Spooktacular Blog Hop - Spooky Sojourn

Happy Halloween!

Do I have a treat for you! My m/f erotic paranormal Spooky Sojourn plus an entire blog hop full of great books for your reading enjoyment. Be sure to check out all the blog tour stops.

 

Title: Spooky Sojourn

Series Name (If applicable) N/A

Publisher: Totally Bound

Genre: Contemporary Erotic male-female contemporary paranormal romance

Book Length: 50,000 words

 

Blurb:

Someone’s trying to kill Deanna, but is it the ghosts she doesn’t believe in, the rich socialite who might be a murderess, or someone else with a beef against The Gilroy Hotel and Resort that Deanna has just been hired to manage?  The Gilroy’s owners want the ghosts, or whoever is causing the trouble at the hotel eliminated, and they are pressuring Deanna to do the job as quickly as possible. Harry DeVeaux, paranormal investigator comes highly recommended to do the job and against Deanna’s better judgment, she hires him.

 

Although Deanna thinks Harry’s crazy for believing in ghosts and Harry thinks Deanna has a closed mind to the possibilities of ghosts and they highly annoy each other, sparks fly. Deanna can’t help but fantasize about Harry and inspired by a romance convention visiting her hotel, writes her fantasies in a private blog that Harry finds, hacks, and reads. Ooh la la!

 

Excerpt:

Drawing in a long, shuddering breath, he look heavenwards and crossed his fingers behind his back hoping she wouldn’t throw something at him, hoping she’d be okay with his admission. “I found your blog and read it.”

Paling, the blood fled from her flesh and her eyes looked like sooty coals against her face. Her gaze clashed with his and held. “How did you find it? I used a pseudonym and I put it on privacy settings.”

He screwed up his lips, and scrubbed his hand over his face, preparing to tell more painful truths. “I’m a bit of a hacker and I like to research the people I’m working with.” Not sure she’d be receptive to his theory, he left out the part that he thought the ghosts led him to her sight. He thought they were closet romantics. He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d locked them into the room now to force them into some alone time together.

When a tsunami of emotions flitted across her face he tried to read them. Fury. Embarrassment. Lust?

“You investigated me? You read my private musings?”

“You wrote about me? In some very intimate ways. At least I presume it was me since you used my name.” He fixed her with a piercing gaze. “Did you?”

A pregnant pause rent the air as she veiled her eyes from his view. Finally, she smoothed her skirt against her legs and admitted, “Yes. I have very mixed feelings about you. You make me crazy the way we argue, the way you believe in ghosts, and yet I find myself thinking about you, fantasizing about you.”

Taking heart in the last part even if he wasn’t sure he liked the first, he said with a lopsided grin, “You fantasize about me much?”

As if she suddenly got bold, she sidled up to him with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes and ran the tip of her finger down his chest. “Aren’t my blogs proof? The question is, do you fantasize about me?”

 

Buy links:

https://www.totallybound.com/spooky-sojourn

 

Author Bio:

 

Ashley Ladd lives in South Florida with her husband, five children, and beloved pets. She loves the water, animals (especially cats), and playing on the computer.

 

She's been told she has a wicked sense of humor and often incorporates humor and adventure into her books. She also adores very spicy romance, which she weaves into her stories.

 

How you can contact Ashley:

http://www.ashleyladd.blogspot.com

https://www.facebook.com/ashleyladdauthor

http://www.twitter.com/ashleyladd

https://www.goodreads.com/AshleyLadd

http://www.shelfari.com/search/books?Keywords=Ashley%20Ladd

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=ashley%20ladd&sprefix=ashle%2Caps&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Aashley%20ladd

 

 

Virtual Book Tour: Sotto Voce by Erin Finnegan

 

 

 

 

Sotto Voce

by Erin Finnegan

 

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BLURB:

 

New York-based wine critic Thomas Baldwin can make or break careers with his column for Taste Magazine. But when his publisher orders him to spend a year profiling rising stars of California’s wine country and organizing a competition between the big name wineries of Napa and the smaller artisan wineries of Sonoma, his world gets turned upside-down by an enigmatic young winemaker who puts art before business.

 

Sotto Voce is the story of love and wine, and how both require patience, passion, an acceptance of change—and an understanding that sometimes, you have to let nature take its course.

 

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Excerpt:

 

Firing up the grill to feed family, friends and crew at the end of the harvest had become a tradition at Rhapsody. It had started as a simple dinner to feed and thank the people who had helped harvest the crop. Then it morphed into a casual, annual party with the closest of Greg’s friends, a break from the backbreaking work with food, wine, music and a traditional grape stomp.

 

Greg always held back a bushel of grapes that didn’t quite make the cut for the year’s vintage and, in a discarded old oak half-barrel, set up a stomp that let everyone work out their stress by smashing the slippery mass into grape pulp. It was messy, slightly feral and dizzyingly fun.

 

After the party settled into a comfortable groove, Greg lifted Tom into the cask, jumped in behind him and held him around the waist as they stomped in time to an up-tempo R&B classic on the stereo.

 

Their stomp became a dance, their feet synchronized and their legs aligned, Greg holding Tom’s hips and leaning into his shoulder.

 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered in Tom’s ear.

 

“Why?”

 

“You know why.”

 

“For getting grape juice all over my pants?” Tom teased. This drew a smile, and a squeeze.

 

“For ignoring you. I’m sorry, and I won’t—”

 

“Don’t. I get it. This is your deadline.”

 

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better, you know. I pretty much live in the barn during primary fermentation.”

 

“Then we’ll set up an extra cot, or I’ll make you coffee, or we’ll take shifts punching the caps while you get some sleep,” Tom offered. “But I want to help, and I want to be with you.”

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

BROODING HEROES AND WHY WE LOVE THEM

 

When I first started to draft Sotto Voce in the fan community, there was a lot of talk about the Greg Kennedy character, and how he was "dark, brooding and hot."

 

Dark. Brooding. Hot.

 

Two of those three make perfect sense when we're trying to sort out what we find attractive in a hero. But what is it about brooding men that we find so hot?

 

In concept, that shouldn't be an attractive character trait, not really. Because "brooding" is really just another word for "grumpy".

 

But here we are, time and time again, talking about "brooding heroes". And I won't lie—I fall for them like everyone else.

 

So what gives? How is it that a brooding man is hot, while a grumpy man is just annoying?

 

I suspect that a brooding hero suggests that there is something underneath that grumpy external layer—that there is depth to his concerns. And if it's a "brooding hero," it's likely that those layers will reveal something in his back story or in his priorities that make him complex, relatable and maybe even a bit vulnerable in ways we did not first suspect.

 

That's certainly the case with Greg Kennedy, the winemaker in Sotto Voce. When we first meet Greg, we know him to be smart, hard-working and a bit reclusive. We also discover that he is moody, somewhat volatile, and stand-offish. But we also discover that he is generous with his colleagues, protective of the people he cares about, and yes, a bit lonely.

 

"That day in the vineyard, when you asked about Rhapsody being isolated?...It is. It was, especially when I was first getting my footing here. I just really felt alone," Greg tells Tom, the wine critic to whom he is drawn, confessing a long-ago fling that haunts him. "He was someone I knew, someone familiar."

 

And eventually, we find that there are reasons why he has isolated himself from the world, and that vulnerability is what ultimately opens him up to love.

 

Ah. There it is. Peel back the layers, and underneath than moodiness we find a man we can love.                                       

 

So for me, at least, it isn't necessarily a brooding nature that makes this character hot, but the suggestion created by his moodiness that there is something more to him that makes me want to know him more.

 

That, and maybe I have a thing for denim shirts, open-top trucks and dark aviator sunglasses.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

 

Erin Finnegan is a former journalist and editor. She was born and raised in Southern California, where she lives with two sheep dogs and grows, ferments and drinks Syrah and Zinfandel in the foothills outside Los Angeles. 

 

Sotto Voce is her first novel.

 

Connect with Erin at erin-finnegan.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/ErinGoFinnegan, on Goodreads at Goodreads.com/ErinFinnegan and on Twitter at @eringofinnegan.

CONTEST

Erin will be awarding a Multi-format Sotto Voce eBook to 10 randomly drawn winners and a Grand Prize of a $25 B&N gift card will be awarded to one randomly drawn winner, all via rafflecopter during the tour. A $25 B&N gift card will be awarded to a randomly drawn host.

 

Please follow the tour and comment; the more you comment, the better your chance of winning. The tour dates can be found here: 

 

http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2014/08/vbt-sotto-voce-by-erin-finnegan.html

a Rafflecopter giveaway