Once a month, a bunch of authors get together and post excerpts from published books, contracted work or works in progress, and link to each other. You don’t have to be published to participate–just an writer with an excerpt you’d like to share. For more info on how to participate, head over to the Excerpt Monday site! or click on the banner above.

This month, I’m sharing the first chapter of Blood and Roses, which will be available at Samhain tomorrow!

—

I was not the only man in the parlor that night, but I was one of the few not looking for a whore.

The girls sat about, mostly, combing their hair or bent in gossip with one another. There was little else to do; it had been a slow night, and patrons came in a discouraging trickle. Occasionally a girl would spy someone she fancied, rise, stretch, and amble over so as not to betray her interest too readily. I sat by a window where the breeze might reach me and played draughts with Elise. There were too many of us in the parlor, crowded and overheated, not enough patrons culling our ranks to keep the numbers at a reasonable level. The chair put my back to the door, and Elise was to spy over my shoulder and give a signal if any patrons seemed to be the sort who might find me a more suitable companion than one of the girls.

I was bent over the board studying my next move when a collective shiver seemed to overtake us all as one. I straightened and saw Elise staring over my shoulder, leaning to get a better view. The other girls, those who I could see, were already scrambling to their feet, idle pursuits cast aside, tripping over their skirts as they rushed to greet this newcomer.

I rose from our table, one of only a handful not already flinging myself at this newest patron, and cast a brief glance behind me, wondering who it was this time the women were making fools of themselves over.

I did not have to wonder what it was. Only one thing turned these working women to sycophants at a mere glance.

Vampire. The king himself might have walked through our doors and not received such a welcome.

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Once a month, a bunch of authors get together and post excerpts from published books, contracted work or works in progress, and link to each other. You don’t have to be published to participate–just an writer with an excerpt you’d like to share. For more info on how to participate, head over to the Excerpt Monday site! or click on the banner above.

This month, I’m posting another except from Copper Kiss, to celebrate it’s release today from Liquid Silver Books! You can read more excerpts here and here, and if you like what you see, head on over here to buy it.

—

Logan’s car was in the driveway when they pulled up, and lights glowed within the house. Reina’s heart started to flutter with hope, until she saw Kynan walking towards the house from the car. His shirt was ripped and stained with blood, his face and arms smeared with it.

“Oh my God.” Reina threw herself out of the car before it had stopped moving. She ran to him. “Kynan! Are you all right?”

He took her arms, held her still when she might have whirled off in a hundred different directions. “I’m fine, Reina.” He hesitated and glanced towards the house.

She didn’t wait to hear more; she ran for the door.

Inside, the house was in an uproar. People ran from one place to another, shouting to others as they went. Everyone bore wounds, but all were on their feet and more or less intact.

Everyone but Logan, who sat on the couch in a daze, the eye of the storm of activity. Reina ran to his side. She dropped to her knees in front of him, took his hands in hers. “Logan?” Her voice wavered, caught, broke like ice on the pavement.

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Welcome to Excerpt Monday! If you want to join in the fun, you can stop by the Excerpt Monday blog for more information.

This month’s excerpt is a scene from my current work-in-progress, Iconoclast:

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It had been a very long time since Samyazaz was a child. He remembered it as a quiet time, a time of study and learning, marked by the wonder of discovery and the somber honor of his duty. He had never even been so careless as to rip a garment, to his recollection.

The first time Sariel and Baraquiel had brought their young daughter to him, her palms scraped raw and dirty scuffs upon the hem of her skirt, he had been speechless with appalled surprise.

Now, years later, as he ushered her into his workroom yet again, he thought ruefully that he had ceased to be surprised by her. Weary resignation had taken its place.

“I was in a hurry,” she said by way of explanation, and remained standing even though he motioned for her to sit upon his table. “Father said we were having the Council over for supper and I must be well-presented, but I lost myself in the library and before I knew it—”

“You were running,” Samyazaz said grimly, stretching out her arm. The shoulder of her sleeve was in tatters, its edges stained with flecks of blood. Through the rent camisole he could see that her arm was abraded and inflamed. A few long cuts had gone deep enough to break the skin.

“My feet flew right out from under me.” She sent him a sheepish grin, which he countered with stern disapproval. It was not lost on him that she had not rebutted his statement, but had not conceded to it either.

“It is unbefitting a Watcher to run through the halls of her own home,” he scolded her, not for the first time and surely not for the last, as he drew a dagger from his drawer. He turned in time to catch her making a face.

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It’s that time again! Excerpt Monday! This month I’m sharing an excerpt from Sacrifice, my upcoming release from Liquid Silver Books.

When an unnatural eclipse hangs in the sky, portending doom, Ryllana is chosen to be sacrificed to ensure her land and her people’s survival. She expects her fate will bring a swift, violent death at the claws of Teppal’s beast. But though the beast comes to claim her, he does not devour her. Instead, he carries her away to his castle.

There, she waits for him to return and demand the sacrifice required of her. In the meantime, she finds a companion in the beast’s human servant, Draig, who surprises Ryllana with his tenderness and compassion. Despite herself, she begins to fall for him — but the beast still waits, and the secrets Draig is keeping might destroy everything she loves.

The eclipse rose in my window and passed out of sight at midday, so I had no means of tracking the time beyond the number of candles that I burned through. It might have been minutes, or days, when my door crashed open. I jumped, my heart in my throat, and a smile bloomed across my face to see Draig in the doorway. I pushed my books aside and started toward him, but cried out in dismay not halfway across the room, for his tabard dripped with blood and he clung unsteadily to the jamb. His face was ashen, his head drooping forward, as though he hadn’t the strength to hold it upright.

I ran to him and helped him to the bed. He held on to me, stumbling across the rug. I eased him onto the bed, then took his face in my hands and turned it to me. His expression was slack, his eyes half-closed. “Draig!” I cried. “What happened?”

He opened his eyes. It looked as though it took a great effort. “Ryllana,” he breathed, and smiled as though it was a wonderful surprise to see me. Then he grimaced and groaned with pain. “I’m hurt.”

“You don’t say.” I pulled frantically at his tabard. “Draig, help me! I must see where you’re injured.”

He rose up onto his elbow and I began to strip his tabard off, but his strength only lasted a moment before he collapsed back onto the bed. His ragged breathing made fear twist through my stomach.

“A kiss, lady,” he whispered, a thread of sound. “For strength.”

I stared down at him. “Don’t be absurd. Now is not the time.” I gripped his tabard at the throat and tore it open down the front. Draig blinked at me, but didn’t protest. It took another moment to unlace his shirt, and then I had his chest bared.

Four parallel gouges cut across his chest, each as long as my forearm and bleeding freely. I clasped my hands over my mouth, horrified. “Oh, Draig…” I sought out his gaze. “This is bad.”

He nodded, and I saw recognition in his eyes. He knew. He knew, and had come to me. I crouched on the bed and tore strips of fabric from the hem of my robe, trying not to cry. I could clean him and bandage him, but little more. I had meager sewing skills, and no needle or thread in any case. I helped him sit and wound the makeshift bandages around his back, then took his hand in mine and bent over it, pressing a fierce kiss to his palm.

He pulled from my grasp and raised his hand to my cheek. “A kiss, lady,” he whispered again.

I shook my head wildly and dashed tears from my cheeks. “Fool,” I whispered down at him. “How can you think of stealing kisses now?”

“So be it, then.” He gave me a crooked smile. “Will you refuse the last request of a dying fool?”

I covered my face in my hands, protests rising unbidden to my lips. But they were an empty comfort. We both knew the truth. He might die, and there might be nothing I could do to prevent it.

I knelt at his side in the mattress and put my hands to his cheeks. I looked gravely down at him, his face grey and pale, then bent and pressed my mouth to his.

I meant it to be only that, a momentary brush. But when I tried to draw away, he curled his hand around the back of my neck and held me to him with startling strength.

His lips coaxed mine, urging them to part so he could take the kiss deeper. I pressed them together and shook my head. When he persisted, I broke away. “Don’t tax yourself,” I commanded unsteadily. “You’ve better things to save your strength for.”

“Better things than kissing?” He eased back onto the bed with a lopsided smile. “I can only think of a very few.”

“Living?” I demanded.

His smile softened, warmed. “What’s the use of that when pretty women refuse to kiss you?”

Make sure to check out the rest of this month’s great excerpts!

Mel Berthier, Urban Fantasy (PG 13)
and
Bria Quinlan, Rom Com (PG)

Joining us this week:

Kinsey W. Holley, Paranormal (PG)
Caitlynn Lowe, Epic Fantasy (PG)
Dara Sorensen, Paranormal (PG)

Babette James, Fantasy Romance (PG13)
Christina DeLorenzo, YA (PG 13)
Nika Dixon, Romantic Suspense (PG 13)
Bryn Donovan, Paranormal Romance (PG13)
Kaige, Historic Romance (PG-13)
Julia Knight, Fantasy Romance (PG 13)
Adelle Laudan, Contemporary Romance (PG 13)
Jeannie Lin, Historical Romance (PG13)
RF Long, Paranormal (PG13)
Rebecca Savage, romantic suspense (PG 13)
Crista McHugh, Paranormal Romance (PG 13)
Michelle Arroyo, Historical Romance (PG 13)

Jax Cassidy, Contemporary Romance (R)
Maya Doyle, Paranormal Romance (R)
Cate Hart, Paranormal (R)
Ali Katz, Historical Erotic Romance (R)
Inez Kelley, Romantic Comedy (R)
Aislinn Kerry, Paranormal Romance (R)
Elise Logan, Fantasy Romance (R)
Cherrie Lynn, Paranormal Romance (R)
Alina Morgan, Urban Fantasy (R)
Vivienne Westlake, Erotic Historical (R)

Stephanie Adkins, Erotic Romance (NC 17)
Evie Byrne, Medieval Paranormal Romance (NC 17)
Kim Knox, Erotic SF Romance (NC17)
Lauren Murphy, Erotic Romance (NC 17)
Kirsten Saell, Erotic Romance (NC 17)

It’s Excerpt Monday again! This month, I’m sharing an excerpt from my upcoming Samhain release, Blood and Roses.

The last thing Arjen wants is a vampire in his bed, despite the rest of the world’s obsession with the creatures. Unfortunately, his reticence is precisely what attracts Maikel van Triet to him. After hundreds of years of being adored because of what he is, Maikel is enthralled by Arjen’s apathy.

What starts as a simple arrangement soon becomes something more than either of them expected. But vampires are shallow, fickle creatures, and Maikel could never truly love another. Could he?

I stopped before my door, fingertips resting on the handle, and turned back to him. I held my other hand out, open, palm up. “Is it a tryst you want?” I asked him. “Or to stay the night?” We both of us ignored the fact that it was nearly dawn, and night to him meant the full bright of day.

He laughed a little. “A tryst, no. That’s not what I came for.” He counted guilders into my palm, more than I normally charged for a full night, more even than I’d have asked of him, enough that it was all I could do not to gape in astonishment. When he had finished, he curled my fingers around the coins and held my hand in his, looking up at me with a crooked smile. “I’m Maikel,” he said quietly.

I looked down at the silver glinting between my fingers, enough to turn this whole miserable night into a remarkably profitable one. “I know who you are.” I pushed my door open and led him inside.

“Do you, then?” That odd, bemused half-smile still hovered about his face. He lingered in my doorway, watching as I crossed to my bureau and put his fee in my coffer. “I had wondered.”

“You are Maikel van Triet, and a vampire, and your reputation precedes you.” He knew it, of course. It was not only the brothel whores who fawned over his kind. Some days, it seemed all anybody in Amsterdam cared to talk about.

He closed my door with a muted click of the latch and crossed to the window as I tucked my coffer into the back of a drawer. My view looked out over the canal, and the sounds of conversation and gurgling water drifted up to us on the night’s breeze.

“What will you?” I asked when it seemed he might stand there looking out until the sun rose. “Your reputation has preceded you, but not so much that I know your desires.”

He did not answer me at first, but closed and latched my shutters with deliberate care. When they were shut fast against the approaching dawn, he turned to face me, hands braced behind him on the sill. “I desire a bed until dark,” he said. “And surety that the shutters will remain closed until then.”

My brows climbed my forehead. I stared at him, nonplussed. “That’s all?”

His head fell forward, sending a lock of dark hair curling against his cheek. It didn’t quite hide the slight smile that curved his lips. “And the decency not to send me to bed hungry.”

I had expected he might request something of the sort. Still, I turned aside, crouching to tug at a boot as pretense, for fear my expression might betray me. I was not like the others, who took vampires to bed and proudly displayed their bites the next morning, whispering in rapturous tones of an experience so transcendental it brought them closer to God, or who hoped silently that a patron might one night take too much, and make her one of his own. I did not care to be bitten. But he was a patron, and I had taken his coin.

Barefoot, I straightened and rolled up my cuff to uncover my left arm, the arteries of which were said to carry the sweetest, purest blood, pumped direct from the heart. I crossed to the bed and sat on it, stretched my arm out toward him, wrist turned up.

He sat facing me and took my hand in both of his. His thumbs brushed across my wrist and lingered over my pulse. “You don’t like me, do you?” he asked without a bit of resentment.

He didn’t look away from me and there was no challenge in his gaze, nothing in it daring me to confess. It was simple and direct, an honest request for nothing more or less than the truth.

I shrugged and broke my gaze away. “Not very much, no.”

I had to look back when he laughed, soft and amused. “And yet you would offer me this?”

“You paid for it.”

He kept my hand cradled in both of his, holding it in his lap like something cherished, fingers stroking tenderly. “I believe I am at a disadvantage. You seem to know a great deal about me, but I do not even know your name.” He didn’t look away from my wrist, where fine blue veins drew wandering tracks beneath the skin.

“It’s Arjen,” I said in a voice gone rough and dry.

“Arjen,” he echoed and bent over my wrist.

His hair fell about his face, so I could not see. His lips were warm on my skin, his kiss as sweet as a lover’s. My fingers curled against my palm, then spasmed when his thumb dug into the flesh, finding a vein and pinning it in place. I braced my other hand behind me, fingers digging into the blankets.

His lips parted, breath gusting across my skin like a summer breeze off the water, hot and damp. His mouth formed a seal on my skin, sucking hard enough that I gasped and had to wrestle down the urge to jerk back. His fingers, gentle before, now held my hand with an iron grip. I could try to pull away, but I doubted he’d let me. Fangs pricked my skin like needles, probing. And without warning he bit deep, sinking into me.

I thrashed, unthinking, as agony coursed through me, and realized it hadn’t been greed that made him hold me so tight. I’d have torn my wrist open on his teeth if he’d let me.

He drank, sucking hard at the wound with a rhythm that echoed the thundering beat of my heart. I twisted and tore at the blankets, struggling against the overwhelming instinct to fight.

He bore me down onto my back, his body stretched along mine, and pinned me in place with a surprising strength for someone as lean as he was, so that I could not fight even if I tried. For my benefit, I wondered, or for his? His fangs never withdrew, and his throat never ceased its steady, rhythmic sucking.

I had suffered any number of indignities at the hands of my patrons, and most of them I had done in willing trade for the coin they put in my coffer. But I had never felt as completely helpless as I did then, fully clothed beneath Maikel’s slight weight with his fangs buried in my wrist.

You can find the full list of participants here, or follow some of the links below:

Mel Berthier, Urban Fantasy (PG 13)
Bria Quinlan, Rom Com (PG)
Christina DeLorenzo, YA (PG 13)
Bryn Donovan, Paranormal (PG)
MG Braden, Contemporary Romance (PG 13)
Babette James, Fantasy Romance (PG 13)
Cynthia Justlin, Contemporary Romance (PG 13)
Kaige, Historical Romance (PG 13)
Adelle Laundan, Contemporary Romance (PG 13)
Jeannie Lin, Historical Romance (PG 13)
RF Long, Paranormal (PG 13)
Crista McHugh, Paranormal (PG 13)
Bria Quinlan, Rom Com (PG)
Dara Sorensen, Paranormal (PG)
Grace Draven, Fantasy Romance (R)
Cate Hart, YA- Paranormal (R)
Aithne Jarretta, Paranormal (R)
Inez Kelley, Contemporary Romantic Comedy (R)
Kim Knox, Erotic- Sci-fi Suspense (R)
Cherrie Lynn, Erotic- Contemporary Romance (R)
Alina Morgan, Urban Fantasy (R)
Stephanie Adkins, Erotic- Supsense (NC 17)
Evie Byrne, Historical Romance (NC17)
Ella Drake, Sci-Fi Romance (NC 17)
Annie Nicholas, Sci-Fi Romance (NC 17)
Kirsten Saell, Erotic – Fantasy (NC 17)

Here’s an (unedited) excerpt from Copper Kiss, my upcoming release from Liquid Silver Books:

—

A shiver rippled down Reina’s spine, a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room, and spread icy fingers up the back of her neck. All thoughts of sleep fled. Slowly, she sat up and reached her empathic senses out, searching for the disturbance.

What she found was a void, an absence where there should have been her own residuals, and Brett’s, and Adri’s fading ones, still lingering about. But just beyond her door there was nothing, only a cavernous emptiness that made terror run through her veins.

She felt out for the wards she had set around her room the first day she and Adri moved in, reached empathic fingers up to the ceiling and down into the floorboards. And in the doorway, just before the void, she found a tiny opening, a paper-thin slice made with surgical precision, just big enough for a man to slip through without anyone the wiser.

If she hadn’t woken, if she’d slept through the tiny shiver of reaction that the breach had sent through her…

She reached blindly for her nightstand, and the cross she always placed there when she removed it for the night. Her fingers grasped metal that burned like ice. She drew it close against her chest and reached out again, found the small, solid weight of her cell phone.

Quiet, she eased the flip phone open and thanked any gods who were listening that she had thought to program Logan’s number into her speed dial. Two buttons–one for the number, one to send–and help would be on its way.

She pressed the first, gripped her cross tightly, and hoped she’d be able to last until it arrived.

And, reaching for the second, the button that would connect the call and bring in the cavalry, a slow, sibilant voice whispered, “Oh, little girl. I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

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