head, the plotlines that attack me when I least expect them to. The ones that jump to life at the most inappropriate times and drive me totally crazy!!

For now I split my life between writing, dreaming, working, and volunteering with children.

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~*HOSTED BY*~

Ryker by Sawyer Bennett Review + Giveaway

RYKER

Cold Fury #4

Sawyer Bennett

Releasing Sept 8th, 2015

~*SYNOPSIS*~

The rugged men of the Carolina Cold Fury hockey team are winning hearts once again in another scorching novel from New York Times bestselling author Sawyer Bennett.

The stakes have never been higher for Carolina Cold Fury goalie Ryker Evans. With his contract running out, he’s got a year left to prove he’s still at the top of his game. And since his wife left him, Ryker has been balancing life as a pro-hockey star and a single parent to two daughters. Management is waiting for him to screw up. The fans are ready to pounce. Everybody’s taking dirty shots—except for the fiery redhead whose faith in Ryker gives him a fresh start.

As the league’s only female general manager, Gray Brannon has learned not to mix business with pleasure. And yet even this tough, talented career woman can’t help breaking her own rules as she gives Ryker everything she’s got. She hopes their hot streak will last forever, but with Ryker’s conniving ex plotting to reclaim her man, the pressure is on Gray to step up and save a tender new love before it’s too late.

~*EXCERPT*~ 

“I don’t even have to ask if you’re ready to do this,” my dad says to me as we take the elevator down to the basement level of the arena.

Leaning casually back against the wall, I eye myself critically in the reflection of the bronzed doors and feel confident in my wardrobe choice. Long black skirt with a lace overlay in the same color that comes about three inches past my knees. While it hugs my figure all the way down, it has a flared bottom and a small slit up the back. I paired it with black fishnet stockings and trendy heels with a pointed toe. The ruffles of a cream-color blouse peek out neck to chest from the black, buttoned cardigan, purposely form fitting so there is no mistaking the curve of my breasts.

No mistaking I am a woman walking into a lion’s den.

My makeup is applied flawlessly to enhance my pale skin and fire-red, shoulder-length hair. Said hair is styled just the way I like it—big barrel-type waves that are set to perfection when I put my fingers into my hair and give a good jazz-hands shake while bent over. After flipping back up, the wild waves and curls make me look like a windblown but stylish mess.

My look today is calculated. It screams feminine—with a slight Victorian flair thanks to my late mother’s brooch pinned at the base of my throat. It also screams sexy—courtesy of fishnet stockings, a snug fit, and four-inch-high heels. Finally, it screams of individuality, because I shunned a properly conservative suit and went with an eclectic mix so there is no mistaking the fact that I think outside the box.

It’s why I am now the general manager of the Carolina Cold Fury.

With my hands tucked into the pockets of my skirt, I grin at my dad. “You don’t have to ask. I’m ready.”

“That’s my girl,” Brian Brannon says with heartfelt affection and pride in his Irish green eyes—second generation, of course.

His words are short and tidy. Just three of them, but it’s his tone of voice and the emotion in his eyes that tell me all I need to know about a father’s love for his daughter.

“Want some advice?” he asks casually as the elevator rolls to a stop and the doors slide open.

“Sure,” I say as I pull my hands free and follow him out, the sound of my heels clicking in unison on the industrial tile floor with my father’s Ferragamo loafers.

“Be yourself,” he says simply as we walk side by side to the team meeting room. It’s a stadium-style room that the team meets in, usually to watch game film, but sometimes for relaying of information as a group.

“Be myself?” I ask skeptically. “That’s all the great Brian Brannon has to say to me?”

“Yes . . . be yourself. Don’t go in that room and for one minute try to mold yourself to their expectations. I didn’t offer you this position to do the same exact job I did. I gave it to you because I want you to be better at it than I was, and you’re going to be because of who you are, not who they want you to be.”

I tuck an arm through my father’s, feeling the strength he exudes at the ripe age of fifty-eight. I can’t help the smile on my face as I lean toward him and give a squeeze. “It’s amazing I didn’t become a narcissistic, self-centered asshole with as much pumping up of my esteem that you do on a daily basis.”

Dad snickers. “As if you could ever be anything that was less than perfect.”

We turn right at the end of the hall and the door to the meeting room comes into focus. But for the slight flutter in my belly, there’s nothing internal to indicate how momentous this occasion is.

To me.

To the league.

To this team.

At just thirty-one years old, I’m getting ready to be named as one of the youngest general managers in the league. As a woman, someone like me among these ranks is unheard of, and I’m not going to be given a free pass just because I’m Brian Brannon’s daughter. While I think my father is about the closest thing to God as you can get, there are many out there who will think he’s gone off his rocker by stepping down and appointing me as GM.

Many will think he’s showing favoritism to a family member.

Some will think he just doesn’t care about this team anymore.

Perhaps a few will even think he’s just lazy and doesn’t want the headaches that come with being a president and CEO of a professional sports team, as well as the general manager.

They’d all be wrong, though, and I sincerely hope they believe him today. If not, fuck it. I have a job to do and skeptics, chauvinists, purists, and otherwise backward-thinking assholes aren’t going to stop me from achieving my goals.

To turn this team into champions.

 

~*REVIEW BY VANESSA*~

I am a huge fan of Sawyer Bennett if you follow our blog and you’ll know that I get so excited to read any of her books. Ryker was no exception and it totally delivered! Ryker is the fourth book in the Cold Fury series and while I would really recommend reading the others to get the characters backgrounds and stories I think reading Ryker alone will be okay. (But seriously the others are just as awesome.) Ryker was introduced in the last book and we learned had two daughters with an ex-wife that cheated on him with a previous team mate; which indecently was how he got traded to the Cold Fury Hockey team. His ex-wife decided she no longer wanted to be a mother at the time and left his daughters with him full time and with their schedules and his pro hockey career life was already a little chaotic but it gets even more chaotic when he runs into the new team manager Grayson Brannon. Gray knows that being a woman in a man’s sport wasn’t going to be easy but she knew she could do amazing things with the team if only they’d let her not to mention that her father who was the teams previous manager has faith in her. With trades, player stats and contracts being up she knows she has a hard job ahead of her. What she wasn’t expecting was to be so attracted to Ryker that they couldn’t help but attempt a secret relationship. But things slowly start to come out and people start seeing them together the truth must be set free. These two both want to be together and are willing to do whatever it takes even give up the things they’ve  always wanted, but other players who aren’t happy about trades being made are out to destroy the happiness these two have found.  With all these problems will this couple be able to get their HEA? Read it to find out!

 

~*ABOUT THE AUTHOR*~

USA Today and New York Times Best-Selling Author, Sawyer Bennett is a snarky southern woman and reformed trial lawyer who decided to finally start putting on paper all of the stories that were floating in her head. Her husband works for a Fortune 100 company which lets him fly all over the world while she stays at home with their daughter and three big, furry dogs who hog the bed. Sawyer would like to report she doesn’t have many weaknesses but can be bribed with a nominal amount of milk chocolate.

Sawyer is the author of several contemporary romances including the popular Off Series, the Legal Affairs Series and the Last Call Series. She will be releasing her third book in the Cold Fury Hockey Series with Random House Loveswept, June 2015.

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Grab the other Cold Fury Romances

ALEX

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GARRETT

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ZACK

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~*GIVEAWAY*~

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Delayed Penalty By Sophia Henry Promo + Giveaway

 

~*SYNOPSIS*~

 

She closed her heart long ago. He just wants to open her mind. For fans of Toni Aleo and Sawyer Bennett, the debut of Sophia Henry’s red-hot Detroit Pilots series introduces a hockey team full of complicated men who fight for love.

Auden Berezin is used to losing people: her father, her mother, her first love. Now, just when she believes those childhood wounds are finally healing, she loses something else: the soccer scholarship that was her ticket to college. Scrambling to earn tuition money, she’s relieved to find a gig translating for a Russian minor-league hockey player—until she realizes that he’s the same dangerously sexy jerk who propositioned her at the bar the night before.

Equal parts muscle and scar tissue, Aleksandr Varenkov knows about trauma. Maybe that’s what draws him to Auden. He also lost his family too young, and he channeled the pain into his passions: first hockey, then vodka and women. But all that seems to just melt away the instant he kisses Auden and feels a jolt of desire as sudden and surprising as a hard check on the ice.

After everything she’s been through, Auden can’t bring herself to trust any man, let alone a hot-headed puck jockey with a bad reputation. Aleksandr just hopes she’ll give him a chance—long enough to prove he’s finally met the one who makes him want to change.

~*EXCERPT*~

 

“I hope you don’t think you’re going to sit on your butt your whole break,” Grandpa said. He punctuated his sentence with a quick snap of his newspaper. He’d done it to lift a falling corner, but he may as well have cracked an invisible whip.

“Come on, Dedushka,” I said, stopping my arm midair and lifting my tired eyes from the milk dripping off the spoon to his customary stern face. “I just got home yesterday.”

“And you start your job today.” His steel blue eyes caught mine before returning to the paper.

“Funny. I don’t remember interviewing.” I smirked, then shoveled the spoonful of soggy cereal into my mouth.

“Oh, how I’ve missed your smart mouth, Auden,” he said without even looking up.

Though I would be home for less than a month, living with my grandparents again would be rough. After my first taste of freedom living in the dorms freshman year, going back to Hawk-eye Land will be a challenge.

All my life I had wished I’d had a sibling, but the yearning was never so prominent as when I came home from school. It had been fourteen years since my mom died. Fourteen years of being the only person my grandparents had to worry about. While I appreciated the motive behind their undivided attention, I’d always wanted someone who understood my rants about their constant hovering. Someone to talk with and share silly inside jokes. Since my well-being was my grandparents’ first priority, they were always on my case. It would’ve been nice to have a sibling to pick up some of the slack. I never wanted to sound ungrateful for what they’d done for me, but sometimes I needed a break.

“What kind of job is it?” I asked, keeping any smart-mouth comments to myself. Didn’t feel like ticking him off today.

“Translating.” Grandpa folded the newspaper into a rectangle and set it next to his Not only perfect, but Russian, too coffee mug.

My grandfather, Viktor Berezin, was a retired Russian language professor at a state university outside of Detroit. He’d taken on various translating jobs for friends and coworkers his whole life and had set me up with small projects since my junior year of high school. The work hadn’t been difficult; translating documents or contracts from Russian into English or vice versa. It was great money for a teenager, since it paid better than babysitting or a part-time retail job.

“Documents?” I asked.

“For a person. He doesn’t know much English, and he needs a translator to speak with the media for his job. You will help him.”

“He speaks with the media for his job? Is he super-high profile?”

“In some circles, I suppose.” Grandpa shrugged.

“You trust me to be someone’s PR person? I have a pretty smart mouth, you know,” I joked, shoveling more cereal into my mouth.

“I’m counting on it, Audushka.”

“Is he an actor? A model?” I pushed my empty cereal bowl to the side. “Wait! Is he some kind of dignitary?”

“I think I’d handle the dignitary if he were one.” Grandpa took a sip of his coffee. “He’s a hockey player.”

“A hockey player,” I repeated. “For the Red Wings?”

Excitement bubbled in my stomach. I’d been a Detroit Red Wings fan since before I could speak. Being a translator for a Russian player on my favorite team in the history of the universe would complete my life.

“Not that high profile.” Grandpa laughed. “He plays for the Pilots.”

A minor-league player? The bubbles in my stomach fizzled and popped, and my tense, excited shoulders dropped.

“Where am I meeting him?”

“You will meet Zhenya at Robinson Arena at noon.”

Grandpa was talking about his lifelong friend, Evgeny Orlenko. Zhenya is the Russian term of endearment for the name Evgeny. Personally, I thought of Orlenko as an uncle, since he and Grandpa were as close as brothers. Professionally, he was a sports agent who represented a number of Russian hockey players. According to recent documents I’d translated, he’d peppered his clientele list with a few basketball players as well.

“Hey, Gram,” I greeted my grandmother, who had just walked into the tiny kitchen with the electric lighted mirror she swore by.

For someone who didn’t approve of her kids or grandkids being vain, Gram was pretty concerned with her looks. She never wore foundation or mascara, but her cheeks were always powdered and her lips were never without lipstick in public. Her fair skin was wrinkled with soft lines, but it didn’t take away from the beauty of her features. Her blue-gray eyes and high cheekbones were complimented by perpetually dark blond hair, thanks to the magic of hair dye. She would’ve been beautiful even if she’d let her hair go gray. I could only hope I got some of those graceful-aging genes.

“What time did you get home last night?” Gram asked, setting the mirror on the table and flipping it to the ultra-magnifying side before stooping to plug it in.

“Around one-thirty, I guess.”

“I can tell. You’re puffy.” She reached over to pat my cheek before turning to inspect her own face in the mirror.

Thanks, I thought. I didn’t dare say it out loud. My grandparents and I had a better relationship since I’d left for college than we ever had when I was growing up. Didn’t want to mess up a good thing. “Where are you off to?”

“It’s my week to clean the church,” Gram answered as she slicked a rose shade across her lips. Then she patted the skin under her eyes with her fingers and turned the mirror’s light off.

“Do you need any help?”

“Pat and Emma will be there, but thank you for asking.”

My breath of relief was almost audible. I hadn’t been back to church since I’d left my grandparents’ house two years ago. Just thinking about the place made me itchy.

I slid out of my seat, tapped my inseams together with a flourish, and straightened my arms at my sides.

“Are you going to tell me my client’s name or is this a super-secret mission, Sir?” I asked in a military monotone.

My grandpa shook his head, picked up the newspaper, and straightened it out. “Don’t know it. I just told Zhenya you’d be happy to do it.”

“Super secret. Got it. I won’t let you down, Sir.” I saluted him. Still staring straight ahead, I waited to be excused.

Grandpa lowered the paper. “Is there something else?”

“May I be excused? I have to shower and dress for the mission.”

“You are a ridiculous girl, Audushka.” He dismissed me with a shake of his head.

“Auden, you're only home for a month. Please try not to drive your grandfather crazy,” my grandma said.

With a salute to both of them, I ignored her warning. I’d driven my grandpa crazy years ago.

I thought Grandpa would continue to reward my almost-native knowledge of reading, writing, and speaking Russian by giving me tedious translating projects my whole life. I never expected him to allow me to work directly with a client, let alone a client in the public eye. Maybe he had more faith in me than I realized.

~*ABOUT THE AUTHOR*~

Sophia Henry, a proud Detroit native, fell in love with reading, writing, and hockey all before she became a teenager. She did not, however, fall in love with snow. So after graduating with an English degree from Central Michigan University, she moved to North Carolina, where she spends her time writing books featuring hockey-playing heroes, chasing her two high-energy sons, watching her beloved Detroit Red Wings, and rocking out at concerts with her husband.

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