#BlogTour! Harlequin GLAMOROUS: Stranded with Her Greek Husband by Michelle Smart

STRANDED WITH HER GREEK BILLIONAIRE by Michelle Smart (on-sale Dec.28, Harlequin Presents): Michelle Smart unravels the mysteries of a Greek marriage in this emotional reunion romance. Keren fled the island of Agon heartbroken, convinced her marriage was over. Now she must return to face her gloriously handsome estranged husband, Yannis, and end things for good. Instead, she finds herself marooned on Agon, and Yannis insists she spends three final days with him first! With nowhere to run from the fierce longing he reawakens, Keren must open her eyes to the whole truth. Not just the tragedy that broke them, but the joy and passion she’s tried—and failed—to forget…

Readers, we have been blessed with a wealth of wonderful Harlequin Romance this month and today’s blog tour book is no exception. It’s my pleasure to share an excerpt from Michelle Smart’s Stranded with Her Greek Husband:


Excerpt, STRANDED WITH HER GREEK HUSBAND by Michelle Smart

Would it help if I apologised?’

She couldn’t stop her stare darting to him. ‘I’m staying for three days not three weeks, Yannis.’

To her surprise, a grin spread over his face. It was a heartbreaker of a smile, all lopsided and…sexy.

She quickly looked away.

Keren didn’t want to see his smile and remember how it had once been part of the Yannis Filipidis package that had seduced and charmed her from the moment she set eyes on him.

Their first meeting had been at the opening of a new contemporary art gallery at Agon’s palace that Yannis and his brother had helped curate as a favour to the King. The palace had artwork and antiquities dating back millennia, but the modern King wanted to bring it more fully into the twenty-first century. Knowing their King wanted to attract a younger, hipper clientele, the PR people behind the launch reached out to Keren and invited her to attend and review. That she was no art critic and had only visited and reviewed two art galleries in all her travels—reviewing offbeat bars and restaurants and activities like elephant trekking were more her thing—didn’t matter to them. It was her audience they wanted to connect with. They’d offered to pay for her flights and accommodation and promised no interference with what she published on her blog. As Agon had been on her wish list of countries to visit, she’d been thrilled to accept.

She remembered the funky feel of the gallery. The creative and delicious cocktails and canapés she’d been plied with by the eager PR team. The buzz that had permeated the air.

But mostly she remembered the incredibly tall, incredibly gorgeous man dressed in a dapper pinstriped suit propped against the wall with a bottle of lager in his hand, oblivious to the lusty stares being thrown his way because his entire focus had been on her.Keren had come to Agon intending to stay for a long weekend. It had ended up being her home for two years.

The man whose attention she’d caught that night and married six months later was still grinning. ‘But you are staying,’ he pointed out smugly.

‘Under duress. And only for three days.’

‘Three days is long enough to convince you to stay.’ Then the smile fell. He tilted his head. ‘Would you believe any apology?’

‘No.’

‘Then I shall save my breath for when you do believe it.’

‘Save it but don’t hold it,’ she advised.

The smile returned. ‘You would give me the kiss of life, surely?’

Before she could respond, he swept past her, his arm brushing hers, and engulfed her in a cloud of the cologne she hadn’t even realised she’d been avoiding inhaling until it was too late.

Grinding her toes into her sandals, Keren closed her eyes and tried her hardest to ride out the wave of longing ripping through her.

They were just echoes of the past. Memories.

Memories she’d locked away on her flight out of Agon.

About Michelle Smart: Michelle Smart is a Publishers Weekly bestselling author with a slight-to-severe coffee addiction. A book worm since birth, Michelle can usually be found hiding behind a paperback, or if it’s an author she really loves, a hardback. Michelle lives in rural Northamptonshire in England with her husband and two young Smarties. When not reading or pretending to do the housework she loves nothing more than creating worlds of her own. Preferably with lots of coffee on tap. www.michelle-smart.com.

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#BlogTour! The Women of Pearl Island by Polly Crosby

I had the pleasure of reading Polly Crosby’s other novel, The Book of Hidden Wonders and fell in love with her ability to weave together dreamy and magical stories. So it is my great pleasure to share with you an excerpt from Polly Crosby’s new novel, The Women of Pearl Island.

ONE

Tartelin

Summer 2018

“I do not require diaper changing, I do not require spoon-feeding, I do not require my ego massaging. What I do require is someone with a deft pair of hands. I asked for someone with experience in dealing with little things, delicate things. A scientist, perhaps. Is that you?”

I nod.

“Show me your hands, then, child.”

I hold them out, palm side downward, and she wheels herself over and inspects them. Her own hands, I see now, have a tremor.

“You’re a pretty girl,” she says, her eyes drifting over my face, glancing off my cheek, and I feel my skin redden. “Not very robust, though. Are you sure this is the right job for you?” I open my mouth to speak, but she cuts me off. “What did you do, before you came here? How is it that you are suited to this vacancy?”

I frown. We went over all this in our letters, back and forth, back and forth. Written on paper, not sent by email, each one signed Miss Marianne Stourbridge in her regimented, barbed-wire scrawl. My life back home was the reason she chose me. But then, she is old, and she can’t be expected to remember everything.

“I grew up around my mother’s artwork, helping her out in her studio,” I say, more loudly than I mean to. “And then I went to art school myself. Mum’s work was focused on found objects, making art from bits of nature…feathers, leaves and twigs—”

“Lepidoptera aren’t ‘bits of nature,’ Miss Brown.”

“She also made sculptures out of grains of rice in her spare time. I helped her.”

“Why on earth would anyone do that?” She leaves the ques-tion hanging in the air and turns her chair abruptly, wheeling herself back to her desk.

The chair is made from cane. It looks like an antique, and I’m surprised it still works. It must be exhausting to propel.

“It’s a shame you don’t have a scientific background, but now you’re here, you’ll have to do. Here, hold this.” She lifts a pair of gold tweezers into the air and I hasten forward and take them. “No, not like that. Pinch. Gently. That’s it.”

I adjust my hold and feel how the spring of the tines is like an extension of my fingers, and I’m back with my mother and she’s saying, “Careful, Tartelin, don’t squeeze too hard. Feather barbs bruise easily.” But before I can use this new-found body part, the tweezers are whisked away from me, and she’s turning again to the desk and bending over her work. I stand by her side and wait, wondering if I’m allowed to go. The clock on the mantel chimes loudly. I count eight. I look at my watch. It’s ten past two.

Miss Stourbridge? Shall I adjust your clock?”

“No point. It’ll only go back to eight o’clock.”

I look over at it, frowning. The second hand is juddering in jerky movements. It makes me dizzy to look at it, as if it’s mea-suring a different kind of time. I turn back to my employer.

Miss Stourbridge is so still as she works. I can see her teas-ing the body of a dead moth from a cocoon, her fingers mov-ing infinitesimally slowly. I look around the room. It is lined in dark panels of wood, and every surface has frames and frames of butterflies and moths, glinting pins plunged into husked bodies.

“Did you catch all these butterflies?”

She is silent, and at first I think she hasn’t heard me. But then I see she’s holding her breath so as not to disturb the moth’s delicate wings. I watch closely, the clock ticking behind us. I’m looking not at her work but at her ribs, waiting for them to inflate, waiting for her nostrils to swell, anything that shows air is passing into her chest. My eyes sting from the pain of staring. She is so still that she has become a part of the chair she sits in. Only her finger and thumb move ach-ingly slowly, and the minutes tick by.

When I was young, I used to try to be as still as she is now. My mother would sit me on her knee and tell me stories, and I would hold myself as still as a statue, bewitched by her tales.

“Long ago,” she always began, in a voice that was reserved only for when the moon was rising, “I was a tiny jellied spawn no bigger than a pearl, floating in the earth’s great oceans. The fish nibbled and swallowed my brothers and sisters up, snap, snap, snap, and I was left, coming at last to rest on the pebbled shore of a beach. And that is how I came to have these,” she would say, waving her hands in front of my face, so close that they skimmed my eyelashes and all I could see was the thin layer of webbed skin between each finger. To my unprejudiced four-year-old eyes, the webs were not a deformity: they were beautiful, useful, magical, and I wished with all my heart that I could be like her, could be from the sea.

I take my eyes from the poor moth on the desk and look over Miss Stourbridge’s head to the picture window that frames the sea beyond, and I remember anew that the sea surrounds us here, like a comforting arm holding the world at bay. A feeling of calm settles over me. However strange this woman is, whatever my job might entail, it was the right decision to come here, I can feel it.

I had seen the advertisement in one of Mum’s ornithologi-cal magazines. Mum bought them for the photographs. She particularly liked the close-ups of the birds’ eyes and feathers. The magazines were littered throughout our house, spattered with drops of paint, pages ripped out and twisted together into the vague forms of gulls and robins so that every surface was covered in paper birds made of paper birds.

But the latest magazine had landed on the doormat, pris-tine and untouched, and when I shook it from its clear plastic covering, it had fallen open on the ad.

PA required to assist lepidopterist. Must be able to start immedi-ately. Must not be squeamish.

When I had written to ask for more information, the return address had intrigued me.

Dogger Bank House, Dohhalund.

Dohhalund. An unusual word, not English-sounding at all. A bit of research showed me that it was a tiny island off the East Anglian coast, the long thin shape of it reminiscent of a fish leaping out of the water. Its heritage was a mixture of English and Dutch. When I looked at it on a map on my phone, it had seemed so small that I imagined you could walk its circumference in only a few hours. I had tried to picture what kind of an island it would be: a cold, hard rock grizzled with the droppings of thousands of seabirds, or a flat stretch of white sand, waiting for my footprints? Whatever it turned out to be, the isolation of it appealed to me.

Miss Stourbridge’s letters had been vague about the posi-tion she was offering, but she did tell me, rather proudly, that the island had belonged to her family for hundreds of years. While I wait, I look about the room, searching for photo-graphs, evidence of other people. Where is her family now?

I shift my weight carefully from foot to foot and I glance at my watch. Two twenty-three. Thirteen minutes. I wonder if I’m being paid to stand and do nothing. I look around the room. Next to the desk is a large clear glass box. Inside hang rows and rows of cocoons of all different shapes and sizes. One or two are twitching. I turn away with a sting of shame, feel-ing somehow as if I’ve looked at something I shouldn’t have.

Over by the window, there is a huge black telescope on a stand. Unlike everything else in this place, it looks very mod-ern. Next to it on the windowsill sits a battered pair of bin-oculars on a worn leather strap.

Quietly I back toward the chaise longue in the corner and lower myself onto its tattered silk cover. It’s the first time I’ve sat down in hours, and my body sings with relief. I edge my hand into my pocket and pull out my phone. It’s switched off: the battery ran low somewhere off the coast of Norfolk at around the same time that the signal disappeared. The lack of signal hadn’t worried me: I’d been looking forward to charg-ing my phone when I arrived, tapping in Miss Stourbridge’s Wi-Fi code, the friendly glow of my phone’s screen a com-fort in this new place.

I look around for an outlet in the room, and with a sudden slick shiver I find I can’t see any. There must be electricity here, surely. But if not… Realization runs through me like a thrill: if there’s no electricity in this house, there won’t be any Wi-Fi either. And with no signal, there’s no way of contacting the outside world. No way for the outside world to contact me. The roar of the sea appears to amplify through

I take my eyes from the poor moth on the desk and look over Miss Stourbridge’s head to the picture window that frames the sea beyond, and I remember anew that the sea surrounds us here, like a comforting arm holding the world at bay. A feeling of calm settles over me. However strange this woman is, whatever my job might entail, it was the right de-cision to come here, I can feel it.

I had seen the advertisement in one of Mum’s ornithologi-cal magazines. Mum bought them for the photographs. She particularly liked the close-ups of the birds’ eyes and feathers. The magazines were littered throughout our house, spattered with drops of paint, pages ripped out and twisted together into the vague forms of gulls and robins so that every surface was covered in paper birds made of paper birds.

But the latest magazine had landed on the doormat, pris-tine and untouched, and when I shook it from its clear plastic covering, it had fallen open on the ad.

PA required to assist lepidopterist. Must be able to start immedi-ately. Must not be squeamish.

When I had written to ask for more information, the return address had intrigued me.

Dogger Bank House, Dohhalund.

Dohhalund. An unusual word, not English-sounding at all. A bit of research showed me that it was a tiny island off the East Anglian coast, the long thin shape of it reminiscent of a fish leaping out of the water. Its heritage was a mixture of English and Dutch. When I looked at it on a map on my phone, it had seemed so small that I imagined you could walk its circumference in only a few hours. I had tried to picture what kind of an island it would be: a cold, hard rock grizzled with the droppings of thousands of seabirds, or a flat stretch of white sand, waiting for my footprints? Whatever it turned out to be, the isolation of it appealed to me.





Excerpted from The Women of Pearl Island by Polly Crosby, Copyright © 2021 by Polly Crosby. Published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

Author Bio: 

Polly Crosby grew up on the Suffolk coast, and now lives deep in the Norfolk countryside. THE BOOK OF HIDDEN WONDERS was awarded runner up in the Bridport Prize's Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a First Novel, and Polly also won Curtis Brown Creative's Yesterday Scholarship, which enabled her to finish the novel. She currently holds the Annabel Abbs Scholarship at the University of East Anglia, where she is studying part time for an MA in Creative Writing. THE WOMEN OF PEARL ISLAND is her second novel.

THE WOMEN OF PEARL ISLAND

Author: Polly Crosby

ISBN: 9780778311140

Publication Date: December 7, 2021

Publisher: Park Row Books


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Social Links:

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Twitter: @WriterPolly

Instagram: @ polly_crosby

Facebook: @pollycrosbyauthor 

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#BlogTour! Harlequin GLAMOROUS: Tall, Dark and Off Limits by Shannon McKenna

His job is to protect his best friend’s sister…not seduce her! Don’t miss the conclusion of the Men of Maddox Hill series by New York Times bestselling author Shannon McKenna. When it comes to his best friend’s sister, he’s tempted to be much more than her protector. Assigned to keep an eye on social media darling Ava Maddox, security expert Zack Austin is more than up to the task. After all, she’s like family. But dealing with the dynamic beauty requires every ounce of patience…and sexual control. They’ve been denying their forbidden feelings for way too long and soon professionalism gives way to passion. Zack’s willing to face her overprotective family’s wrath, but is Ava’s talent for finding trouble about to explode in his face?

Doesn’t that sound intriguing? Read on for an excerpt from Shannon McKenna’s Tall, Dark and Off Limits!

Excerpt, TALL, DARK AND OFF LIMITS by Shannon McKenna

“No wine,” Zack told the waiter brusquely, realizing too late how stuffy and uptight that sounded. “For me, of course,” he said to Ava. “Feel free to have some. I never drink when I’m working.”

“Good for you.” She smiled up at the waiter, whose name was Martin, according to the tag on his shirt. “I’ll have a glass of red wine, please.”

“I have a beautiful 2016 Romanée-Conti that’s open,” Martin told her.

“Sounds lovely.” She gave the waiter that trademarked blinding smile that brought men to their knees. Martin stumbled off, probably to walk into walls and tables.

And Zack just sat there, tongue-tied. When Ava Maddox was around, his foot always ended up stuck so far into his mouth, he needed surgical intervention to get it out. She was giving him that look. Big, sharp blue eyes that missed nothing. So on to him.

The restaurant had low light and a hushed ambience, and they were in the back, tucked in a wood-paneled corner booth. Now the challenge was to kick-start his brain into operation, instead of just staring at how beautiful she was in the flickering candlelight.

She just waited, patiently. Like she was all too used to men losing their train of thought as soon as they made eye contact with her. Like she was accustomed to cutting the poor stammering chumps some slack while they pulled themselves together.

Her cell rang, and she gave him an apologetic glance when she saw the display. “Gotta take this. One sec.” She tapped the screen and held it to her ear. “Ernest? Thanks for getting back to me. Are you still in the office?… Yeah? Could you get a cab to swing by the Mathesson Pub and Grill on your way home?… Yeah, I need my laptop, the pink one with the collage cover. I’m talking to the Maddox Hill CSO about the online harassment…yeah, I know, but still…uh-huh. Okay, thanks. You’re my hero. Later, then.”

She laid the phone down. “Ernest is my assistant. He’ll bring my computer here so I can show you the master list of the last few of years’ worth of Blazon’s projects.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have your laptop with you at all times,” he said.

“I usually do,” she said. “But I had every intention of going back to Gilchrist House tonight. I have a crazy weekend coming up. Ernest and I are flying down to the Future Innovation trade show in Los Angeles tomorrow. It’s a very big deal.”

Zack couldn’t hide his disapproval. “Traveling to Los Angeles? Going back to a deserted office late in the evening? Leaving by yourself, going home by yourself? With all this going on?”

Ava sighed. “Zack, Gilchrist House has a twenty-four-hour doorman. And I would call a car to take me from doorstep to doorstep. I’m not an idiot.”

“I never suggested that you were.”

“I’m not in physical danger,” Ava assured him. “Really. This is just, you know, the new normal. The incivility of our modern electronic age. It’s ugly and unsavory, but I’ve got to get used to it and learn to roll with it.”

“The hell you do,” he said. “New normal, my ass. I’ll tell you what’s normal. When I find that bottom-feeding son of a bitch and grind him into paste.”

Ava gave him that narrow, nervous look, which by now he recognized. It was a signal that he wasn’t behaving professionally. He was too intense. Making it personal.

In a word, scaring her.

“Ah, wow, Zack,” she murmured. “I’m surprised at your reaction.”

“Why? This situation is a disgrace. Why should you be surprised that I’m horrified?”

Her eyes slid away. “Well, I don’t know. It’s just that you’ve never taken me seriously before, so why would you suddenly take me seriously now?”

“I’m sorry I gave you that impression,” he said stiffly. “It wasn’t intentional.”

“Oh, don’t be that way.” Her tone was light. “I’m  used to it. I rub a lot of people the wrong way. I’m just too much for people sometimes. Drew’s always on my case about it, telling me to tone it down. And I try, I really do. But it never works. Boom, out it comes. The real Ava, right in your face.”

“He shouldn’t do that,” Zack said forcefully.

“Shouldn’t what? Sorry, but I’m not following you.”

“Drew. He shouldn’t be on your case. He shouldn’t tell you to tone it down.”

Her eyes were big. “Ah… I didn’t mean to get you all wound up.”

About Shannon McKenna: Shannon McKenna is the NYT bestselling author of seventeen action packed, turbocharged romantic thrillers, among which are the stories of the wildly popular McCloud series and the brand new romantic suspense series, The Obsidian Files. She loves tough and heroic alpha males, heroines with the brains and guts to match them, villains who challenge them to their utmost, adventure, scorching sensuality, and most of all, the redemptive power of true love. Since she was small she has loved abandoning herself to the magic of a good book, and her fond childhood fantasy was that writing would be just like that, but with the added benefit of being able to take credit for the story at the end. Alas, the alchemy of writing turned out to be messier than she'd ever dreamed. But what the hell, she loves it anyway, and hopes that readers enjoy the results of her alchemical experiments. 

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#BlogTour! Harlequin Christmas #bookstagram Tour: The Bad Boy Experiment by Reese Ryan

THE BAD BOY EXPERIMENT by Reese Ryan (on-sale Dec.28, Harlequin Desire): A steamy fling with an old crush who doesn’t do commitment? What was she thinking! Find out in the conclusion to Reese Ryan’s Bourbon Brothers series. What happens when you say yes to a bad boy? Even if divorcée Renee Lockwood were willing to give love a second chance, she wouldn’t choose Cole Abbott. The sexy, successful real estate developer doesn’t do commitment. But he’s perfect for a no-strings fling—exactly what Ren needs now that she’s moved back home to raise her son. Mind-blowing pleasure with the man she once crushed on is harder to quit than Ren expected. Impossible, in fact. Is time running out before the bad boy bolts…or will the results of her experiment surprise her? 

Excerpt, THE BAD BOY EXPERIMENT by Reese Ryan

Renee turned and started down the stairs. Suddenly, the door swung open, taking her by surprise. She missed a step, tripping but catching herself on the banister before she face-planted in the gravel.

Graceful, Renee. You’re a regular Misty Copeland.

“Ren?” Cole hurried down the stairs. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I thought maybe you’d… I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Changed your mind.”

She was flustered and rambling like a fool. Yep, this was definitely a bad idea.

Stop talking and make a graceful exit, if that’s even possible at this point.

“Not a chance, sweetheart.” Cole extended a hand. “C’mon inside.”

Renee swallowed hard, her hand trembling as she placed it inside his.

Don’t chicken out now.

Cole led her into the kitchen. Like hers, it was outdated. It reminded her of her Aunt Bea standing at the old stove making fried corn or her famous chicken and dumplings—the first thing Ren had ever learned to cook.

“Still feels weird being here, huh?” Cole’s voice shook her from her temporary daze.

“Very.”

They entered the living room where an exercise mat and weights were on the floor.

“You were working out. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have disturbed you.” Ren glanced at the equipment. “I know it’s really late and—”

“Renee…” Cole drew her closer, pulling her attention back to him. His gaze was soft and warm as he stroked her cheek. “It’s okay. We both know why you came here.” He managed to say the words without sounding cocky. “But I need to hear it from you. Tell me exactly what you want from me.”

Ren’s head was spinning. No one had ever asked her that. Not in a relationship or her career. And now that he had, she wasn’t quite sure what to say.

So instead, she clutched Cole’s white Abbott Construction & Development T-shirt, pulled him closer and pressed her lips to his.

Reese Ryan writes sexy, contemporary romance featuring a diverse cast of complex characters. She presents her characters with family and career drama, challenging love interests and life-changing secrets while treating readers to emotional love stories with unexpected twists. Past president of her local RWA chapter and a panelist at the 2017 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Reese is an advocate of the romance genre and diversity in fiction. Visit her online at ReeseRyan.com.

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