Unveiled
Jacklyn Daher
Publication date: June 6th 2020
Genres: Paranormal, Young Adult

What if your entire life was a lie?

Sixteen-year-old Luxor Everstone had the idyllic life-wealthy, popular and beautiful. Until in a fit of rage, she almost killed her best friend. And herself.

Waking up from a coma she senses everything is different. She is different. A darkness lingers deep inside laced with rage, further fuelled by a faceless man who haunts her.

Exiled to a sleepy town for a new start and to attend a juvenile rehabilitation centre, all she wants is a clean slate. Except the universe has other plans as crimson eyed people reeking of sulphur throw her life into peril at every turn.

Encountering Hunter is a surprise in more ways than one. Enigmatic and antagonistic, against her will a strong electric connection draws her to him. But Hunter’s curious nature and innate ability to know Luxor’s thoughts keep her on edge so does his offer of helping her uncover the lies.

Torn between attraction and her instincts to flee, will she put herself at risk for answers?

Or will the truth heal, or taint her soul?

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EXCERPT:

Warm streaks of sunlight broke and radiated through the luscious looming oak and elm trees, the harmonious melodies of hummingbirds gliding mid-air dancing with butterflies, an array of multi-colours swirling around. Straight ahead, high above on a branch an owl hooted, its wide eyes wise enough to know this was a twisted world of danger under the guise of beauty.

Luxor was sucked back into a world she dreaded and submerged wholly. She inhaled a sharp breath and puffed out her cheeks. She twirled around and wondered aimlessly, refusing to inhale the polluted air, all too aware of the fate which behold them.

No, no, no! Not again!

It was a repeat performance.

The Forest.

The Hunt.

The Fall.

This isn’t real, it’ll be over soon.

Since the accident, the night terrors were her reality. Night after night. Luxor wanted to run to wake up, but it was futile. She was a prisoner inside her own nightmare. A low hiss echoed from one of the low branches. She cradled herself and shivered as she peered up, but she couldn’t see anything. She curled her barefooted toes into the dirt and moved forward. For the first time it was a new addition.

Ready.

Luxor changed a bit of the game to gain control, she couldn’t keep going the same way. Sixteen years was enough.

Set.

“What do you want?” she said into the void. It was the same question she always asked, hoping for an answer.

A rumble shook underneath, a sign of a muted answer, followed by a melodious laugh echoing through the trees. But it didn’t offer a reprieve. The chase was about to commence.

Go!

Luxor played the part and lifted the hem of her ivory dress and clutched the chiffon tightly. She glanced over her shoulder and dashed into the distance to nowhere. She dodged any obstacles in her way, her arms scratching against rough bark. Twigs snapped and leaves crunched under her bare feet as bugs were squashed mixing in with a gritty residue of burnt dirt which stuck between her toes.

As usual nobody was there, but a deep sense of foreboding awaited her and a deep chilling presence arrived which ultimately welcomed her.

A gust of wind whooshed in and brought a frosty chill, a telltale sign of ominous danger, just as the flash of a violet lightning bolt ahead lit up the sky. The environment transformed, and the wildlife scampered away in all directions, leaving a mess in their wake.

The lush foliage died and transformed to black, stripped of all its beauty as oak trees extended their branches, knocking the grand apple tree beside it. Apples rained down and cast her surroundings into darkness.

Nobody was in sight, but that meant nothing, this was the perfect setting.

Luxor stopped dead in her tracks as an iridescent glow hypnotised and blinded her. Shielding her eyes with the back of her hand, she squinted. Even if she wanted to look away, she couldn’t. The glow was utterly alluring.

A large root bulged up from a towering tree and long blades of grass sprouted into weeds, curling about transforming into vines. Luxor stumbled to her knees, the spell she was under momentarily broken. After blinking three times, she noticed the vines shackled her ankles as mud covered her feet and stones lacerated them with navy blue liquid oozing out. She rid herself of the constraints and low crawled.

Whispers murmured in the air, incomprehensible like static through a telephone wire.

A choking mist, tasting of sulphuric acid, clouded from above just as long canopy leaves blanketed and closed her in. The suffocation phase began. It was always the same—beauty, dying, suffocation, and the promise of death. The further she ran, the louder the whispers became until it was all she could hear. The hissing joined in and she expected at any moment for a lethal boa constrictor or python to make an appearance, but nothing did.

“Stop changing the game,” she cried out, her lips chaffed from the toxic air.

Luxor could handle the night terrors, but this was something unfamiliar, and she hated it. While concentrating on blocking out the recent additions of the whispers and hissing she had forgotten all about the next phase. One by one, hummingbirds rained down on her until it had become a full-blown down pour, their hums replaced by caws. She peeked upwards and released the lush foliage hadn’t turn black because of death, the crows had covered them like a blanket. She ducked and covered her head and crawled to find shelter.

“Bloody psycho,” she grumbled, squeezing through a hole and underneath a harsh log to hide. Pushing aside scorched, prickly pine needles, her hands brushed against mountains of hummingbirds with snapped necks and broken wings. She was exhausted, more emotionally than physically.

Luxor stifled back the urge to throw up, tucking her knees to her chest, becoming rigid. Not long now she would wake up. It couldn’t change the game that much.

Silence.

Another round of laughs, this time darker with not a hint of a song. Luxor shivered and scratched her arms, chilled to her bone, but not because of the weather. Peering down, mosquitoes had nibbled at her skin creating navy blue spots before being glued on with her blood.

“The game has just begun,” the crows cawed out in a high pitched screeched, their beaks peeking the eyes of the wise owl. “And you better get ready.”

Author Bio:

A mother of two boys, I’m a self confessed nerd who loves to write dark and twisted characters in modern settings. You could find feisty MC’s and bad boys with filthy mouths. Doesn’t mean I don’t love to read or write saucy romances too!

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The Gladiator’s Downfall
Kristen Banet
(Age of the Andinna #1)
Publication date: December 14th 2018
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Reverse Harem

Mave knows where she stands in life.

She’s an Andinna. A member of the winged, horned, and tailed warrior race that the Elvasi Empire defeated in the Hundred Year War and then enslaved. She’s a slave, and has been one for a thousand years, the personal property of the Empress of the Elvasi Empire, since the end of the War. She’s a gladiator, thrown onto the sands of the Colosseum to die, though it backfired on those who wanted her dead. She’s the Champion of the Colosseum, and has been for roughly nine hundred years.

All of these things have marked her as an outcast among her own people. Hated, distrusted, and despised, she knows the name of her people, but not much else.

But she knows where she stands. Keeping her head down and her blades sharp has carried her this far, and she refuses to acknowledge the deepest wishes she holds in her heart. Those will only get her killed.

Alone, she’s stood against everything they have ever thrown at her, refusing to give them what they want.

What Mave doesn’t know is that it’s all about to change.

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Author Bio:

Kristen Banet loves to read books that make people cry. She likes to write books that make people cry (and she wants to hear about it). She's a firm believer that nothing and no one in this world is perfect, and she enjoys exploring those imperfections--trying to make the characters seem real on the page and not just in her head.
She might just be crazy, though. Her characters think so, but this can't be confirmed.

You can find more of her works under K.N. Banet!

Check out her social media to catch what's going on in the worlds inside her head. She drops teasers, new covers, and opens ARC reader slots through her Facebook group, The Banet Pride.

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Shadow’s Lyric
C.A. Worley
(Crossing Daggers, #1)
Publication date: June 1st 2020
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance

It began with a blood oath.
It ended in bloodshed.

When twenty-one-year-old Lyric is told by her father, Gabrian, she will be crossing into the Otherland as payment for a favor he owes the Shadow Lord, she thinks her life is over. In truth, it is just beginning. Years of training as a soldier and an uncanny ability to learn pretty much anything give Lyric the tools she needs to survive her new reality—and it totally helps that her new lord and master is sex incarnate.

Draven has long awaited Lyric’s arrival, and not just because he needs her to track a powerful weapon stolen by an unknown adversary. He believes he has everything firmly in hand, despite the subterfuge he foolishly agreed to some twenty years back. When Draven’s enemies and lies of omission both threaten the fragile bond he and Lyric are forming, he refuses to allow anything to stand in the way, not even the razor-sharp blade of Lyric’s favorite sword.

WARNING: This novel contains tons of bad language, the occasional smackdown, and a good deal of inappropriate humor–sometimes all at once.

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EXCERPT:

Draven was waiting for me in the hall when I exited my quarters. Something about the way he was casually leaning against the stone, with his arms and legs crossed, made him look especially yummy.

His nostrils flared right as his silver eyes took on an ethereal glow. I turned into a startled rabbit, frozen in his high beams. The oxygen between us heated, increasing in weight. Suddenly I felt hot, my mouth dry.

“I know how we can wet it,” he rumbled, pushing off the wall and crowding my personal space.

Stupid shield!

In my defense, it was hard to concentrate on anything when Draven was looking at me like he was about to eat me alive.

“Do you have any idea what you did to me out there?” he accused.

“I didn’t do anything to you.”

Draven grabbed my hand and flattened it on his crotch. My fingers reflexively squeezed, like they had a mind of their own. A dirty, naughty, whorish little mind of their own. A thrill shot through me and my adrenaline kicked in.

Well, hello there, nipples. Are you trying to tear through my shirt? Looks like.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch you best them again and again, but that’s exactly what you’ll do, isn’t it, Angel?”

“You—you liked that? It was just me losing my temper.”

Squeeze.

I was somebody else at that moment. Someone whose hand had no problem fondling big packages.

“No, it was so much more,” Draven contended.

Squeeze.

This time he released a satisfying exhale. I was affecting him. I liked—scratch that—I loved how I was affecting him. I felt powerful. Desired.

Despite any misgivings over the Shadow Lord’s intentions, I wanted him with an irrational craving bordering on obsession. I wanted this male I hardly knew. Wanted him enough that I was standing in the hallway, after getting pissed on by a gargoyle, stroking him through his leathers.

We were having a conversation about what I did on the archery range while I was giving him a handy. Damn if I could get my stupid fingers to let go. I knew Draven wanted me. I didn’t understand it, but he’d made it very clear. The proof was throbbing in my palm.

The question was, what was I going to do about it? Probably what I always did when someone pushed me. I was going to push back.

“Did you follow me up here for a quickie, Draven?”

Ohmysweetjesus, I seriously just said that out loud. Another person was inhabiting my body. Probably a prostitute’s ghost.

“What would you do if I said yes?”

My heart sped up, thinking of the answer, picturing it vividly in my head.

“Shield, Lyric. My control around you is tenuous at best, and the images you’re projecting are telling me you’d be more than okay with me locking us up in your room for a few hours while I take up residence in the cradle of your thighs.”

I bit my lip, which I guess was code for go ahead and do me because Draven had me pinned to the wall with my legs around his waist faster than I could blink. So distracted by this exalted male, I hardly noticed the discomfort of my swords getting sandwiched between my back and the cool stone.

“Maybe just a taste, then,” he bade, his mouth so close to mine I was breathing his exhale.

I waited, then quickly realized he was waiting for me to decide. My sensitized skin felt tight. My core ached. I hungered. Gods, how I hungered.

These stirrings had always been dormant in me. One second in Draven’s orbit had awoken the carnal side of my being, the demon side which should have always had an appetite for pleasures of the flesh.

Mateus and the other demons in our clan had no issue finding a warm body for just a night. Getting naked with the humans whose names they’d not remember was commonplace.

I’d grown into adulthood believing I was lacking in this, convinced my halfling chromosomes had dampened those instincts. I had lived in the presence of hundreds of males my entire life and not one of them made me feel any amount of sexual desire, not even Mateus. Only Draven made me feel this way and had since the second I’d stepped into his world.

“Lyric,” he growled.

I involuntarily tilted my pelvis, groaning at the faintest touch of sweet friction. Draven shook, holding himself in check. For me. He was holding back for me.

It was heady stuff having any sort of power over the biggest and baddest Shadow in the land.

My soul pushed energies out and when his magics pushed back, I was lost. I could no more stop this than I could stop a rising tide.

My hands flew to his hair, grabbing two fistfuls. I yanked him the rest of the distance, holding him to me, unable to get close enough.

Unlike our first kiss, this one was raw. Primal. All teeth and tongue and desperation. I loved it. Locking my legs behind his back, I ground against him.

“Fuck, Lyric.”

His curse added to my impulse to behave badly. I’d bet he was a dirty talker in bed. Not that I had much experience with that, but I did have satellite television in my room back home. One can learn a lot from soft porn.

“Have to … make you … come,” he gritted between kisses.

Oh, yes, please!

Draven’s mouth drifted down the column of my throat. He kept one hand under my ass and the other slid under my shirt, then under my sports bra. I threw my head back when he reached my nipple, pinching and pulling. All the while he continuously rolled his hips into me.

Shadows started moving around us. Just like in my dreams, they slithered against my limbs, humming with vibrations. I froze.

“Draven?”

“Shh. It’s just me,” he whispered, licking my collarbone. “I need your mouth, but I want to taste and touch you everywhere. Let me show you how I can do both.”

“Uh—”

His lips were on mine again, the tendrils of darkness taking over his scorching kisses below my ear and down my neck. The maelstrom of sensations obliterated any hesitation I might have had. It was like there were three Dravens making out with me against the wall.

He dropped his other hand back to my rear. Magics skated under my clothing, across my breasts, feeling like electric fingers.

When he started lifting me up and down against his rigid cock, I moaned. The movement was chafing, holding me in that narrow space between pleasure and pain. That foreign storm, the one I’d only ever experienced in my dreams where a shadowy figure played my body like a master, built with the force of a tsunami.

Electric currents slithered down my abdomen, under my pants, and settled atop my clit. Holy fucking shit. They increased in intensity, alternating with his jerking hips. Every part of me was covered in his essence.

The only place he wasn’t was the one place I knew we both wanted him to be. Conjuring the image of Draven moving inside me, imagining his weight pinning me down as he thrust between my legs, the dam finally broke.

I cried out in pleasured shock, unable to hold it in. On and on it went with those electric currents prolonging my ecstasy until I was nothing more than a drooping form Draven had to hold upright.

My body went limp, my head dropping to his shoulder. He was still hard and I wondered if we should do something about that, though, maybe not out here in the hall.

Draven kissed my neck then straightened. Pulling gently on my hair, he tilted my head enough to see my face.

“You’re exactly as I knew you’d be,” he said.

“How’s that?” I puffed, still somewhat winded.

“Passionate. Wild. A force to be reckoned with.”

I blushed hard. Make-out session against wall? No problem. Complement from the Shadow Lord? Total embarrassment.

“Yes, well, you’re nothing like I thought. None of this is, aside from the atmospheric differences.”

“What did you think I’d be?”

“Cold. Scary. Murdery.”

He fought a smile. “I’m not sure murdery is a word, but I can be—and often am—all three. Though, not to you, Lyric. Never to you.”

Emotions rolled through me, plucking a haunting tune on my heartstrings. I wasn’t sure I was ready to identify what I was feeling.

He spoke to me as he might speak to a lover. He showed care for me, concern even. He’d fucking bought me a set of katanas and a personalized flask, things I’d treasure far more than any gift of flowers or jewelry.

“Draven …”

His lips pressed softly to mine. I knew my shield had been annihilated, so he was catching everything. It was grossly unfair.

“It’s okay, Angel. This was all I needed, for now. You come beautifully, by the way.”

If I flushed any further, I was going to have an aneurism.

Draven lowered me to my feet, brushing back the stray hairs that had fallen out of my ponytail during our hallway tryst.

“You might want to shower and change again, unless you want everyone to know what we were doing.”

“They’ll still catch traces, anyway, won’t they?”

“Probably.”

Lamerson’s words about my worth got stuck on repeat in my mind. “I don’t want them to think I’m, that I’m …”

“That you’re what?”

“That that’s why I’m here, all I’m good for.”

I waited for the regret to seep through my pores. When it didn’t, I chalked it up to the endorphins still pumping through me. Surely, I’d regret this by morning.

Draven pushed open my door and nudged me inside. “Then go rinse off, get dressed, return to the training area, and kick someone’s ass.”

Oh, gods. Draven got me. He sooo got me. How could I possibly keep my panties dry when the Shadow Lord was over there getting me?

I was in over my head.

Author Bio:

C.A. Worley is the alter-ego of Romance Author Cass Alexander. Where Cass tends to focus on humor in her publications, C.A. loves to write fantasy. She chose to write under the two different monikers so as to not confuse (or tick off) her readers.

C.A. currently resides in the Midwest, but was born and raised in the South. She spends her days working from home and her evenings are spent shuttling her kids to and fro. Her dinners are subpar, but she makes a mean dessert.

When she's tired of living her sons' travel sports schedules, C.A. enjoys a glass (or four) of wine. She needs the liquid courage to click the publish button for her fantasy romance novels.

Her motto is, "Be Brave," and she tries to live it every day. It takes a healthy dose of courage to get through this thing we call life.

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Monster Academy
Catherine Banks
Publication date: June 2nd 2020
Genres: Paranormal, Romance, Young Adult

They thought they’d have it easy being monster elites, but these three best friends still have to deal with pop quizzes, crushes, and even worse…humans.

Frances Stein, Loralie Reaper, and Tsukiko Okami just want to play games and relax after their classes. Any hopes of chilling out, however, are destroyed when humans attack Monster Academy and try to use the students for ransom.

In order to defeat the humans and protect their fellow monsters, they must work side by side with their crushes without giving away their secrets. Of course, that would be a lot easier if they were able to stick together, but in a move that betrays insider knowledge, the BFFs are separated.

By tapping into their monstrous powers and working with their crushes, they will open their hearts and unlock abilities long thought dead. But will it be enough to save all of monster-kind? It’s going to be one hell of a year at Monster Academy.

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EXCERPT:

Takumi bowed again. “Yes, sir.” He straightened and looked at me. “Are we providing a guard for Tsukiko?”

“No,” Grandfather and I said at the same time.

Grandfather gave me a glare, and I snapped my mouth closed. My tail swished behind me, but I quickly wrapped it around my leg.

“Not at this time,” Grandfather amended. “If the situation worsens before I am able to return and you believe she needs a guard, then assign one to her.”

My mouth dropped open.

“Even if she tries to argue,” Grandfather finished with fire in his eyes.

I closed my mouth and looked down at my shoes. Fine. I got it. I would just make sure that that did not happen.

Behind me, Loralie danced from foot to foot. “Grandfather?” she whispered.

I looked up and saw his lip twitch again. “You may go,” he whispered.

Faster than I had ever seen her move, Loralie cleared the distance between us and the hellhounds. The hounds surrounded her, rubbing their bodies on her and licking her face and hands. She cooed at them while scratching their ears and rubbing the bellies of the ones who had lain down.

The ferocious, black dogs had red eyes that reminded me of the fires of the Underworld, fur that resembled shadows and mist, and razor sharp teeth that could tear through flesh and bone with ease.

And Loralie loved them. As Death’s daughter, she was capable of controlling the hell hounds if needed, but she had such an affinity for them that they just did whatever she asked.

“How long will she do that?” Takumi asked.

“Give her at least thirty minutes,” Grandfather said. “She hasn’t seen hellhounds in several months. I’ll leave it to you, Takumi. Take care of my girls…and the rest of the students.”

He added that ending like he’d almost forgotten there were other kids here.

Author Bio:

Catherine Banks is a USA Today Bestselling fantasy author who writes in several fantasy subgenres under two pseudonyms. She began writing fiction at only four years old and finished her first full-length novel at the age of fifteen. She is married to her soulmate and best friend, Avery, who she has two amazing children with. After her full-time job, she reads books, plays video games, and watches anime shows and movies with her family to relax. Although she has lived in Northern California her entire life, she dreams of traveling around the world. Catherine is also C.E.O. of Turbo Kitten Industries™, a company with many hats including being a book publisher and Etsy store full of nerdy fun.

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