How to Save a Life Cover reveal

COVER REVEAL and KINDLE FIRE GIVEAWAY FOR

How to Save a Life

Hey all, here is the cover to my newest standalone romance, releasing February 9, 2016!

Josephine Clark is trapped. A harrowing past haunts her every time she looks in the mirror, and she can’t escape the violence of her everyday life. More and more, her thoughts turn to Evan Salinger, the boy she knew in high school. The boy they called a mental case. A loner. A freak. The boy who seemed to know things no one could know. For a few short weeks, Jo had found perfect solace in Evan’s company, sneaking every night to meet him at the local pool. In the cool of the water and the warmth of Evan’s arms around her, Jo had tasted something close to happiness. 

Cruel circumstances tore them apart, and four years later, the sweet memory of their time together is dissolving under the punishing reality of Jo’s life now. Evan seems like a fading dream…until he reappears at the moment she needs him most. Guided by Evan’s strange intuition, they flee her small Louisiana town, running from police and criminals alike, and Jo begins to suspect there is something more to his sudden return than he admits. 

Over twelve days across America’s heartland, deep secrets come to light, buried pasts are unearthed, and the line between dreams and reality is blurred as Evan and Jo fight to hold on to their soul-deep love, and discover that there is more than one way to save a life. 

How to Save a Life is a complete second-chance STANDALONE novel with some shades of the paranormal. It carries the characters from high school through to their early twenties. It is not YA; mature subject matter and sexual situations. For readers 18 years and up.

preorder link: http://amzn.to/1Jsb9OJ
And I am giving away a brand new Kindle Fire as part of the cover reveal!
Enter here: http://bit.ly/1JALOC5

Excerpt: “I didn’t do that so I could get something in exchange. You don’t owe me anything. That’s not how this works.”

“How what works?” I asked in a small voice.

“Us.”

I felt shy and unsure and completely exposed. More than even when he was between my thighs, kissing me to oblivion and back again. 

"So this is us?" I asked. 

“Yeah,” Evan said, cupping my jaw. He swallowed hard. “This is us.”

I felt something break open in me. I wanted to cry. I laughed instead, and threw my arms around his neck, driving us both under the surface. I kissed him and tasted myself on his lips, and his own sweetness before the chlorine water washed it away.

We came up laughing and sputtering, my hair in my eyes. Evan raised both hands and brushed the long, dark locks from my face…and from my scar. I held still, letting him do this, letting him see me, and he smiled.

“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and kissed me long and hard, and I sighed into that kiss, into his body, into him. I wasn’t beautiful, not anymore, but it was still nice to hear.

“I know you don’t believe me,” Evan said, his words echoing my thoughts with uncanny precision. “But it’s true.”

I felt myself turn rigid, ready to pull away, but Evan wouldn’t let me. His arms slipped under mine and around my back, drawing me toward him. He raised one hand to my scar, his fingers soft and gentle, and warm over the lightning crack that marred my cheek.

“The Grand Canyon was carved by a river. It sliced through the rock, revealing layer upon layer of beauty, and a depth that couldn’t be seen until it was cut open. One little sliver of water…”

“Evan…”

“One little sliver.” He traced the ragged seam down to my chin. “The majesty of the Canyon is that depth; that beauty, buried for years, until the river cut it open, revealing everything.”

I felt tears sting my eyes and pressed my cheek into his hand. “Don’t,” I whispered. “I can’t take it.”

"It's okay, Jo." Evan smiled gently and pulled me to him. “It's okay.”

No, it wasn't okay, but he didn’t fight me or try to force it on me. Years of feeling ugly couldn’t be erased with a few poetic similes. But he was here in my arms and I was in his, and the way he looked at me…I could almost believe what he was saying was true, and that was good enough for me.

Snippet from Endless Possibility, releasing tonight!

Hey all,
Noah and Charlotte's story comes to a conclusion with Endless Possibility, and I thought I'd actually dust off this blog and post a final snippet for those who care to read without having it in their face on Facebook.

Enjoy!
http://amzn.to/1LlfgMo

Sometime later that morning, we finally put our clothes back on, and Charlotte made a call to Sabina Gessler, the director of the Vienna Touring Orchestra.

“I don’t have to be back until later this evening,” Charlotte told me. “I want you to come with me and meet everyone before the concert. Sabina, and Herr Steckler, and—oh! Annalie! My best friend here. She is lovely. I told her all about you. Except that you’re blind. Funny, that never even occurred to me. I just don’t think of you that way first.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Not anymore.”

Charlotte gasped. “Really? Oh, Noah...” I heard the bed creak as she stood on it and wrapped her arms around my neck. I breathed in the perfume of her skin. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

God, this woman. I pressed a kiss between her breasts, over her heart. That sound, her heart quickening its pulse under my touch…the best thing I’d ever heard. 

“We have one problem,” Charlotte said, slipping her arms down around my waist. “It’s nine a.m. and I’m wearing a fancy black velvet dress. The Walk of Shame imagery I have going on here is pretty epic.”

“Hey, I’m in the same boat. How many buttons did you rip off my vest?”

“Maybe one or two.”

I arched a brow in her general direction.

“Or all of them.” She giggled. “So what do we do?”

“Let’s go back to my hotel…” I cocked my head. “Unless this is my hotel. Is this my hotel? Where are we?”

Charlotte laughed again, a rich sound, and cupped my cheek. “Oh, Noah. You sound so…happy. But tired. You look tired, honey.”

I held her hand. “I’m fine, baby. Really. Never better, now that I’m with you.”

“You promise you’ll tell me what happened? I mean, all of it. Your whole trip?”

I kissed her hands. “I promise. Right now, I need a shower. Or, more specifically, I need to get you in a shower. In my hotel room.”

“You’re insatiable,” she laughed. “That doesn’t solve my current clothing predicament. You tore my underwear to shreds, mister.”

“In my defense, a thong isn’t really underwear. It’s more of a torture device to drive men insane. And it worked.”

“I love how it worked,” she purred, her lips brushing mine. “You have something for me to wear at your hotel?”

 “Leave it to me. I’ll take care of you, baby."

“Mmm.” She rested her head against my chest. “I like the sound of that.”

Haha, funny story...Or, RUSH before Me Before You.

So, back in March of this year, I was working on RUSH, the third book in my series. It's about a blind recluse, who's bitter and angry at the world for his loss of vision, and who makes life a living hell for those around him. The entire idea came to me in a flash while running. (Some of you have heard this before, so just skip on down to FAST FORWARD for your abridged version).

I take a run most days, and I get in some good plot thinking, flashes of inspiration, and sometimes I unravel story lines as I jog along. But on this one particularly good run, I overheard (in my mind) a conversation. It was a young man--and he sounded bitter. He was giving a young woman a litany of job duties (and not being very nice about it.) Sounded like a job interview. So I listened in, eavesdropped. This man began to ask the girl questions. What do you look like? Hair color, eye color, etc, because he was blind--come to find out- and wanted to know what the "ghost who was to haunt his house" looked like. And he still wasn't being very nice about it, but this girl--god blesser--wasn't taking his guff.

And that, in a nutshell, was how RUSH was born. I ran home, typed up the echoes of that conversation, almost verbatim, and went from there.

FAST FORWARD to a month later, and RUSH is giving me the fits. I could NOT get around a certain stupid plot development I had tossed in there, and had not yet discovered that cutting it out completely was going to save my book. I was stuck trying to write around it and generally feeling shitty about the whole thing. To top it off, I stupidly set myself a crazy deadline by putting it on pre-order on Amazon, where the consequences of failure are swift and dire. Basically, I was in a funk and would go for days doing nothing more than ordering and reordering bits of dialogue, trying to get the stupid thing to gel. 

I finally gave up and decided I needed to do some reading to refill my brain and get going again. I had heard a lot of good things about a book called Me Before You by a super-talented author named Jojo Moyes. So I decided to give that book a gander...and nearly had a heart attack just reading the blurb.

For the uninitiated, MBY is about a bitter, angry recluse who's been injured in an accident, and who gives his new assistant hell because he's bitter and angry and the assistant is plucky and doesn't take his shit and OMFG WHAT AM I GOING TO DO???

Yeah, panic. Straight up, panic. I'm 40% finished with RUSH and then I find this universally beloved book with a similar premise. Only she thought it up first, and I was sure I was going to look like some sort of ridiculous pretender. Oy. That was not a good day. So I did what I always do when I panic, and that is to send an email to Erin. (She's the one the book's dedicated to, and now you know why) I told her the situation and she told me to keep going because Erin's advice is always fabulous and, in one way or another, always boils down to "Shut up and keep going." So that's what I did. I kept going: I dynamited that stupid plot boulder I'd plunked into the middle of the story, and I finished it.

What I did not do was read Me Before You. Not until after RUSH was finished anyway. I didn't want one iota of that book (which turned out to be everything good I had heard it to be and devastating to boot) to seep into mine, subconsciously or otherwise. I skimmed enough to see that the plot lines were very divergent beyond the basic grumpy guy/assistant premise, and mine has a big ole HEA.

When I did read MBY, I was stunned by its intelligence, its smooth flow, and the fact that despite it being the Ugly Cry of the Century, it wasn't schmaltzy or maudlin in ANY way. Sharp, funny, sad...it's a glorious book.

Some people have compared the feel of my book to MBY and for that, I am profoundly flattered, but I'm not egotistical enough to think the two books are in the same league. And I can say that without qualms or self-pity because I'm also proud enough of RUSH to know it can stand on its own, in whatever capacity it has to move readers. I just kept going, because Noah and Charlotte had a story to tell and neither they, nor I--eventually--could let anything stop them from telling it.

But for a minute there? Yup. Shittin' bricks.

ES