Sunday Smooch with Amy Andrews

Welcome to another LoveCats DownUnder Sunday Smooch!


Today we have a smooch from Playing It Cool but first 


... the winner of last week's Sunday Smooch Giveaway is Kim Martin!


Can you please contact rachel (at) rachelbailey (dot) come to receive your prize.


And now for today's Sunday Smooch from Playing It Cool by Amy Andrews.

Score one for the curvy girls!

Harper Nugent might have a little extra junk in her trunk, but her stepbrother calling her out on it is the last straw... When rugby hottie, Dexter Blake, witnesses the insult, he surprises Harper by asking her out. In front of her dumbass brother. Score! Of course, she knows it's not for reals, but Dex won't take no for an answer.


Dexter Blake's life revolves around rugby with one hard and fast rule: no women. Sure, his left hand is getting a workout, but he's focused on his career for now. Then he overhears an asshat reporter belittle the curvy chick he'd been secretly ogling. What's a guy to do but ask her out? It's just a little revenge against a poser, and then he'll get his head back in the game.

But the date is better than either expected. So is the next one. And the next. And the heat between them...sizzles their clothes right off.


Suddenly, this fake relationship is feeling all too real...Blurb and Cover

Harper is at work at the City Kids hospital where she's been employed as an artist to brighten up the old drab walls of the different areas with bright murals. Unbeknownst to her, Dex is also there with the Sydney Smoke on one of the team's charity engagements. He slips away from his duties to find her and say hi. When he does he finds her in her work clothes of paint splattered overalls and he's having a hard time concentrating on anything else other than the central zipper of said overalls that runs straight down the front of them.

“Well, come on woman, tell me about the damn mural before I do something impulsive.”

Impulsive? Like what?

The low growl twirled and twined itself around internal muscles with a gossamer touch, sparking to life all the pent up lust she’d been trying to control the last couple of days.

Harper wiped the scenarios in her mind’s eye with a quick clear of her throat. “This is my... under the sea mural,” she said, her legs jerking into action, wandering down to where it started, sucking in some much needed air as she fought to control the reaction of her body to the nearness of his.

It was insanity of the highest order how easily Dexter Blake could affect her body. No man had ever left her panting just from his presence alone.

Determined to keep this above board and professional in her workplace, she explained succinctly and methodically what she was trying to achieve. She pretended he was one of her school age art students and not a fully grown man who was emitting so much testosterone she was almost faint with it.

She discussed colour and technique and where she was going with the bare sketches on the unfinished section as her pulse fluttered madly. Some would have called it babbling. But she had to engage her mouth in something useful lest it develop a mind of its own.

She was too aware of him to relax. Too aware of his hands jammed in his pockets, his gaze on her mouth as she talked. His heated interest on her zipper.

His cursory questions and complete disinterest in the answers seemed merely an excuse to let his gaze wander freely over her. He didn’t touch her but she felt the hot, sticky fingerprints of his interest mark every part of her body.   

Christ. He was turning her on just by looking at her.

“Okay,” she said, her voice tremulous with desire as she ran out of scintillating factoids about the mural. He needed to stop or she was going to do something impulsive. “I think it’s time you left now.”   

To his credit he didn’t protest or pretend he didn’t know why she was kicking him out. He just nodded. “I really did come down here just to say hi but...Jesus...” His gaze dropped to her zipper. “Are you wearing anything under that?”

A twinge,  like the low sexy notes of a saxophone, undulated across her pelvic floor. Dex was looking at her like he wanted to peel her out of her overalls as if she was a ripe banana. God knew he could do it easily. He was only an arm’s length away. He could just reach out and yank if he wanted.  

Harper swallowed. Her breath hitched. “Well I’m not naked, if that’s what you mean.”

His low groan rubbed against her skin like the finest grade sandpaper, her nipples beading painfully against the fabric of her bra. “Damn.”

The word rumbled out of him, arrowing heat from her breasts directly to the bullseye between her legs. She should send him on his way for both their sanities. Push him out the door and tell him she’d see him on Sunday, but the desire darkening his usually light green eyes was a heady thing.

“I’m wearing underwear,” she clarified quickly as if it might give some protection from the incendiary gaze threatening to melt her overalls right off.

“Christ,” he muttered, his gaze zeroing in on the tab of her zipper as he reefed a hand out of his pocket and jammed it through his hair. “All I can think about is yanking that damn zip down.”

It was all she could think about too.

Harper’s breath was thick as fog in her throat, her pulse slowing right down. He took a step towards her.

“Tell me to go,” he murmured, his gaze almost feral on her mouth now.

Harper couldn’t. She was virtually paralysed with lust. How she was managing to stay upright under his thorough eye-fucking she had no idea.

“No.”

She should. But she couldn’t.

It was like there was an invisible string between them pulling them inexorably together, and she didn’t have the power or the will to break it. He was going to have to man up if he wanted out of here unmolested.

“Jesus, Harper,” he whispered, looking at her for long moments, looking into her eyes this time as if he was searching for some kind of lifeline.

She clocked the exact second he stopped searching.

“Goddamn it,” he swore, taking the one pace necessary to cover the distance between them, his hands grasping her upper arms, yanking her towards him as his mouth closed in on hers.

After days and days of sexual fantasies, the touch of his mouth was like petrol on a fire and she blazed with need. Harper had heard other women talking about hearing the hallelujah chorus when the right guy kissed you. Choirs of angels and all that jazz. But that wasn’t what she was hearing. There was music alright, but it was no glorious benediction. 

It was the bourbon-gravelly tones of Nickleback singing about pants around her feet and dirt on her knees. 

 She was vaguely aware of him walking her backwards in the direction of the wall, her legs moving automatically at the insistent push of his powerful thighs, and she had just enough sense in her rapidly devolving thought processes to protest.

“No, no,” she muttered, tearing her mouth from his. “The paint’s wet.”

Harper's job is one of the more unsual I've written. For a chance to win an e-copy of Playing It Cool, tell me if you've read any other heroines with unusual jobs or if there's a particular job/profession/calling you'd like to see a heroine doing. Who knows, I might just make it happen in one of my books! I'm always looking for intertesting things to write about!

Come back next Sunday, when the winner of today's giveaway will be announced and another smooch will be posted!

Smooch Graphic by WebWeaver

A story worth telling....

In between writing and reading romance, I enjoy sitting down with a biography or autobiography. However, I'm fairly diverse in what kind biographical story I read. From sportsman to celebrities, to world leaders or someone who has made an amazing impact on the world to the very ordinary - I'll pick up books that are recommended by others or simply land on my desk or kindle.

Here are some I've read that I enjoyed (This is a fairly diverse list)


Parky - by Michael Parkinson. I really enjoyed this tale of his own life, plus details of some of his most famous (and infamous) interviews.

War Horse - the story of footballer Shane Webcke. Now, I am a diehard Broncos (Rugby League) fan. (Or Broncos tragic as my husband likes to call me) which may have something to do with the hat, scarf and T-shirt amongst other things I own with my team on them. But I found this read to be more that a book about sport.

Loving Amy: A Mother's Story. This is the tale of the short and sometimes tragic life of Amy Winehouse. A tale of loss and laughter and grief and joy, told by her mother.

Michelle Obama: A Life. I loved this one. It was a fabulous depiction of this iconic woman. This one is a re-read for me.

Do you have a favorite biography or auto-biography?

I would love to hear if there are any I should be downloading to my kindle.

Movie Boyfriends

Last Saturday, on the spur of the moment, a girlfriend and I ambled into a local cinema and settled in to watch Bridget Jones’s Baby. Of course it starred Colin Firth as Mark Darcy and Colin Firth is one of my all-time favourite heart-throb-y actors. Happy sighs. And yet Mark Darcy—as much as I enjoy the character—is not one of my all-time favourite movie boyfriends.

On Sunday I stretched out on the sofa and watched the Lord of the Rings movie (again). Aragorn is my favourite hero EVER. And yet Viggo Mortensen, the actor who plays him, doesn’t do a whole lot for me in his other movie roles.

Obviously movie (and TV) boyfriends aren’t so much about the real life actors who play them, but how the fictional character that is being depicted in the movie comes across emotionally on the big screen—and no doubt that’s due in large part to the actor’s art in bringing that character to life.

Of course all of this pondering over popcorn had me reaching for the nearest piece of paper and jotting down a list of my five favourite movie boyfriends of all-time—because I love lists. And I wanted a list of heroes I could imagine sailing off with into the sunset to live happily ever after. This is what I came up with:

Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music
He was my very first movie boyfriend—I fell for him at the tender age of ten when I was allowed to stay up late and watch the movie. He hid a good heart beneath all of that bluster…and his honour and loyalty to his country in the face of Nazi Germany held me spellbound. I thought him soooo courageous. And the fact that he danced with Maria and sang with the children had me melting. :) I could definitely imagining sailing into the sunset (uh, maybe I ought to say setting off over the Alps) with him.

James Hammerton from Sliding Doors (played by John Hannah)
This character is such a combination of fun and sweetness. I fell head over heels for him—he’s kind, he makes the heroine laugh, he never pressures her…plus he’s a Monty Python fan! Seriously, what more could a girl ask for? Well, if she also happened to ask for someone who would challenge her to make her dreams come true, who would give her practical support to help make those dreams come true, and to make her believe that she doesn’t have to settle for second best, then James is your man. Happy, happy sighs.

Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey (played by JJ Feild)
Jane Austen wrote great heroes. And while Northanger Abbey isn’t one of my favourite of her books, I love this particular movie version—it’s so good-natured and Henry is so utterly likable (which is why he’s a movie boyfriend rather than Hugh Grant’s Edward Ferrars from Sense and Sensibility or Jeremy Northam’s Mr Knightley from Emma). Henry has a sense of fun and a sense of the ridiculous that immediately attracted me to him. He also has to decide whether he can live up to his principles or whether he’ll allow his snob of a father to browbeat him. Of course, he defies his father, all for the love of Catherine, which makes me swoon every time. Yes, that is one man I could VERY easily live happily ever after with.

Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice (Colin Firth’s version please)
You know, I love every version of Mr Darcy that I’ve seen—Laurence Olivier’s, Matthew Macfadyen’s—but Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy gives me shivers (of the very best kind ;-) ). In the beginning he’s so arrogant and superior! And then he’s so vulnerable! And then he amends his behavior and tempers his pride and arrogance. And then he rescues Lydia. A man who changes (and sacrifices his pride) all for love. Oh, man, how could Lizzie not fall in love with him? I did. Completely. :)

 Aragorn from Lord of the Rings (played by Viggo Mortensen)
Aragorn is a hero in every sense of the word. He has a destiny to fulfill…and while he is filled with doubts about his own strength, and has little hope that good can prevail over evil, he still gives the quest his all. He’s a man who will fight for good, who will do everything he can to protect those weaker than him, and oh my can that man wield a sword. He faces his every fear and triumphs. He’s not a man who seeks to become king, but it’s a title he certainly earns. Also, he’s hot—seriously hot. I play with scenarios about Aragorn and me. ;-) Honestly, I could write FanFic about this man.

I have this movie poster on my wall. :-)

 So there you have it, my favourite Movie Boyfriends. Do you share any of my faves…or do you have different Movie Boyfriends of your own?

A Busy Life? Try a Rich Picture

I have a tendency to fill my life up to the max. It’s almost like I was born busy. In the last few months I’ve taken on teaching public relations at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, started a Graduate Certificate at QUT Brisbane in Coaching and Mentoring and have become Chair of the Byron Writers Festival. And in just a few weeks, I have my grade six piano exam. This along with trying to get my current WIP finished. Oh, and fitting in those other things like family, exercise and friends.

But I’m not complaining (well not too much). I love a challenge.

One of things we have learned about in the Graduate Certificate is about rich pictures. Rich pictures are a diagrammatic way of relating your own experiences and perceptions to a given problem situation through the identification and linking of a series of concepts. So one of our exercises was drawing a rich picture of our lives.

Not being a particularly visual person and being a terrible drawer, I was skeptical about this exercise, but it was really enjoyable and insightful. Strangely enough, this is how I worked out why I felt like I was always being pulled in lot of different directions…because I am. It was very interesting looking at my life from a pictorial standpoint.

The course has a big theme of reflection. If you need a moment of reflection, have a go at creating a rich picture. It’s a lot of fun and you might just learn something poignant about your life.

Retro Sunday Smooch: Countering His Claim

Welcome to another LoveCats DownUnder Sunday Smooch!

Today we have a smooch from Countering His Claim but first ...

the winner of last week's Sunday Smooch Giveaway is -- ptclayton

Can you please contact Helen Lacey: mail (at) HelenLacey (dot) com to receive your copy of The Cowgirl's Forever Family!


And now for today's Sunday Smooch from Countering His Claim, which is being reissued DownUnder in October as part of the Local All-Star Anthology.

Passion sets sail in USA TODAY bestselling author Rachel Bailey's tale of high-stakes inheritance

Never be distracted by a woman is hotel magnate Luke Marlow's golden rule, especially when the woman just inherited half his late uncle's luxury cruise liner. But ship's doctor Della Walsh is the exception. Her dignified beauty ignites Luke's desire despite his suspicions. Even so, he will gain full control of the ship at all costs.

For Della, the ship has been a sanctuary. Now she has just three weeks to change Luke's mind and save the ship—until passion comes along and steers them off course….




 [Scene set-up: Della has spent the day showing Luke the facilities on board the Cora Mae, and now they're on the deck in the moonlight, trying to avoid their attraction...] 

He looked up to the stars and a flash of movement caught his attention. Within an instant he was beside Della, one arm around her waist, pointing skyward. “Shooting star.”

“Oh,” she said on a long breath, her gaze following his finger.

The feel of her against him was mesmerizing. Absorbed in the moment, she’d forgotten to be on her guard and allowed her soft curves to meld into his side, her head resting back on his shoulder as she tracked the star’s path.

“Make a wish,” he murmured beside her ear.

A kiss. In this moment, all he wanted was to turn her to face him, to lean down and touch her sweet lips with his. It was wrong, he knew it was wrong, but the blood in his veins thundered and a delicious heat began to rise.

The star faded and the night sky again grew still, the only movement the ship’s steady forward progress and the gentle breeze that danced in Della’s hair. But she didn’t move away. Part of him dared not move and break the spell, but the larger, rebellious part of him—surrounded by the scent of vanilla and woman—risked inclining his head down to hers, and was rewarded when she shivered.

“Like to know what I wished for?” he said, voice low.

Her eyes drifted shut. “You’re not supposed to tell. It won’t come true if you do.”

“Maybe,” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that his lips brushed her lobe as he spoke. “But if you knew what the wish was, perhaps you’d grant it.”

He pressed a light kiss on her neck, just below her ear. Della held herself still but didn’t pull away. “I don’t have any magical powers to grant wishes.”

“I’m not so sure.” He pressed another kiss to her soft skin, this one at the edge of her jaw.

As he cupped the side of her throat with one hand, he felt her racing pulse and turned her to face him. A small sound of protest passed her lips even as she leaned in and placed the lightest of kisses on his mouth. It took everything inside him, but he locked his muscles tight and didn’t move an inch. Della had held herself back so much, he wouldn’t ruin this by pushing too far, too fast. Instead, he waited for excruciating seconds for her to come back to him. Her warm breath caressed his face as she looked from his mouth to his eyes, fighting some inner struggle. Then she tilted her head forward and stole another butterfly kiss, and again, he gently moved his lips but nothing else, despite the protests of his straining body.

Her scent curled around his thoughts, leaving little reason in its wake, but he held firm until she tipped her chin up for a third time. Now, her lips were more confident and she wound her arms up around his neck. That was all the permission he needed, all the permission he could wait for. With a groan, he pulled her in.

He deepened the kiss, tasting her, needing to be close, connected to her. Holding her flush against him with the hand she’d stitched, he traced a path over the curve of her spine with the other, down over her hip, back up to feel the swell of the side of her breast. He’d wanted her from the moment she’d first appeared like an angel from the crowd on the deck the day he’d boarded, but now, he craved her with an urgency that rocked him. His body was ablaze; the kiss was nowhere near enough. Her fingers wound up into his hair and dug into his scalp, her mouth demanding against his.

“Della,” he rasped as he wrenched his mouth away to drag some oxygen into his lungs.

She stilled and looked up at him with eyes that were suddenly alert…and stunned.

“It’s okay,” he whispered as he rubbed a thumb over her damp bottom lip.

She unwound her arms from his neck and let them fall to her sides. “No, it’s not.” She said the words quietly, almost to herself, her eyes averted. Then she drew in a deep breath and met his gaze. “Luke, you don’t want to do this.”

He almost laughed at how far that was from the truth. “I can tell you that my body disagrees in the most strenuous of terms.”

“That’s because it’s under a misapprehension.”

“What would that be?” he murmured as he skimmed his fingers down her spine to the dip in her lower back, trying to bring the two of them back to the place they’d been only moments earlier.

For a full second, her eyes darkened in response to his caress, before she blinked the effect away. “Your body thinks there’s a chance this will go further.”

“Hate to be the one to break it to you,” he said lazily, “but your body agrees with mine.”

Tell me, have you ever wished upon a shooting star? I've tried, but I've never been quite fast enough. Whether you've been able to or not, I'll be giving away a copy of The Local All-Star Anthology, which includes Countering His Claim, to one commenter.

Countering His Claim is still available as an eBook in the US, Australia and NZ, as well as other parts of the world, and in paperback in some places. The Local All-Star Anthology will be on the bookshop shelves in Australia and NZ in October.

Come back next Sunday, when the winner of today's giveaway will be announced -- and a smooch from a gorgeous Amy Andrews book will be posted!

On the Road Again

Two weeks ago my DB and I headed down to Christchurch to spend a few days with the grandies and family. It is a trip we do often.
Usually it is a four and a half drive through Blenheim and Kaikoura along a stunning coastline.
This time we had to go to Nelson first so that added an hour to the trip, but it also meant we drove down the centre of the South Island, which was a nice change.
I apologise for being a hopeless photographer, and add in sitting in travelling car and here's the result, but they give you the idea.

 
 
 
 
Once over the pass we head towards Hanmer, a beautiful Alpine Village.




Heading up the beginning the Lewis Pass,  a stretch of road often closed due to snow. None for us that day.

 It's quite isolated through here with farmhouses scattered along the way kilometres apart.

I've twice ridden the Rainbow Rage bike challenge which runs behind these mountains on the right.

On the return trip we follow the coastline before and after Kaikoura. This area is popular with tourists stopping to see the seal colonies.

 
 





The mountainous backdrop to Kaikoura township.
This is one of my favourite areas of the country geographically with the sea and the mountains so close. It also gets extreme weather which isn't so good.

I love getting out and about in our country. There's so much to see and the views are always changing.
Next month we're heading to the North Island on a two week road trip. I'll try to take better photos. :)
What's the trick to taking reasonable pictures? Apart from asking the DB to stop the car when he's just overtaken an annoying driver!

 

A guest post from Clare Connelly

It is my pleasure to introuduce everyone to Clare Connelly. I met Clare at the recent RWAustralia conference in Adelaide at the cocktail party. Here we are -

We got chatting and I dsicovered that she'd written dozens of category romance novels as an indie. I was very excited to learn this given how category romance is my first love and to meet an Aussie indie author who loves it as much as I do and is making a successful career out of it, is totally aweome. So we asked her to come and tell us a bit about herself because we know how much you guys love category romance too and finding a new author to love, especially one with such an extensive backlist, is like finding gold! So...here she is!

A huge thanks to the LoveCats for inviting me to post on the blog today. I feel really (really, really) thrilled to be here. 

So far as she could tell, his thick dark hair was still as wonderfully dark as ever, although he was wearing it shorter than he used to. Apart from that, nothing seemed to have changed. Every little line, all the small laughing creases were all the same. He was as wonderful as ever.

Thus began the first false start in my career as a romance writer, and wasn’t it a doozy?

I wrote my maiden full-length category romance at fifteen, and you’ve just suffered but a brief excerpt from within its pages. Looking back, it’s a hybrid that reflects with horrifying accuracy a crucible of my interests. At the time these were, Jane Austen, The Bold & The Beautiful, all things Emma Darcy and apparently a weak-spot for hyperbole and repetition.

But I wrote the thing, all fifty thousand words of it, printed it out, had my mother and sister edit it (what they must have thought!). Despite their kindly-couched tips for improvement, I sent the manuscript off to the London Harlequin office. This was in the days well before e-submissions and I waited with baited (you might even say arrogantly hopeful) breath to hear. Six months later, on beautifully watermarked letterhead I received the crushing death knell to my teenage aspirations: WHILE WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUBMISSION … You can imagine the rest.  I consoled myself with the dreariest Hanson song I could find (WEIRD, for those of you playing along at home.)

It would be more than a decade before I completed another manuscript though, like many aspiring writers, I wrote tirelessly in the interim. I filled the internet with the ramblings of my heart (thank you, Wordsworth), penning blogs, emails and recipes. And all the while, I read voraciously – on average, a category romance novel a day. It’s a wonder my feet could touch the ground!

In 2012, I gave up a dream job working with Maggie Beer to have my little people. The business of being a mum to two kids under twenty months was H-E-C-T-I-C and I craved both the routine of my career and the distraction of grown-ups – even if I had to make them up.

And so I wrote. I treated my writing as a job long before I had any real hopes of publication. I figured that the best way to be a real writer was to start acting like one.

My word-count-goal used to be two thousand words per day. Multiply that by thirty-ish days and bam! A full-length category romance could be completed in roughly a month, if it was well-plotted. Because writing is easy and things always go to plan, right?

No.

It took a lot longer the first time around, and it was rubbish (plot holes everywhere). The first five I completed felt wrong. Something was missing. I wrote, and I wrote, and I read and I read and finally I finished a book that, after giving it some breathing space and returning to it with fresh eyes, caused within my heart the same flutters it feels when I read my favourite romances.

Having yet again knocked ever so gently on Harlequin’s doors and been told ‘no thanks’, I was becoming convinced I would need to set aside my dreams of making any kind of career out of writing. Until my sister strenuously urged me to stop being such a wuss and do that thing everyone’s talking about: self-publish.

And so, dear reader, I married him. Wait. That’s not right, but you get the gist.

I self-published with remarkably little research, preparation, fanfare, and with a compensating degree of Dutch Courage in the form of red wine. Thanks to Amazon’s almost Orwellian reporting algorithms, I saw a sale flash up on my graphs about five minutes later. And then another. And then another. I wasn’t going to be the next EL James just yet but, right from the start, hundreds of copies of my book were selling each week which, to me, was utterly surreal. Who were these people, and how were they finding me?

It’s been two years since that large glass of Maggie Beer Shiraz (you know she produces wine too, don’t you?) and I have published thirty-eight single titles, several anthologies and now write full-time. Or as full time as a five and four-year-old allow.

“Jenevieve!” He pulled her closer, gritting his teeth. She could feel the purity of his anger as he stared down at her, nothing but hatred in his black eyes.

Which brings me finally to my predilection for angsty alpha-males (sorry, having dragged out the old MS I don’t seem able to stop.) Even as a teenager I seemed drawn to those passionate anti-heroes. The kind of bad boys who are all heart – but a heart that’s buried a long way beneath their arrogant, angry, mocking exteriors (and what exteriors they tend to have, swoon). Half of my catalogue falls into contemporary catalogue romance (think Billionaire Mediterranean hunks) and half are Sheikh romances, which I adore for their arrogance-by-birthright. I no longer describe their purity of anger and I allow them to have a little lust in their eyes…

What kind of hero makes you tick? Are you a sucker for good-at-heart-bad-boys or do you love to read about those sensitive, kind new-age guys? Or a little bit of both (because who says you can only have one book boyfriend at a time?).

Clare's bio - 

Clare Connelly first discovered romance novels as an adolescent and learned almost everything she knows about life from within the pages of a Mills & Boon. She has a small family and a bungalow near the sea in South Australia. When she isn't chasing after energetic little children, or wiping fingerprints off furniture, she's writing, thinking about writing, or wishing she were writing.

You can check her out a little more or just perve at the background picture) at www.clareconnelly.com