Sons of Gulielmus
Book 2
Holley Trent
Genre: Paranormal Romance
Publisher: Crimson Romance
Number of pages: 163 (PDF)
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.
Amazon
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.
Author Contacts:
Website | Blog | Twitter | Facebook
Tour giveaway details:
-eBook copies of A Demon in Waiting and Melt My Heart (2 bundles, 2 winners)
-$25 e-gift certificate: ARe, Amazon, or B&N (1 winner)
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