Cover Reveal: Wicked Attraction

Newsletter subscribers got the reveal last month, so if you're not a subscriber, head over to my website and sign up on the Coming Next page!

Wicked Attraction is the 2027 release in the Paladin League series!

The pre-order is not up yet. That will go up in June, closer to the release of Wicked Temptation.

Wicked Attraction is Book 9 in the 10 book Paladin League series.

This is Ian "Rusty" Sinclair and Ellis Vandenhoff's story.

We're starting to wrap up the big arcs in this book as we head toward the final story in 2028.

Here is the cover copy I currently have for the book:

He’s a soldier clawing his way back from disgrace.
She’s a scholar desperate to prove she’s more than a prodigy.
Together, they’ll face a mission that could cost them everything.

Special Forces Sergeant Ian Sinclair has fought to rebuild his career and the trust of his team. One wrong move could send him back to probationary status, and he refuses to risk it. The last thing he needs is a civilian complication—especially Ellis Vandenhoff. Brilliant, restless, and bold enough to follow the trail of a centuries‑old treasure map she never meant to find, Ellis is determined to step out of her ivory‑tower life and into the real world.

But her discovery has put her in the sights of Jorge Torres, a ruthless arms dealer who believes the Lost Treasure of Trujillo will secure his legacy—and make him untouchable. Twice the Green Berets have tried to bring him down. Twice he’s escaped justice. This time, failure isn’t an option.

Now Ian’s mission is clear: protect Ellis, even if it means risking the career he’s rebuilt. For Ellis, survival means trusting the soldier whose relentless focus on safety both infuriates and tempts her. As bullets fly and passions ignite, they’ll discover the greatest danger isn’t Torres or the treasure—it’s the attraction that could shatter their defenses and change their lives forever.

Cover Reveal!

If you are a subscriber to my newsletter, you got the cover reveal last month. If you'd like to subscribe and get the latest news first, go to the Coming Next page on my website and scroll down to the sign-up form.

The next book in the Paladin League series is coming out in July, which means I needed the cover for Book 8 in the series to put in the back of Wicked Ambition. Wicked Temptation will be released in 2026. When I have a preorder available, I'll share the link on the blog.

Now, without any further delay, here is the cover for Wicked Temptation!

Wherefore Art Thou Oz?

Book related, but not writing related topic today.

Oz, the hero of the book after Lurch's story, has long hair. Like really long. I didn't think much about this. My characters are in the driver's seat and I'm just along for the ride.

The long hair, though, became a huge issue while I was working with my cover designer. The photo sites she uses do not have any good options for men with long hair.

Literally none.

She asked me to see if I could find someone and I spent hours looking. Hours! And I ran into the same problem she did. There was one guy that could kind of maybe work except he didn't look hard and dangerous and Oz most definitely is both.

The other funny thing is that while I liked the heroine she put on the mock up, I wasn't excited about her hair style. I thought while I'm here, let me see if I can find a different heroine. Every image I liked for Ayla turned out to be the same model. I decided the hair wasn't an issue, not when my cover designer already found the right woman to portray the heroine.

We're still working on the cover, but the cover reveal will happen first for newsletter subscribers. If you want to join my list, you can sign up Here. Just scroll down a little to find the sign up form.

Wicked Deception: Official Cover Reveal

With slightly less than six weeks to go before the release of Wicked Salvation, I thought it would be a good time to do a cover reveal for the final book in this arc, Wicked Deception.

Wicked Deception is Kyle's story. You met him in Finn and Zo's book and he plays a much bigger role in Griff's story, so you'll get to know him much better.

It's funny because I didn't know what Kyle was like either. Not really. Until Griff's story. His personality took me by surprise. He's a smart ass and he likes to stir things up to entertain himself. And despite this, he's very good friends with Ryder, Finn, and Griff.

I've written one scene in Kyle's book and he's not being a smart as now, so there are more depths to him that I have to discover. I'm excited to see where his story takes me.

BTW, Wicked Deception is the end of the weapons arc, and will wrap up that storyline, but I have an idea for another four-book Paladin League arc and hope to work on this after I finish Kyle and his heroine.

New Cover

One of my older stories, The Troll Bridge, received a new cover. If you've liked my Facebook author page, you saw this yesterday. It made its world debut there. :-)

Troll Bridge is part of the Jarved Nine series and its cover didn't look like the other two covers in the series. I was planning to wait until I had time to expand the story into a book and re-cover it then, but as time has passed and other projects have taken precedence, I realized I needed to just do it now. So I did.

This is a 12,000 word story that I wrote for The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance in 2010. It's also going to be part of a Jarved Nine boxed set I'm working on. Another reason to jump on the cover now so that it looked like the other stories in the set.

I'll pass along more information about the boxed set later. I'm still working on formatting it and don't have a release date yet. In the meantime, enjoy the new cover for The Troll Bridge!

Cover Reveal: Wicked Intention

If you're a member of my newsletter or if you've read Wicked Obsession, you've seen the cover for Wicked Intention already. For the rest of you, here's the cover for my next story.

***SPOILER ALERT: Don't go past the cover image if you haven't read Wicked Obsession yet and don't want a minor spoiler.***

This hero and heroine were originally supposed to be the first couple in the Paladin League series, but Ryder and Langley jumped in front of them.

Special Forces Sergeant Finn Rowland is undercover as a mercenary and part-time gunrunner by the name of Tom Finley when he meets Zofia Parker in the South American country of Puerto Jardin. Finn is immediately attracted to her (and vice versa), but she's up to something and Finn needs to figure out what that is before she blows up his mission.

Surprise! New Covers!

It wasn't my intention to change the covers of the books I control in the Blood Feud World series, but life has a way of throwing little surprises our way. After someone pointed out a certain Facebook post to me, I knew I'd have to get new covers for these two books sooner or later.

I was thinking I could wait until after Wicked Obsession was released on January 22nd, but as I looked at my iPad and was searchingfor something to read. Then I saw one of the two covers in question and became pissed off. Decision made. Contact cover designer first thing Monday. I didn't expect her to turn the covers around so quickly, but she had them back to me the same day! How awesome is that?

Of course, this meant my night became devoted to swapping out the covers on my website and at all the booksellers. I have no clue when the booksellers will actually update their websites, but I've done what I could there and now we wait.

So allow me to share my new covers with you:

Blood Feud is a short story and the first entry in the Blood Feud World series. The heroine is a vampire enforcer and the hero is a demon prince. They have a past. It didn't end well and now they have to work together to find a killer before war erupts.

Enemy Embrace is a novella and the fourth story in the Blood Feud World series. The heroine is a vampire slayer and she has her sites set on the fiend who killed her family. The hero is a demon executioner and his target is the same vampire. The only way to defeat this powerful enemy is if they work together, but both have reasons why they don't want to do this.

Cover Reveal

I've resisted sharing the cover for my latest story for a while now and it's been so hard! I've wanted to show you all how awesome it turned out since I got it.

This is for Wicked Obsession which should come out late summer or early fall. I'm hoping late summer. It's the start of a new romantic suspense series called The Paladin League. The first hero up is Ryder Pienkowski. His heroine describes him as half Italian, half Polish, and all gorgeous. She should have added all stubborn to the list.

It was supposed to be a wedding: a little fun, some wine, the chance for Langley Canfield to forget a devastating breakup. Until the wedding turns into a kidnapping, and her brand new ex—US Army Special Forces Sergeant Ryder Pienkowski—races to the rescue.

Phoenix Burning Cover Reveal

Okay, so maybe it isn't a earth-shaking, top secret cover reveal. I found it on Amazon and anyone who was looking at Phoenix Burning would have seen it. I'm thinking of it more like the big Apple announcement today. All those photos of the new iPad have already leaked out and the show is more of a show and tell.

If you'd like to see how I envisioned the hero and heroine as well as some other pictures I worked with as I was writing, visit my Phoenix Burning board on Pinterest.

Stock Photography Hell

Enemy Embrace was exclusive to the Crave the Night anthology for six months, but now that time is up and I went in search of royalty-free photos for a cover. I've lamented before about trying to find cover images and it hasn't gotten any better. Most of the pictures out there simply won't work.

• Smiling people? No. Not for the kinds of stories I write.
• Scrawny men. A lot of the men in these pictures are either scrawny or unattractive or both. Why can't stock photographers grasp that both the man and the woman need to be good looking?
• Poses too staid or poses too explicit. Some of these pictures look like portraits that people would put up on their fireplace. Conversely, there are pictures out there with all kinds of skin showing. I don't write Erotic Romance, but even if I did, the book sellers aren't going to show a cover that might offend customers.

These issues leave a handful of photos out there and authors are using and reusing them, which gets kind of old. The problem is there's nothing better and there's little choice.

But me? I have an extra layer of difficulty. You see, I frequently write multicultural characters and Enemy Embrace has one of them. My heroine is Latina.

I find it oddly ironic that just last week someone blogged at Heroes and Heartbreakers about how white romance is. It left me sputtering because of the 14 stories I've had published, 6 of them have had a hero or heroine who has a multicultural background. A quick use of a calculator says that's 43% of my published work.

Anyway, considering the hell I've had to go through to find stock images for these couples, I'm exceedingly aware that photographers who shoot photos I can use are few and far between. After hours of searching, I found 3 pictures that might, possibly work for this story, but none of them are optimal. It's frustrating.

For those curious about my multicultural characters:

The Power of Two - Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese
Through a Crimson Veil - Mika is 1/2 Japanese
Dark Awakening - Kimi is all Japanese-American
The Troll Bridge - Troll is part Filipino and part African-Caribbean and part Hawaiian
Demon Kissed - Bree is part Latina
Enemy Embrace - Nicole is part Latina

Cover for Dark Awakening

Dark Awakening never had its own cover because it was part of an anthology called Shards of Crimson, which had four Crimson City stories. Now that Team Crimson City is working to publish our stories in electronic format, Kimi and Nic finally get a cover. As I blogged earlier, finding stock photos with multicultural characters was very difficult. Nic doesn't look very much like the Nic I saw when I wrote the story, but I think the cover turned out awesome anyway.

I'd written the cover copy for this story back in 2006 because I wanted a description of my story for my website even if the back cover copy on the actual anthology was more specific to Crimson City as a whole.

Kimi Noguchi is working as an intern for an advertising agency in Crimson City and she's discovered that she's a kijo or witch. She thinks having talent is cool, but her magic attracts the attention of a power-hungry Bak-Faru demon and she's forced to call on another demon, Nicodemus, for help.

Nic made a promise to stay away from Kimi for her own good, but now that she's summoned him, all bets are off. She's his vishtau mate, a bond held in reverence by all demons, and he's not about to let this opportunity pass him by. Nic plans to protect, woo and win his woman.

This was the first time I'd ever written anything short. I tend to go over the word count numbers in my contracts by a pretty good amount. What can I say? Bonus story for readers, right? Sometimes it just takes a while for a story to unfold, and despite my attempts to prod them along, I can't get my characters to move faster than they do.

The first ever cover for Dark Awakening...drum roll, please:

Stay tuned for more on when Team Crimson City will have the series available in ebook.

New Cover for Through a Crimson Veil!

When I blogged a couple of weeks ago about having so much trouble finding stock photos to use on covers, it was because I was in the middle of having covers made for Through a Crimson Veil and Dark Awakening. For those of you who are going Dark Awakening, huh? This is my Crimson City novella that was in the Shards of Crimson anthology.

Well, Through a Crimson Veil is finally available electronically! I'm still waiting on Amazon, but if you have a Nook, it's up at BN.com. The story is also up in EPUB and Mobipocket PRC format at ARebooks and in a variety of formats at Smashwords.



Here's the new cover copy I wrote for the book:

When a sexy half demon asks Conor McCabe for protection, he can't say no and he doesn't understand why. He hates demons. He doesn't want to help her. He doesn't want to want her, but every minute he spends with her strengthens his need to keep her safe—and intensifies the desire burning between them.

Mika Noguchi sought out Conor to steal the key that can free all demons imprisoned in Orcus. She quickly regrets her mission—Conor is her destined mate and he'll view her theft as betrayal—but she gave her word to the council and the penalty for breaking it is severe.

Other demons are loose in Crimson City, however, and they have their own plans. They're not about to let anyone stand in the way. Not Conor. Not Mika. They'll do anything it takes to advance their agendas—even kill.

Writing cover copy is sooo hard. This totally made me appreciate my editors and anyone else at my publishers who wrote it for my books. I still have to come up with a short, one sentence blurb for Crimson Veil, but I'll get there.

And here's the cover:

BTW, Team Crimson City is working to get our books up in electronic format. More info to come.

Stock Photos and Cover Art

For the past couple of months, the Crimson City authors have been working on getting the series up in ebook. It's been an interesting process. I'd formatted a couple of short stories for ebook, but this was a full-length book and a novella. It was more work, but I also learned a few tricks to speed the whole thing up. And just to prove I'm a geek beyond all hope, I enjoyed the formatting. Mostly. :-)

Finding stock photos for the cover artist was much more difficult.

There are so many issues with stock photos. First, pictures of men and women grinning happily are not going to work for cover art. Especially if they're wearing business suits. I haven't written a character yet who dresses up like that, although I think I have one in the wings. Maybe. We'll see if that lasts once I get into writing his story. And I write stories with suspense. Grinning people on the cover don't work. Neither do people wearing phone headsets, holding money, using a laptop or the myriad of other poses rife on the stock photo sites.

Then there's problem two--both people need to be attractive. It happened over and over again--I'd find one attractive person, but they'd be paired up with someone not so attractive. Why do so many photographers use one model that would turn heads and put him/her with a model who is plainer? Or if both the man and woman are good looking, the guy is scrawny. Muscles and looks are important for book covers.

I had an extra issue at work on the Crimson City covers. Both my heroines are of Japanese heritage. Both their heroes are of European heritage. Yeah. There was one photo that was perfect. Sexy clinch. Asian woman. European man. And I'd already used it for the Power of Two cover. (Which will be coming in ebook eventually.)

The cover artist cut off the heads of one couple so you can't see the woman isn't Japanese. This is what we're going with for Through a Crimson Veil. And I spent hours and hours (time I definitely don't have) combing the stock photo site for something, anything we could use for Dark Awakening. I did find one picture with an Asian woman, only she was paired with an Asian man. My cover artist performed a miracle, but he was replaced.

Is it seriously too much to ask for stock photographers to put a good looking, muscular man with a good looking woman together in a pose that's sexy without being Erotica sexy? A pose that doesn't involve grins or any piece of business equipment? Is it too much to ask that some of the couples come from two different ethnic backgrounds?

I love writing multicultural characters, but getting covers made for those books is excruciating. I never found any picture that could even remotely work for Troll in my story, The Troll Bridge. Troll is multi, multi, multicultural. His heritage is part European, part Filipino, and part African-Caribbean. Yeah. You'll notice that cover only has a woman on it. She at least looks something like his heroine.

As I contemplate future stories that I have in mind, I'm already dreading what their covers will look like. It's not only authors publishing on their own or republishing their backlist who comb the stock photo sites. New York publishers are using stock photos now, too. What kind of cover will I end up with for my hero who's Eurasian? What about my Polynesian/European hero and heroine? I have a couple of Latina heroines and one hero (all in different stories). Changing their backgrounds won't work. My characters are who they are, but cover images...::shudder::

Here's The Power of Two

I've had my covers for a while now, but wanted to wait to show them off. I'm impatient, though, and I couldn't wait any longer to share. I'm showcasing them one at a time. The appearances on my blog are the grand premiere. :-)

Without any further chatter from me, I present The Power of Two!

Isn't it awesome? I love the background especially. It has a really nice future feel to it. I did the searching for the couple on the cover. It was amazingly hard to find a picture that fit and I finally had to go for the best that I could find. The woman in the picture was listed as being Chinese and my heroine, Cai, is 1/4 Vietnamese. Also, both models look older than my hero and heroine are in the story. Cai is 21 and Jake is in his mid-20s. Like I said, though, there were very few pictures to choose from and I picked the best one available. But while the couple isn't exactly right, the cover is still awesome!

This concludes the new cover premieres. I hope you enjoyed looking at them as much as I enjoyed showing them off!

Here's Ravyn's Flight

I've had my covers for a while now, but wanted to wait to show them off. I'm impatient, though, and I couldn't wait any longer to share. I'm showcasing them one at a time. The appearances on my blog are the grand premiere. :-)

Without any further chatter from me, I present Ravyn's Flight!

I really love this cover! The guy has shorter hair, and since my hero is in the army, this was important to me. I also really like that the woman is wearing his camo shirt. There's actually a scene in the book where Ravyn is wearing Damon's shirt, so it's as if this picture was meant for my book!

Here's Eternal Nights

I've had my covers for a while now, but wanted to wait to show them off. I'm impatient, though, and I couldn't wait any longer to share. I'm showcasing them one at a time. The appearances on my blog are the grand premiere. :-)

Without any further chatter from me, I present Eternal Nights!

Crave the Night Cover

Isn't this cover totally awesome? I've shared it on Facebook, but I realized I never shared it on my blog and decided I better fix that. My story is called Enemy Embrace and it's part of the Blood Feud series. (This includes: Blood Feud, Demon Kissed, and Shadow's Caress.)

Blurb for Enemy Embrace: Nicole Ruiz will do whatever it takes to get revenge on the vampire who killed her family--even make a deal with a demon.

Watch for it October 2011!
 

Also, in other news, I've had requests to make the ebooks for The Troll Bridge and Blood Feud available in stores other than Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Now both stories are available at Smashwords in many formats. You can also find these books as well as my Nocturne Bites shorts and my Light Warrior books available in eformat at Diesel Ebooks. Both should be available shortly at Kobo Books and Sony Ebookstore, but they're not up yet. And of course, for those with Kindle and Nook readers, you can find my books at both Amazon and BN.com.

I'm also working on getting my earliest books into ebook format and will announce here as I manage this. It might take me a little while because my story for Crave the Night is due August 31st, but it is definitely on the agenda.

Shadow's Caress Cover!

I have the cover for Shadow's Caress! This is my February 1, 2011 release from Harlequin Nocturne Bites.

The quick blurb for the story is: A vampire trapped in a hellish limbo has one hope to reclaim his life as the undead--the hunter who tried to kill him.

Malachi James is the vampire who's stuck in limbo and he hates it. No one can see him or hear him--not humans, not other vampires, and if there are others trapped with him, he's unaware of them. The only person who can sense his existence is Cass.

Cass Lanier walked away from vampire hunting after Malachi opened his eyes and met her gaze while she was staking him. Now some presence is hanging around, arousing her, and she thinks it's him--her last vampire.

Cass has bigger trouble than she knows--yet. The vampire hunters have discovered she didn't follow all the steps necessary to kill a vampire and they plan to take her out.

You can check out an excerpt on my website, but I haven't found the story for sale anywhere yet so there aren't any active buy links. I'll have those up as soon as Shadow's Caress is available.

I wish I could post the pictures of the models I used for Cass and Malachi, but I don't want to violate the photographers' copyrights. The couple on the cover don't look much like them and that always makes me want to share what they really look like. :-)

I can describe them though. Cass has short, dark hair and a pixie face. She's 21, not young for her years, but she's a little flip and has a kind of off-center way of thinking. She's a lot of fun and doesn't do a lot of angsting even in the midst of being chased by men who want her dead.

Malachi was 22 when he became a vampire. He's got light brown hair that's kind of shaggy and usually falling into his eyes. He loses his American accent when his control slips and speaks with an English accent, one he's cultivated over the centuries. He doesn't hold grudges or hate Cass for staking him because he understands that humans fear vampires. Also, he believes that bitterness and the need for revenge hurt the one who seeks these things and he just doesn't go there.

With that, here's the cover for Shadow's Caress.

New Covers!

I mentioned earlier that I was going to get the two short stories I wrote for the Mammoth Books collections out in ebook format. I have the electronic rights to those stories, so I decided to get covers made and take the plunge. Well, my covers turned out utterly awesome and I have to share here even though I haven't finished writing the book description blurbs yet or even started formatting.

First up is the cover for The Troll Bridge. This is a time travel where the heroine, Lia Stanton, goes from 2010 to 2050 and meets up with Troll Maglaya, a Special Ops soldier stationed on the planet Jarved Nine. He's the one assigned to guard Lia.

The second cover is for Blood Feud. This story is about a vampire heroine, Isobel, and her former lover, demon prince Seere. Unfortunately, for Isobel and Seere, their romance was doomed 200 years earlier because demons and vampire are enemies. But when a demon starts killing vampires, the two sides have to work to find the killer before war erupts. Again. Isobel and Seere are assigned by their respective leaders to work together and get the murderer.

Totally awesome, yes? Now I have to get moving on writing the book descriptions and formatting so I can get this up on Amazon and other places.

Demon Kissed Cover!

Demon Kissed comes out from Nocturne Bites in May and I received my cover yesterday. I'm posting a bigger version here than I have on my website.



For those who don't know, Nocturne Bites are short stories that are released in electronic format. I discovered when I wrote my two shorts for Mammoth Books, that I had a lot of fun with the length and wanted to do more. About the same time, I read a news headline that someone posted on Twitter and I thought it was a great story idea.

The headline? Something about an exorcist being convicted of murder. I knew what the headline really meant, of course, but my imagination went off. What if the demons tried and convicted a demon slayer of murder? And so Bree and Andras showed up and needed a story. :-) There wasn't enough to the storyline to make a full-length book, not without doing a lot of work to beef it up, but it was perfect for a short.

Anyway, Bree has been convicted of murder by the demons. She's been sentenced to death, has an executioner assigned to kill her, and a bounty put on her head. She doesn't know this, though, or why there are so many demons after her. Andras shows up to help her and he fills her in.

I have an excerpt up if you'd like to read a little bit of the story.