COOKING UP A STORM by Ashley Ladd
Available at Totally Bound: https://www.totallybound.com/cooking-up-a-storm
Be sure to read my character interview
with Rique which is after the excerpt. You won’t want to miss it. ;)
Blurb:
Brooks and Rique desperately want to win a coveted chef’s job
offered by an eccentric millionaire in paradise. Even more, Rique desperately
wants to stay alive.
Brooks and Rique desperately want to win the head chef’s
position offered by an eccentric millionaire Jonah Verleun on his beautiful,
private but peculiar island that includes a zoo full of exotic animals, an
amusement park and a monster shark tank beneath Jonah’s bedroom floor. While
Brooks wants the job to escape his heartache and the lover who thwarted him,
Rique is hiding from the mob, hoping to live long enough to pay them off with
the prize winnings. Fierce competitors, they cook up a storm in a series of
cooking challenges while trying to turn down the heat on their intense
attraction. When a hurricane strikes the island, the storm Rique has been
cooking up explodes, and no heart—or body—is safe.
Excerpt:
They ran, hunched
over, zigging and zagging as bullets flew around them. Rique damned himself for
putting Brooks in this mess. He wondered if the mob held the others prisoner
and that’s why they didn’t answer the door.
He
turned the first corner they came upon and then the next. He stopped dead and the
air left his lungs. A moment later Brooks ran into his back almost knocking him
over. He swayed dangerously but managed to stay upright and spread his arms
wide to keep Brooks from stumbling forward.
He couldn’t believe
his eyes. One of Jonah’s tigers lay in their path crouching low, baring his
teeth, and eying them as if they were dinner.
He
tried to quell the jitters attacking his stomach so the animal wouldn’t smell
his fear then whispered to Brooks through clenched teeth, “What do we do now?
Freeze or run?”
“Run.
But where?” Brooks whispered back, a frown trembling on his lips.
“To
the closest protection.” He prayed their hunters had lost them, that they
wouldn’t run back into a barrage of bullets. As Rique bunched his muscles to
run, already feeling the animal’s fangs ripping into him, he noted how the
tiger’s thick muscles corded in his shoulders, and how saliva ran down his
snarling lips.
“Dear
God, we’re going to die.” Panic laced Brooks’ voice. “If we get out of here
alive, let’s both turn down the job and move in together.”
Swallowing
hard, Rique couldn’t reply so he nodded. Besides, as much as he wanted to live
with Brooks, he couldn’t do it as long as he was indebted to the mob. However,
the point was moot. He couldn’t see a scenario in which one of them didn’t die
in the next five minutes.
Feeling
responsible, Rique couldn’t let anything happen to Brooks as long as he was
alive. He would take on the tiger giving Brooks time to reach safety. “On the
count of three, run!”
As Rique whispered,
“One,” hisses, then a blood-curdling growl wrenched the air. It was a different
sound than the tiger was making. Then a crocodile bellowed and jumped out of
the bushes and snatched the tiger by its belly. As it dragged the struggling
creature back to the bushes, the tiger howled in surprise and pain. It clawed
the air in vain as the reptile’s powerful jaws clamped tighter biting through
flesh and bone.
Available at Totally Bound: https://www.totallybound.com/cooking-up-a-storm
Character
Interview:
Please introduce
yourself. What is your name and what makes you intrinsically you?
Thank you, Ashley! I’m so glad to be here, and by “be here”,
I also mean to be alive. That was a close call.
I’m Enrique “Rique” Fuentes, co-head chef for Jonah Verleun
on his private Caribbean island.
I live to cook, to create new and wonderful dishes to
delight my boss’s palate.
I’m from the Louisiana bayou and although I’ve been taken
out of the bayou, the bayou is still a big part of me.
Please tell us a
secret or two about you that your author didn’t divulge, the juicier the
better.
When I was a kid, I used to spy on my older brother having sex with his girlfriend. Once, he had sex with another man and that was so much hotter, kinkier. From that moment on I was fascinated by men. I couldn't stop thinking, fantasizing about them.
What is your secret
guilty pleasure(s)?
I love to read erotic romance and watch erotic movies. The
more flesh, the more lovemaking, the better.
Have you ever been
arrested or done anything else you’re ashamed of? Please tell us all about
it/them.
I’m ashamed of my gambling addiction. It got so bad while I
was working in Las Vegas that I became indebted to the Eddie Carlucci, mobster.
I almost got myself killed over it, and not just me, but my new love, Brooks.
Have you ever done
something really wonderful? What was it? It’s okay to stand up and take a bow.
Right after Hurricane Katrina hit in Louisiana, I helped
several of my neighbors to escape their houses right before they washed away. We
barely got out of that storm alive. Unfortunately, that seems to be becoming a
pattern.
What was the most
traumatic thing that ever happened to you? How did you recover from it (or have
you recovered)?
It’s a tossup between surviving Hurricane Katrina and being
hunted by the mob. Both almost got me killed.
What are the top
three or four things on your bucket list that you’d still like to accomplish?
I’d love to win my own TV cooking show on a big network. I want
to be the next Julia Child or Gordon Ramsey.
I want to write a cookbook, or a series of cookbooks, and
see them published. I don’t mean merely published, but a big ass print run,
like millions of copies. I want to write the Harry Potter of cookbooks!
I want to get up the nerve to wrestle an alligator. Coming
from the bayou, it’s in my blood.
What is your greatest
fear? Why? Have you ever had to face it? If so, please tell us about it.
Coming face to face with an alligator is pretty high on my
list. Once when I was still living in the bayou, I came home drunk late at
night and I wasn’t as careful as I should be, I almost tripped over one of
those monsters that had crawled out of the swamp. Those suckers are a lot
faster than they look. I barely got into my house with my skin still intact.
What was your most
embarrassing moment?
My mother set me up with her best friend’s daughter. When
she came onto me, I pushed her away—in front of my mother and the girl’s
mother. That was one hell of a way to come out of the closet to my family.
What are your
credentials for the job you’re doing now?
I’m a distinguished graduate of Le Cordon Bleu chef’s
school. Since then, I’ve held several chef’s positions in some of the best
hotels in New Orleans and Las Vegas.
Do you have a good
relationship with your family? How would you describe your family and your
relationship with them?
It hasn’t been too good since I embarrassed my mother in
front of her best friend. I could have handled telling her I was gay better. Of
course, I was only 20 at the time. I’d handle it much better now.
Who is your best
friend? Do you stay in close contact with him/her?
Billy Ray “Bubba” Devereau back in the bayou is the best
friend I ever had. We still email and talk on the phone but not as much as I’d
like. His bride, Emmy Jo, isn’t too thrilled with my gambling or my (ex)
man-chasing ways.
What is your favorite
breakfast? Dinner? Snack?
I love a good beignet for breakfast. I like food too much to
have one favorite dinner but a juicy well-cooked steak is always welcome.
Snacks? Chocolate ice cream. Red velvet cake.
Who was the one that
got away? Tell us a bit about him/her and how they got away.
J.O. He’s married to a woman now so I don’t want to cause
trouble for him by stating his name. It broke my heart when he decided he wasn’t
gay, that I had just been an experiment that didn’t work out. I know I shouldn’t
blame myself because he decided he liked women, but I should have been able to
spot it, to protect my heart better.
If you were to change
careers, what else would you do?
I used to dream of being a secret agent for the FBI, but
after running from the mob, getting shot at and almost losing my life, I’m not
so sure.
Is there anything
about your hero/heroine that you would like to change? What is it and why?
Brooks is perfect. Sometimes he gets a little silly, but most
of the time, he makes me laugh and I really need that.
Is there anything
else you’d like to tell us or your author?
Thank you for introducing me to the two most important
people in my life, for giving me true love.
You can find Ashley at:
http://www.amazon.com/Ashley-Ladd/e/B002PSKTLU/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1404670854&sr=8-1
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