Excerpt from Something Wicked by Renee Harrell

Something Wicked

by Renee Harrell

SYNOPSIS:  

Reeling from a nasty break-up, Ann Lippens isn’t ready for a new relationship, even with someone as attractive as Cody Rhodes. When she rejects Cody's advances, the musician turns his attention to Ann's best friend, Kim.

Kim couldn't be happier. Cody is charming and mysterious, talented and sexy as hell. Who wouldn’t want to be at his side?

Within days, Kim is changing her appearance and behavior to please her new boyfriend. Ann soon discovers that Cody is the near-twin of a dead rock star named Bobby Winters. Winters had a dark and troubled history until his fiery demise. Bobby's string of girlfriends all died early, suspicious deaths.

Discovering the secret timetable for Kim's murder, Ann realizes she's the only one who can stop it. But it's not Kim who Cody truly wants....

RENEE SAYS: 

When my partner, Harrell, and I finished writing the first draft of our story, I felt something was missing. We’d written a novel with a high school-aged protagonist – Ann Lippens is our take on a less secure, more body-conscious, Nancy Drew – but the tale had taken an edgy turn. We needed an opening that offered a hint at the darkness to come.

A few days later, we’d plotted the story’s prologue. We know a lot of readers can’t stand prologues (or epilogues) and routinely skip over them. I certainly hope they read this one…

EXCERPT:

Far below them, the sea splashed against a row of jagged rocks. The ocean roared up at her.

"Isn't this beautiful?" he said. 

The warmth of his breath tickled the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. She turned to see him smiling.

For the first time in days, he appeared relaxed and happy.

"Yes. Yes, so beautiful!” Here at the cliff's edge, with the blue sea beneath her, everything seemed fresher, brighter. Her spirits lifted.

He asked her a question, his words snatched away by the sound of the ocean.

"What?" she shouted.

Irritated, he started to speak before changing his mind. He swept his arm out, his hand extended.

She reached out to him. When she did, he gathered her in his embrace. Pressing a hand on the small of her back, he began to sway.

He wants to dance, she thought.

He'd danced with her before but only once, the night they'd met. Now, he moved smoothly along the cliff's dirt surface. She matched his steps, content to follow his expert guidance.

It was romantic in a weird kind of way. Not a typical date, not by a long shot. After all, how many girls could say they’d slow-danced on Kraken's Peak?

She would remember this afternoon for the rest of her life.

He murmured as they danced. She strained to make out his words. A moment later, she realized there weren’t any words to be heard.

He was humming.

She recognized the tune. She didn’t like the song – Not that I’m going to tell him – but it was his favorite. He'd played it for her, more than once.

With a flourish, he ended the dance. He bowed to her.

As he straightened, she hugged him tightly. "This is perfect," she said into his ear.

"No." He studied her, from her red hair to the green patchwork jumper that brushed lightly against her hips. “Not yet.”

He yanked the heart-shaped locket from her neck. Staggering as the chain ripped through her hair and over her head, she caught herself at the very edge of the cliff. Beneath her shoes, tiny stones spilled into the void, tumbling into space.

She tried to step forward. He put a hand out to stop her, scorn in his eyes.

"Bye," he mouthed, his open hand shoving against her chest.

Flailing her arms desperately, her feet slid on the loose soil. She tried to regain her balance, grasping blindly for anything to stop her descent.

Screaming, she dropped over the edge of the cliff.

He watched as she fell. Her cry was lost in the thunder of the waves as they smashed into the rocks below.

"Things weren't perfect." He wrapped the chain of the locket around his fist. "Things couldn't be perfect because you weren't perfect. You could never replace the woman I loved.

“I have to get her back.”

FIND OUT MORE:  

"Renée Harrell" is the semi-pseudonym of Renée and Harrell Turner, a wife-and-husband writing team. Although we primarily write YA fiction, we've dabbled in science fiction (Aly's Luck and After Things Went Bad), teleplays (Bill Shakespeare's Next Big Mistake) and humorous mystery (Frankenstein, P.I.).

Check out their website HERE and find their books on AMAZON.

Excerpt from Winter by Sarah Remy

Winter

By Sarah Remy

Synopsis:  Winter's not your ordinary teenager.  While trying to rescue his sidhe family from exile, he mistakenly unleashes the monstrous Dread Host upon humankind.   Winter's mother wants nothing more than to find a way to break the curse keeping the sidhe imprisoned on Manhattan. New York City is driving Winter's family slowly mad. Winter's sister wears Chanel and longs for a Fairy Court she's never seen. And Winter's mentor is a talking mouse.  Winter wants to save the world.  When he discovers an unlikely changeling lost in the subway, Winter realizes he's been given a chance to finally banish the Host, and maybe even save his family. But the changeling isn't quite what she seems, and Winter's already unstable world beings to spiral out of control.

Sarah says:  When Jill asked me to pick an excerpt from my YA urban fantasy, WINTER, I had less difficulty than I expected. WINTER is the first volume in my Manhattan Exiles trilogy. So many things happen in this first book - I introduce the overlap of sidhe and human realms, I plant the seeds of upcoming war between worlds, and I throw in a murder/kidnapping.

But at its heart I wanted WINTER to be about young people trying to find their place in their own personal space - in their families, and around their peers. Who are they? How will they react to upheaval, how will they approach new challenges, and react to love and loss?

I'm writing the trilogy for my teenage daughter, and this excerpt romanticizes (a trifle) the way I'd like her to begin to fall in love one day, surrounded by candlelight, books, and mystery…

Excerpt:

“Have you heard of the Lough Gur?” Aine asked around her fingernail.

She’d tracked Winter to the library when she’d given up sleep. The flickering of his lamps led her past half-pulled tapestries and through empty rooms.

She’d found him sitting on a cushion, made lovely by the shifting lantern light, apparently lost in the pages of a large and dusty tome.

He’d grunted, but not looked up, so Aine borrowed one of his lanterns and took it to the map.

“Gair’s lake?” He translated without glancing from the book. “Not particularly. Siobahn had a young cousin, Daniel Gair. I believe he was killed by dysentery in the early 1900s.”

“Lough Gur,” Aine said pointedly, “is far more than a loch. It’s one of the dark places between, a dangerous place where our folk might cross into mortal lands and back again, and where time is terribly muddled.” She shuddered.

Winter closed a finger in his book. He regarded Aine thoughtfully, grey eyes sparking in the lantern light. It was hard to tell in the shadows, but she thought the side of his face looked less inflamed. Even scarred he was beautiful in the flickering light, more beautiful than any of the young fay who regularly swarmed about Gloriana.

Aine thought more than a part of his beauty was that he was so very different than the boys she had known at Court. Gloriana’s suitors were skilled at song and wordplay, quick with the sword and insult, eager to dabble in intrigue and insinuation. They were like lazy forest cats, wiling away the long hours until the sun went down and it was time for the hunt.

“A Way between, you mean.” Winter asked, “Are you going to tell me Smith dropped you in a lake and you surfaced beneath Chinatown? Although I suppose that might explain the lack of clothes. Perhaps you and dear Michael were skinny dipping?”

“No! I mean, I don’t think so.” If she poked too hard at the gap in her memory it made her head hurt. She chewed her thumbnail. “Lough Gur isn’t the sort of place one visits willingly. It’s quite a long way from Court, east of Gairdin Mhuire. The Gardens are treacherous enough in themselves. I’d have no reason to journey so far from Court. In fact, I’m forbidden to leave the Queen’s Progress.”

Winter scoffed. “More to the point, Gloriana closed all of the old Ways five hundred years ago. I doubt Smith convinced your queen to change her mind.”

Aine had to agree. “Her Ladyship has very little use for mortals.”

Find out more: 

BLOG: www.sarahremy.wordpress.com

WEBSITE: www.TheManhattanExiles.Com

GOODREADS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18454906-winter?from_search=true

AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/Winter-Manhattan-Exiles-Sarah-Remy-ebook/dp/B00F21FNMM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1388375917

TWITTER: @sarahremywrites

Guest blogger Diane J. Reed on Teen Sex and YA Fiction

Teen Sex

by Diane J. Reed

Sex sells! We all know this. How can we not in a post-50 Shades of Grey world where suddenly the cat is out of the bag and marketers know full well that even middle-class mommies like their book club selections to serve up hefty helpings of hot & steamy erotica? This recent phenomenon has sent the publishing world ablaze, and now graphic sex scenes are cropping up everywhere. But what happens when the sex starts to trickle down to mainstream novels about teenagers?

Gulp!

This is precisely the issue that’s been keeping me awake at night lately. Even when it’s handled “responsibly” in fiction (i.e., teens use condoms), I still find myself cringing a little every time a 16 or 17 year old gets it going on between the sheets. Do teenagers ever have sex that is glowingly beautiful & mind-blowingly transcendent? Or is the truth more like an awkward tangle of moist lips & body parts as they try to figure out how to get things right? Part of me is concerned that writers are creating a fantasy realm that has never existed for any teenager—and on the top of that, are promoting risky behavior that might be emotionally scarring for more vulnerable adolescents. 

For this reason, I felt like I was walking a tightrope of sexual tension with my first YA novel Robin in the Hood. My main character Robin McArthur is only 15 years old when the novel begins, and she’s as obsessed about sex as most girls her age. When she discovers her formerly wealthy family is now broke, and out of desperation starts robbing banks to make ends meet, she stumbles upon super hot Creek—a 17-year-old guy who has a thing or two to teach her about crime. They soon become partners and the passion and sparks fly. After they hone their skills by robbing a local ATM machine and get separated, the following is their sexy reunion scene at a nearby lake:

“Take off your clothes,” a voice whispered at the edge of the lake like a ghost.

It was still a bit misty out, and I thought I felt a warm breath against the back of my neck—

I whipped around. There he was!

Creek, stripped to his torn jeans with his blonde hair dangling against his shoulders again, as if the powers that be had somehow beamed him right in front of me.

And he was grinning from ear to ear.

“You were a very bad girl today,” he remarked.

Unable to control myself, I hugged him with all my might, elated that he’d made it out of Bob’s convenience store okay through God knows what kind of messy miracle. And Lord, how I wanted to kiss him again! But I felt like a fool with a bag of money and a t-shirt still bulging over my belly, because I’d been too preoccupied to remove them till I’d succeeded in hiding the motorcycle.

Creek broke away from me and gazed at my tummy with a laugh.

“You rocked it!” he said, patting my stomach.

“B-But how’d you get here so fast?" I gasped.

Creek’s lips slinked into a smile. He shook his head. “Sweetheart, it ain’t hard to get a lift in these parts when you’re not wearing a t-shirt. Now we gotta move—”

He slipped both his hands under my camisole, removing the money bag and t-shirt and letting them fall with a thump to the sand. To my surprise, he threw off my blonde wig and traced his fingers beneath my camisole straps, tenderly lifting them over my head.

My heart ricocheted inside my chest. Oh my God—is this the part where we have Post-Heist Sex?

Creek’s eyes arrested mine. They were still that hard blue, broken by shards of glass in the middle like a guy totally focused on his mission. But there was a softness at the edges as well, as if maybe he wanted to . . .

Protect me?

And kiss me at the same time—

Both urges warring inside him.

Well, I decided, no time like the present to test that theory!

I rushed my hands up his firm chest and clutched his face, pulling his lips to mine for as much Heaven as I’d ever been allowed on this silly, spinning planet.

And spin I did! Inside, I felt as if I my whole being had gotten lost in a dreamy whirl. All traces of thought evaporated, only the smell and feel of his hard skin and soft hair overwhelming my senses. I was tumbling end over end, because no one had ever informed me that . . .

When you touch someone this beautiful—

It’s like falling into a pool of light.

And all of a sudden,

You’re that beautiful, too . . .

Creek’s hands surged up my bare back, and I couldn’t stop from pressing my breasts against his chest—my scratchy, Pinnacle-issue bra be damned—as my fingers nimbly undid the button and zipper on his jeans. I pulled them down his legs like they were as easy to rip from his body as saran wrap, and then I kicked off my shoes to do the same with my jeans.

Who was this girl??

I’d become a mighty blur—all animal on instinct and overdrive—who was determined to make both our bodies sing in the sunshine and sand that seemed to cry out for us to become one creature—

But then I felt Creek hoist my nearly naked body in his arms, hugging me tightly to his chest.

He kissed me uncontrollably for a few seconds, when all at once his lips broke free, and he rested his forehead against mine.

And he began to walk into the lake, gently carrying me, as though we were heading for some strange, a spur-of-the-moment . . . baptism?

“Bloodhounds,” he said breathlessly, his gaze full of alarm. “Bob’s got bloodhounds—”

From out of nowhere, I heard the echo of a chorus of dogs, their deep resounding barks growing closer by the second.

With one last kiss, Creek released me to the water, sailing me forward. The cold shock rushed to my neck, constricting my lungs and leaving me heaving for air.

“Swim, Robin!” He ordered, pointing to an inlet of the lake covered in shadows. “Swim with everything you’ve got!!”

As you can see, there’s a lot of sexual tension here but also so much action that the characters don’t actually have time to sexually “connect”. Yes, this is on purpose, because Robin is only 15, and I felt it would be irresponsible to write casually about sex with a character who’s an underage minor. 

But what about the sequel?  Yikes!

Robin will be 16 years old in the sequel to Robin in the Hood, where she goes on a journey to a foreign country with Creek to find her long lost mother. Hello! They will be totally unsupervised by adults in this story, and you KNOW they are going to have sex! To pretend otherwise would be to commit one of the greatest crimes in fiction: avoiding the truth. As much as I don’t want to promote irresponsible teen sex, I also don’t want to be branded a downright liar . . .

So what to do?

Well, I could keep them running with lots of bristling action and plot twists, to the total exhaustion of my poor readers.

Or, I could take a cue from Simone Elkeles’ novel Perfect Chemistry and Colleen Hoover’s novel Hopeless—two well-written books for young adults who go the “responsible” sex route. Yes, in these novels 16 & 17 year olds do have sex—but only once in the entire story (although there are lots of passionate kissing & detailed caressing scenes to fill up their 300+ pages). But in following their lead, am I contributing to the moral demise of our country and/or over-sexification of our youth?

God only knows. Let’s face it—teens have sex, pretty much no matter what moment in time or society you put them in, and I just can’t bring myself to be pollyanna about that. So I’m waiting until my female heroine Robin is at least 16 in the sequel to allow my characters to fully embrace their natural sex drives so I can sleep peacefully at night. And of course, I will want Robin’s first experience to be downright heavenly—the kind of thing you only see in the movies! Why? Because I don’t want to read about fumbling teens grunting and grinding in the backseat of some car, and neither do you. Does this mean I’m leading teens on just like other contemporary authors?

Well, there’s the rub. Perhaps if enough teens read these kinds of books, they will insist that their earliest sexual encounters have some quality and depth of meaning. Or maybe I’m just fooling myself? Since this is such new territory, I’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on the matter, good or bad. And until then, here is some food for thought: when I spoke to my local librarian about the subject, she stated that if there is graphic sex in a novel—regardless of whether it’s involving teenagers—the book gets shelved in the “adult” fiction section of the library, period. The trendy publishing labels of “New Adult” or “Mature Young Adult” simply don’t apply. Detailed sexual encounters = Adult fiction, so in the end, it’s up to the parents to decide if their teens can read such a book. Perhaps that’s where the final word on the matter really lies . . .

 

Get updates from Diane by following her on Twitter @DianeJReed and check out her website http://www.banditsranch.com/ 

 

Order ROBIN IN THE HOOD on AMAZON or BARNES AND NOBLE or KOBO