Monday, May 5, 2014

Bewitching Virtual Book Tour & Giveaway for A Demon In Love by Holly Trent


Welcome to my stop on Bewitching Book Tour’s Virtual Book Tour for A Demon in Love by Holly Trent.  Please leave a comment or question for Ms. Trent to let her know you stopped by.  You can enter her tour wide giveaway by filling out the Rafflecopter form below. Don't forget to visit the other stops on the tour, the more stops you visit, the better your odds of winning.  

Soundtrack of A Demon in Love
By Holley Trent

I don’t listen to music while I’m writing fiction because I have the unfortunate habit of accidentally typing the song lyrics I just heard. I suppose it’s a consequence of using the same part of the brain to do two different tasks at once—I can’t just listen passively.

That said, I do scour my iTunes library for inspiration when I need help identifying character motivations or to establish a certain mood before writing a scene. I also hop around my go-to iHeartRadio stations in search of new songs. I’ll listen carefully to the lyrics and use them to inspire my book’s dark moments.

Here are the top six songs that influenced A Demon in Love.

1) Bruno Mars – “Gorilla”

Okay, this one slipped in for what will probably seem like an obvious reason. It’s a song about *whispers* dirty, sweaty sex. Charles is a sex demon. He knows a little bit about pleasure, you know what I’m saying?

2) Little Big Town – “Tornado”

When I heard this song for the first time, I immediately thought about the hero Charles. This line in particular hit home: “I’m a tornado looking for a soul to take.” After all, part of his job is to corrupt souls. For the past hundred years, he’s been a bit like a tornado—out of control and just waiting to run into something that would make him fall apart.

3) Pentatonix – “Run to You”

Really, this is a song that about wanting to give up everything to be with the person your heart belongs to. It’s about being broken. It’s a song that sums up Charles Edison in an a cappella nutshell.

4) One Direction – “Strong”

This one’s a bit more upbeat, but this bit of lyrics caught me: “When I’m not with you I’m weaker. Is that so wrong?”

Charles has a lot of demons (figuratively speaking) he fights with every day. He needs a reason to keep up the battle, and that comes in the form of Marion.

5) Queen – “Princes of the Universe”

Every book should have a Queen song, but this one is particularly fitting because it comes from the Highlander soundtrack—a film about immortals, which Charles and his brothers are.

Stop what you’re doing and go watch that video on YouTube now just because…you know, Freddie Mercury. Hot damn, he broke the swagger mold.

6) Imagine Dragons – “Demons”

I didn’t just pick this one for the title.  I picked it for this: “Don’t get too close, it’s dark inside. It’s where my demons hide.” … “I can’t escape this now unless you show me how.”

The last hundred years have been pretty dark for Charles. He’s committed a lot of sins, and being half-demon he should be able to reconcile those with his “profession,” but…he can’t. I think deep down, he wants to be brought to task for them, which Marion does. She can’t grant him absolution, but she can help him be kinder to himself.


A Demon in Love
By Holley Trent
Sons of Gulielmus, Book 2

Genre:  Paranormal Romance
Publisher:  Crimson Romance
Date of Publication:   5/5/14
ISBN:   978-1-4405-8150-2
ASIN:   B00JX12L40
Number of pages:  163 (PDF)
Word Count:    79,000

Book Links:  Amazon | B&N | Kobo | ARe | Goodreads

Book Description:  

Charles Edison has spent most of his 123 years courting women for Hell. As a faithful son of the demon Gulielmus, he’s never known true affection for women. Which is funny, seeing as how he’s descended from a love god on his mother’s side. Now that he sees his brother falling head over heels, Charles wants the same for himself. He wants to belong to someone.

The Fates conspire to right old wrongs, and Charles learns the woman destined for him is one he shouldn’t want. Marion Wilder’s family has been on the supernatural Most Wanted List for twenty-five years because they were responsible for the demise of a demon. Gulielmus would kill her if he had the chance.


But Marion’s the only human woman Charles can touch without harming. She’s his one chance at having a normal life and a real family, and he would give up anything to keep her. Even his father’s favor.

Excerpt
She bent to pick up the receipt she’d dropped, and then yelped at the sight of the stranger six feet from her. She blew her fright away on an exhale and put her hand to her heart.

Why did they always frighten her? By now, she should have been used to strange men approaching her. Sometimes they heckled her—the “little girl” truck driver. Occasionally, they tried to sell her things. Dick and weed, mostly. One she didn’t partake in. The other she sure as shit wasn’t going to pay for, even if she were that kind of desperate.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head, hoping he’d catch the drift. Not that they ever did. Bozos.

“Cold night, isn’t it?” he asked. His voice was deep and cultured in the way Shakespearean actors’ voices were. Trained. Odd, seeing as how the only culture this guy had likely rubbed off from the newspapers he slept on. She cocked her head to the side and really studied him. Maybe he was experiencing some sort of delusion and believed he was on the set of a BBC miniseries or something. Maybe a modern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. She knew which character she’d be cast as, and was already gearing up to play the role if he said something sufficiently stupid. And he would. There was always something wrong with these truck stop guys. Pity, because this one was hot. He had to be around six and a half feet tall, and a nicely proportionate breadth to go with that height. Not bulky, but there were definitely some muscles beneath that jacket. He had to outweigh her by a good hundred pounds.

He fixed a stare on her she couldn’t tell was from blue or gray eyes beneath the pole light, but either way, it was oddly mesmerizing. She couldn’t bring herself to break free of it, although it somehow made her feel exposed.

Naked.

Why was he looking at her like that—like he knew her? She’d never seen the man before. She certainly would have remembered those startling eyes and all that dark hair. Jesus, she liked a bit of mane on her men. Someone could slap him on the cover of a romance novel. Just wrap him in tartan, hand him a sword, and set up an unobtainable fantasy for a few thousand women.

She pursed her lips, considering him. Nah, she’d read probably a hundred thrift store romance novels in the past year, and this guy was too tan to be a Scotsman and not dark enough to be a sheikh. Greek tycoon, maybe? Oh yeah. Put him on the deck of a yacht wearing some of those little European swim trunks and—

“Isn’t it?” he repeated, and raised one dark eyebrow.

“Huh?” She blinked. Did he want something?

He shifted his weight and shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, grinning at her. Shit, he could have lit up the entire parking lot with that smile. He was so pretty—now, what did he want with her? Whatever it was, she wasn’t paying for it.

She closed her eyes and drew in a bolstering breath. “It’s cold,” she said blandly and hauled her toolbox up into her truck cab.

“Montana’s a pretty inhospitable place, huh? There’s still a month until winter, but I don’t think the snow cares about timeliness.”

“Mm-hmm.” She patted her pockets in search of her keys. The next thing he’d probably say was that he could make it a lot more hospitable for her, if she had enough cash.

Prostitutes were pretty predictable, and she certainly got propositioned enough, though usually the truck stop hos were a little less—upright.

But, shit, did she really look like the kind of woman who’d pay a man for sex? She wrapped her fingers around the handle, prepared to slam the door.

He moved closer and grabbed the door’s edge before she could pull it. “Hey, why don’t you let me buy you a cup of coffee? You look like you could use a cup.”

“I don’t think so, dude.”

She could afford her own coffee, obviously, but no prostitute had ever offered to buy her anything. Must have been a new sales strategy—the hook ’em, then hump ’em.

She just wanted to get back on the road, but he was right. She did need to refill her thermos, fiend that she was. Coffee was her one vice, and she’d forgotten to take the canister into the restaurant with her during dinner. She didn’t want to give the guy the satisfaction, though, no matter how good he looked.

She let her gaze fall on him once again. He looked harmless enough, with his easy stance and hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. His boots were actually quite good quality. Brown leather with some scuffs. Broken in, and wet from snow, but they looked damned expensive. Didn’t seem like hand-me-downs, either. The heels were too good.

There must have been good money in truck stop whoring.

“No, thank you,” she finally managed, and gripped the door handle again after two failed attempts. “I-I need to get back on the road and get this load delivered.”

“Must be lonely,” he said. His grin waned slowly, and this time it was he who looked away, toward a truck entering the lot. He waited until it had circled around to the gas pumps.

“It’s a job,” she said when he looked up again. Damn, those eyes. They were so sad, and for some reason, that made her a little sad, too.


About the Author:  

Holley Trent is a Carolina girl gone west. Raised in rural coastal North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range with her family. She writes sassy contemporary and quirky paranormal romances set in her home state.

She’s hard at work writing other stories set in the Sons of Gulielmus world, including one for the mysterious Creole cambion Claude.

See Holley’s complete backlist of paranormal and contemporary romances at her website, http://www.holleytrent.com. When she’s not on deadline, she boldly tweets under the handle @holleytrent.









Tour Schedule
May 5 Guest blog
Queen of the Night Reviews

May 5 Spotlight and review
Books, Food and You

May 6 Interview
Diane’s Book Blog 

May 6 Spotlight
Author Karen Swart

May 6 Spotlight and review
Penny For Them...

May 7 Interview
Darkest Cravings

May 7 Spotlight
Share My Destiny

May 7 Interview and review
Dark Side of Romance

May 8 Guest blog
Butterfly-o-Meter Books

May 9 Spotlight
Corazones Literarios 

May 9 Spotlight
Paranormal Romance Fans for Life

May 12 Spotlight
Booklover Sue 

May 13 Interview
Eclipse Reviews

May 14 Guest blog
Ebook Escapes

May 15 Review
Paranormal Romance and authors that Rock

May 16 Guest blog
Fang-tastic Books

May 19 Spotlight and review
Romantic Reads and Such

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for hosting me! I've got this soundtrack going on repeat-play today.

    ReplyDelete
  2. congrats to Holley on the new release!!! This looks and sounds awesome :) Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good luck, book sounds interesting. Deb P

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  4. Enjoyed the excerpt specially the part where she's trying to decide which type of romantic hero he represented.

    ReplyDelete