Sirius Hidden Truth by A.J.Long

Steamy Romance, Romantic Suspense, Erotic Romance

Date Published:  February 2018

April Barnes was a simple girl with a simple life. All she wanted was to graduate and help the world. Everything changes when her only friend Vanessa Lewis talks her into covering for her at a catering job. The minute April walked in the door, her curiosity gets the best of her and that curiosity introduced her to a world that would soon be a part of her.

The minute he laid eyes on her, there was only one thing that Dominic Prescott wanted and that was April Barnes. Hidden behind many secrets, the opportunity to get closer to her presented itself when he volunteered to teach an economics class that she was a student of.

Introducing her to his world wasn’t part of his plan. All it took was one taste and she would be forever his, or so he thought until the truth he had kept hidden away is revealed putting them both in danger.

Will she be able to accept his world or will she walk away and leave the only man she ever loved behind…

Excerpt

 She wasn’t sure who this man was, but she was hypnotized by his charm. Never before had she submitted to a man based on his request. With shaky hands she began unbuttoning her shirt. The fact that he was watching her made her feel even more nervous. When her shirt fell to the floor, exposing her light pink demi bra, she looked up to him, aware that the half smile on his face was because he approved. Reaching behind her back, she found the zipper of her skirt and pulled it down. Pushing the material down her legs, she let it drop to the floor before she stepped out of it. With only her bra, matching panties, and black heeled shoes on, she stood in front of him waiting for what would happen next.

When he held his hand out to her, she lowered her honey brown eyes and placed her hand in his. He captured her hand and led her to the open panel. Just inside the hidden door, the mysterious man switched on a light that barely lit the narrow hallway. April tried to see where the hallway led, but it was too dark. Feeling the change in the temperature, she began rubbing her arms to get warm. It wasn’t just the lack of clothing that made her cold; the darkness and the thought of not knowing what was in store had her shivering. Taking in her surroundings, she felt something being draped over her shoulders. As she pulled it around her, she noticed that it was a dark blue velvet cape, just like the ones the guests had worn in the ballroom.

Turning to face the mysterious man, she was about to ask where he was taking her, but before she could get the words out, he stilled her in her spot and placed what felt like a mask over her eyes. As he began securing it behind her head, he spoke in a firm but velvety voice. “One of the requirements to enter the chamber is that you will be covered in velvet. Be assured your identity will never be revealed. Can you accept these rules?’

Nodding her head, she allowed him to finish securing the mask. When he gently placed his hands on her shoulders, she turned at his will. She raised her head to his until their eyes met. The look on his face, although mostly covered, told her everything she needed to know. Placing his hand on her chin, he tilted her head and lowered his lips to hers. His tongue swept gently across her parted lips, never dipping inside. Biting her full bottom lip, he ended the kiss and pulled away, leaving her unfulfilled and disappointed.

April tried to resume where he had left off, but was denied as he placed his finger across her mouth. “We need to go,” he ordered, taking hold of her hand.

Reaching the end of the dark hallway, there was a large wooden door with something written in Latin engraved in the wood. Having taken Greek and Latin in college, she translated the words as she read them, ‘Blood of one’s desire is the root of another’s pleasure.’ She wasn’t quite sure exactly what it meant, but just the thought of finding out had her mind reeling with excitement. April watched as he placed his hand on the handle. Getting ready to pull it open, he suddenly pulled his hand back. She was confused by his movement until he looked down at her and warned, “You are to remain by my side unless you are solicited. You will address me as Sir, and most importantly, you will do as I command. Do you understand?

About the Author

Award winning Author of the Independent Press Award and NYC Big Book Award.

My love for writing began several years ago after an early retirement from a demanding job that I loved, but also hated because it consumed so much of my time. Now, I am able to focus my time on what I love. Writing romance has been a life long dream and to actually say that I am a published author is beyond what I would have ever expected.

Even though some may say I have a little naughtiness in my books, I look at it as an added bonus for my readers. After all what is a romance book without a little spice.

When I am not writing, I enjoy spending time with friends either at home or out on the town. Mostly, I enjoy a relaxing night at home where I can enjoy a glass of wine in the company of a good book.

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Unstrung Series by Kendra C. Highley

YA Sci-Fi Series Blitz

UNSTRUNG (Book 1)

Lexa Pate, 17-year-old thief extraordinaire, has burned a bridge or two in her life. You don't make a career out of stealing other people's property without making enemies.

When a risky job goes from bad to worse, Lexa and her adopted family find themselves on Precipice Corporation's hit list because they've accidentally stolen the wrong thing - plans for a new model of genetically-engineered super humans. Now every bounty hunter, cop on the take, and snitch in the city is after them.

Lexa's world crumbles around her as she fights to keep her family safe even as someone strolls out of her forgotten past. Quinn claims to know who Lexa really is, but can she trust a stranger she met while robbing his boss?

More importantly, does she really want to know what Quinn has to tell her?

UNFINISHED (Prequel Novella)

In a world where genetically-engineered humans serve as slave labor to “real” humans, ten-year-old Quinn is an anomaly. Designed with superior intelligence and physical attributes, he lives and trains at Maren DeGaul’s lakeside mansion, being readied for some mysterious purpose as dictated by Precipice Corporation. Despite the comfortable surroundings, Quinn is frequently pushed to his limits by his human guardians, often learning lessons in pain and loneliness.

That all changes the day they introduce him to a new artificial, one who is both his equal and his soulmate. But when Maren decides the new artificial is flawed and should be decommissioned, it’s up to Quinn to find a way to save his only friend.

UPRISING (Book 2)

Master thief Lexa Pate always prided herself on never being caught. That changed the night she freed the artificial humans of Triarch City, a people she’s still learning to identify with. Now, imprisoned by the government, she’s separated from her family—and the love of her life—while facing murder charges. What she doesn’t know is something far worse awaits her: the Quad intends to make her pay for her crimes.

After helplessly watching Lexa be captured, Quinn has to place his trust in a group of people he barely knows to save the girl he loves. The rebels outside Triarch City have the equipment—and the information—he needs to rescue Lexa. But, knowing the Quad has sophisticated brainwashing techniques, his biggest worry is who she’ll be even if they do manage to bring her home.

Pawns in a game they barely understand, Lexa and Quinn will have to use all the gifts they possess to fight the powers seeking to control them and find a way back to each other.

Before it’s too late.

UNIFIFED (Book 3)

Lexa Pate has been called many things: thief, artificial, lover, friend. Now, as she faces the biggest crisis of her life, she realizes there’s another title trying to define her: murderer.

After she was freed from the Quad’s clutches, Lexa thought her life would go back to, if not normal, something resembling that. Sure, the band of rebels she’s joined have ideas of freeing the world from the Quad (delusions of grandeur might be more accurate), but Lexa is reunited with the men who’ve become her ragtag family. In her new home, she’s safe, she’s surrounded by people who care for her, and Quinn is always close at hand, ready to show her how much he loves her. So why does she feel like killing him every time they’re together?

Quinn thought rescuing Lexa from the Glass House would be all he needed to find his happy ending. But Lexa’s incarceration has changed things between them, and he fears the Quad altered more about Lexa than anyone suspects. With tensions in the rebel camp rising between the humans and the artificials, Quinn knows the war will reach a boiling point soon, and he may be the only one who can stop it. But if the rebels continue to believe Lexa is dangerous, he could lose more than the war—he could lose the girl he loves.

Excerpt From Book 1

I stare blankly at the wall in my room. My Exeprin high has worn off and I changed back into my pajamas at the first chance, unable to get the chip off my mind. Our little team has ceased being annoying but forgettable and has become a critical target. Everyone from cops to bounty hunters to the Quad’s security team will be after us. All because we stole the wrong thing. Sure, we hadn’t planned to steal that particular chip, but our mistake doesn’t change one simple fact.

We are so dead.

“…run another diagnostic,” Turpin calls from the hallway. He’s been holed up in the lab with Jole, examining the data on the chip. A moment later, he knocks. Unlike Jole, he waits for me to say “come in” before opening the door.

“Hey,” he says, taking a seat on my desk chair. “You okay?”

I drop my pillow over my face. Maybe I should suffocate myself with it. “If I hadn’t tripped and set off the alarm, there’d be no trace of how the chip was taken. Now…they’ll find us.”

“Lexa, there’s no way to plan for the unknown. Besides, anyone else probably would’ve set that security device off sooner and not gotten away.”

A headache starts throbbing behind my eyes. Stars, this is the worst time to be coming off Exeprin. “I’ll remind you how you said it wasn’t my fault when we’re rounded up by Maren’s people.”

“You won’t have to,” Turpin says. “I’m the one who took the job. We go down, you can blame me.”

He sounds so dejected, I sit up, hugging the pillow to my chest. Maybe I should be scared, but a morbid curiosity about Maren’s artificials gets the better of me. “What are the new versions like? Can you tell from the plans?”

“Most of it is over our heads—the genetic engineering data is very complex—and part of the chip is heavily encoded. But I understand enough to know these are the most human-like versions I’ve seen. Circulatory systems that actually regenerate synthetic blood cells, skin cells that scab over when cut, fully functional digestive tracts. Stars, even their hair, fingernails and bodies will grow like a human’s.”

My headache intensifies. “Wait, what do you mean their bodies will grow?”

Turpin goes to my window. “Instead of making adults, like usual, these prototypes appear to be equivalent to six-year-old children. All of them with critical thinking processors akin to a person with a one-forty I.Q. The plans cover maturity cycles and learning rates by age. The only thing I can guess is that her scientists want to mimic the learning capability of a child’s brain.”

My room suddenly feels cold. “We stole the plans for a super-race of fake human beings?”

“It would seem that way. And all of them programmed to think the way the Quad wants them to think. Hyper-intelligent, but without the experience or knowledge to have true free will. I’m wondering about that, though,” he says, coming to sit on the edge of my bed. “If Maren’s playing God to this extent, how will she maintain control of her ‘kids?’ Can you imagine them as teenagers?” He gives me a rueful smile. “You’re hard enough to handle.”

I punch his arm, more out of respect than annoyance. Everything is so topsy-turvy, I wonder if I’m going soft. Soon I’ll be letting Jole off the hook for coming into my room without knocking. “Maybe it’s good we stole those plans. The new K600s are advanced enough that I can hardly tell they’re artificials. These new…things would be an abomination. A crime against nature.” I stand and pace, needing to put my nervous energy into the ground. If I don’t, I’ll blow, and I can’t afford a meltdown. “Bolts shouldn’t be so human. It blurs way too many lines, don’t you think?”

“The bigger question is what we tell our clients,” Turpin says. “Because we can’t give the chip to them. It’s too dangerous.”

He has a point. “I say we tell them the chip self-destructed as we decoded it. Who cares if they get angry. I’m less scared of them than I am of Maren.”

About the Author

Kendra C. Highley lives in north Texas with her husband and two children. She also serves as staff to four self-important and high-powered cats. This, according to the cats, is her most important job. She believes in everyday magic, extraordinary love stories, and the restorative powers of dark chocolate

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Unstrung

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Unified

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The Tea Shop by Bernadette Marie

Bestselling Author Bernadette Marie is known for building families readers want to be part of. Her series The Keller Family has graced bestseller charts since its release in 2011. Since then she has authored and published over thirty books. 

The married mother of five sons promises romances with a Happily Ever After always…and says she can write it because she lives it.

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Seeing the future is a curse that Abigail Weston has carried her entire life. Knowing how and when someone will be hurt, or the whereabouts of missing people, haunts her enough to move away from the town that no longer trusts her.

When real estate developer Carson Stone meets the intuitive Abigail, he can't help but feel the connection to her and wonder if love at first sight is possible, especially since they share a passion for old buildings. She believes they all should remain, while he builds new ones in their place.

No matter Abigail's feelings for Carson, knowing that their future is to be together does not ensure them a happily ever after, especially if she can't figure out what the other side is trying to show her--because in her visions Carson's future is dark and cold.

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A Snippet from the Book

"If he weren't a tyrant who tore down old buildings, you'd be head over heels in love with him already, wouldn't you?"

Abigail wasn't even going to consider an answer to that, let alone give it any thought. Because unfortunately, she was sure her cousin was correct.

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Sugar and Spice and All Those Lies by Evy Journey

Evy Journey, writer, wannabe artist, and flâneuse (feminine of flâneur), wishes she lives in Paris where people have perfected the art of aimless roaming. Armed with a Ph.D., she used to research and help develop mental health programs.

She's a writer because beautiful prose seduces her and existential angst continues to plague her despite such preoccupations having gone out of fashion. She takes occasional refuge by invoking the spirit of Jane Austen to spin tales of love, loss, and finding one’s way—stories into which she weaves mystery or intrigue.

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Gina’s grandfather was a French chef whose life was cut short by a robber’s bullet. The only lasting legacy he could leave his family was his passion and talent for cooking.

Growing up poor but with a mother who is a gifted cook. Gina learns cooking a great meal is an act of love. An art that sustains and enhances life.

A world of new challenges, new friends, and new loves opens up for her when she’s chosen to cook for a Michelin-starred restaurant.

But danger lurks where one never expects it.

Can her passion for cooking help Gina survive and thrive in this world of privilege, pleasure and menace?

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Snippet:

Prologue:

I’m alive. I’m dead. I’m in-between. In that limbo where my vital signs hover just above death. I rise above my body and look down on it, lying on a gurney. Hospital staff are rushing me along the brightly-lit hallway to the operating room. One of them holds an oxygen mask on my face. Another, a bag of intravenous fluid connected to my veins by a tube.

I’m not ready to die yet. These good people anxious to rescue me don’t know that my resolve is the only thing that is keeping me alive. No, I’m not ready to die—I’ve only just begun to live. I have yet to prove to myself, to the world, that I have what it takes to prevail.

My family—now on their way to the hospital—doesn’t know yet exactly what happened to me. And except for one detective, neither do the police. I see him now by the foot of the gurney, keeping pace with the nurses. He’s scowling, his lips pressed into a grim line.

A tall, taut, and solitary man, he has deep-set gray eyes clouded by too many images of violent death and a lower lip that hangs perpetually open in disgust or despair. So much darkness he has already seen in his thirty odd years in this world. He needs to piece together the facts that constitute the attempt on my life, events that may have led to it, and various fragments of my past to understand what brought me to this point.

The first time I met him, I fell in love with him. There was something primal about him, some paternal, animalistic instinct to save hurt or fallen victims. Like me, maybe. It gave him power and it made him irresistible to me.

But fate is fickle. It teases. It entices. One day, something quite ordinary happens to you. Yet, you sense that that ordinary something can change your life. Not necessarily for something better, but for something new. Fate is dangling before you the promise of a world that, before then, was totally out of your reach. How can you not seize it?

Now, of course, I see the end of that promise. And it’s not where I want to be.

It’s tragic, don’t you think, that the end of that promise should be right here on a gurney, with me fighting for my life? It certainly is not what I hoped for.

How could it end this way? I embraced life, took chances, but half-dead on this gurney, I wonder: Am I paying with my life? But, like I said. I’m not ready to die yet

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Upheld by The Grace Lane Authors

Five women have joined together under the pen name, Grace Lane, to write about their personal experiences in hopes to inspire and uplift others.  The following character sketches will give you a little insight about each author.

Rebekah: 

Writing about motherhood and her husband’s health struggles, Rebekah lives true to the meaning of her name—to bind. Life’s experiences have shaped her into a wise, steadfast daughter of God who has the beautiful ability to make others laugh through her clever wit.

Jeni: 

Jeni’s stories revolve around the loving care of her son with special needs. Knowing that he will not live out his childhood, she’s armed with strength and determination to give him the best life possible. The bright hope Jeni finds through the Savior will encourage the lowest of hearts.

Elizabeth:

Elizabeth is passionate about sharing the Light of Christ. You’ll feel this in reading about the challenges she faces with her spouse’s addiction and divorce. Through sophistication, uplifting words, and a touch of spunk, she’s a modern-day disciple “gathering in the fold” and feeding His sheep.

Faith:

A woman of intuition, Faith has a distinctive gift for understanding people. Her personal goal in life is to help women recognize their potential in whatever role they fill. She writes about her battle in overcoming abuse as a child and her fight with low self-esteem.

Dawn:

A single mom for ten years, Dawn not only believes the motto “Light trumps darkness”, but she lives it every day. Her short stories are about finding God after a heart-crushing divorce. Dawn touches many lives through her unwavering testimony and simple ways.

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Upheld: Ordinary women discovering an Extraordinary God

Life happens. Ordinary and extraordinary events fill the days and nights, but regardless of the circumstance, God is there. We’re five friends who, over the course of a decade, learned to recognize the heavenly touches in our lives. We share our stories in a series of short vignettes, as glimpses of the profound and practical ways God lifts us.

First as a newlywed and then as a young mother, Rebekah awakens to the daily light that comes from realizing how often and simply the Lord touches her life. Jeni nurtures a child with special needs and learns that strength and support are only a prayer away. Elizabeth forges a new path towards renewal and regeneration after she exits the roller coaster ride of her spouse’s addiction. Faith discovers the beauty of reminders from a loving Heavenly Father that she has worth and the precious gift of agency. Dawn opens her mind to the understanding that no matter what happens peace can abound and everything will work out.

In Upheld: Ordinary women discovering an Extraordinary God we invite you to walk with us, explore the nooks and crannies of life, and have joy in the knowledge that you are not forgotten. As you read, we hope you will also discover God upholding you in your own life.

And now for the Cover

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Isn't it lovely!!!

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