Christmas with the SubClub gals!

The girls at THE SUBCLUB are running a super HOLIDAY BUNDLE contest, and I'm helping them celebrate by donating a prize of my two Christmas themed titles 'tied' in a festive bundle, THE GIFT and FIRE AND ICE.

So zip on over there, and find out how to enter. It's a simple question, promise, and there are lots of great prizes on odder as well as my humble offering. :)

http://thesubclubbooks.com/?p=17689

 

THE GIFT is out now!

My Christmas novel THE GIFT is out now! Complete with festive red bow and golden lettering on the cover [see piccie below for more detail].

THE GIFT isn't entirely a new title. It's a re-imagining of an earlier book of mine, KISS IT BETTER, transferring a generic sort of Spring/Summer setting to the more seasonal one of December and the run up to Christmas. Although this was an idea suggested to me by my editor, I do think it works perfectly, as The Gift has a strong 'fairytale' type romance vibe to it, with shades of Sleeping Beauty, almost, along with reunited lovers, and a tough and slightly cranky Prince Charming, who's been through the mill of pain and injury, and almost literally come out on the other side as an entirely different man.

There's also an entirely new and rather sexy epilogue, which includes not only a love scene for hero and heroine Jay and Sandy, but a 'sighting' of Lizzie and John from my ACCIDENTAL TRILOGY. The books are all set in the same 'world' as a few of my other titles, including Entertaining Mr Stone, Suite Seventeen, and In Too Deep.

[Look at that blingy lettering, eh!]

Blurb for THE GIFT

Pleasure with a perfect stranger...

Jay Bentley is a man with issues. Haunted by physical and psychological demons, he seeks solace and sexual oblivion in the pursuit of an exquisite erotic daydream from his youth, and the reality of a woman who has illuminated his inner fantasies since a brief meeting years ago.

Sandy Jackson has always known that a certain magic is 'missing' from her life. She's feisty and philosophical, but her dreams are filled with heated images of a handsome Prince Charming she once encountered, a man who will kiss everything better and gift her with glorious, dangerous pleasure.

But the past is an illusion, and the present fraught with conflict and uneasy compromise… can two passionate lovers reconcile their differences and slake their burning sensual hunger for each other in a wild and daring liaison?

Excerpt here:

http://www.portiadacosta.com/thegift.html


Available from:

Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Kindle UK and Kindle US
 
Also from Barnes and Noble, W H Smith, Nook UK, Kobo, All Romance Ebooks, Waterstones Books and Waterstones Ebooks

And while we're on a Christmas theme... here's another of my titles set during the Festive Season...

Cally and Innes, the boss she secretly adores, are marooned in a freezing flat over Christmas, with broken central heating... and a dose of the forty eight hour flu for Innes. What else is a girl to do but administer her body heat as a therapy to make him feel better?

More info and a sexy excerpt here:

http://www.portiadacosta.com/fireandice2.html

New cover for FIRE AND ICE!

Here the brand new cover for FIRE AND ICE! Don't you think it's steamy? Look at that clinch and the way they're so into each other!

FIRE AND ICE is very much a winter/Christmas story, inspired by the time himself replaced our central heating system and we were shivering in the cold for about a week. Of course he chose December to do the job. LOL

Anyway, here's the blurb for the story:

Sharing their body heat...

Super efficient P.A. Cally Hobbes is head over heels in love with her handsome boss, the urbane and delicious Innes McKenzie. Day after day, beneath her cool, businesslike exterior, she's simmering hot for him, and she knows he's not entirely immune to her either, despite their perfect, above board working relationship.

Icy weather, a broken central heating system, and a dose of 24 hour flu suddenly change everything. With Innes alone and laid low in his frozen flat, Cally's golden chance to get close finally arrives. Innes is freezing, and she's burning for his touch, so what else can a girl do but climb into her boss's bed to warm up his chilly limbs with a dose of body heat?

An overnight recovery quickly leads to a very different kind of therapy... making all Cally's dreams of passion flame into life. Sex with her beloved Innes is everything she's fantasized about, and more. Much, much more.

But will their mutual desire and tender feelings survive a return to office propriety? Working together as P.A. and boss again, can Cally and Innes share the lasting glow of love? 

You can find more information, buying links, and a super hot excerpt here:

http://www.portiadacosta.com/fireandice2.html

Available from: Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk plus other outlets.

Enjoy and stay warm! :)

Fire and Ice - I'm at it again!

NB. FIRE AND ICE BACK AT NORMAL PRICE NOW...

... STILL A GOOD READ THOUGH, I THINK... ;)

As part of my programme to design new, matching covers for all my self published titles, here's my latest effort, the redesigned FIRE AND ICE. Hope you like it...

To celebrate this new look, I'm offering FIRE AND ICE at a new low price for a limited period of time. It's currently 99 cents/77 pence at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk for Kindle format, with epub and pdf formats available at All Romance Ebooks and Smashwords.

FIRE AND ICE is a winter story, but given the pathetic state of the British summer weather this year, I think it's also a timely read for June too. Here's the blurb:

Surrender to sexual healing...

Super efficient P.A. Cally Hobbes is head over heels in love with her handsome boss, the urbane and delicious Innes McKenzie. Day after day, beneath her cool, businesslike exterior, she's simmering hot for him, and she knows he's not entirely immune to her either, despite their perfect, above board working relationship.

Icy weather, a broken central heating system, and a dose of 24 hour flu suddenly change everything. With Innes alone and laid low in his frozen flat, Cally's golden chance to get close finally arrives. Innes is freezing, and she's burning for his touch, so what else can a girl do but climb into her boss's bed to warm up his chilly limbs with a dose of body heat?

An overnight recovery quickly leads to a very different kind of therapy... making all Cally's dreams of passion flame into life. Sex with her beloved Innes is everything she's fantasized about, and more. Much, much more.

But will their mutual desire and tender feelings survive a return to office propriety? Working together as P.A. and boss again, can Cally and Innes share the lasting glow of love?

You can read an excerpt of FIRE AND ICE here.

Where is the time going?

Good grief, where is January going? One minute it's Christmas and the next, we're two thirds of the way through January and not a lot to show for it. I can't believe how time flies so fast, as I get older. Just when I need it to slow down a bit. LOL

A lot of the time so far this month has been spent acclimatising myself to my new laptop, and to Windows 7 and various new programs. This is no hardship. I love new tech and I love fiddling with software and learning its foibles. I'm happy with my choice of laptop - a Lenovo Thinkpad - and I've even grown to love widescreen now, after holding out for a long time with 4:3 aspect. The extra acreage is great for things like graphics, especially.

So what's happening in my writing life. Well, I just delivered my second Victorian erotic romance for HQN. This one's called DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH, and it's a wacky conundrum of inspirations, including hints of Downton Abbey and an awful lot of Sherlock Holmes. The hero, Wilson Ruffington is an eccentric genius who can be a bit brusque and capricious, even if his heart is basically in the right place. He's not a detective, but he does have something of Holmes' analytical method about him. He's a scientist and a consulting technologist, a polymath who's brilliant in all areas of learning. The heroine is Adela Ruffington, and she's a second cousin, twice removed of Wilson, a woman who's as unusual in her own way as he is in his. Not exactly a beauty, with a crooked nose due to an accident [Wilson's fault!] and a few faint scars from chicken pox, she's been overlooked on the marriage mart, and being sensual in nature, she's taken control of her own erotic life in a way that's quite radical for a Victorian woman. But she's a New Woman, and member of the Ladies' Sewing Circle, so she's far from an uptight prudish miss.

In other writing news, I've just had word that a couple of my stories are going to appear in the fabulous Alison Tyler's next anthology for Harlequin. More about this as the details firm up, but my two stories are linked, about the same couple, and called COME AT SIX and COME AT NINE.

I've also been very active on the self publishing front, and have two recent titles that you might like to check out.

AN APPOINTMENT WITH HER MASTER - BDSM short story

DARING INTERLUDES - mini anthology of couples go wild stories

If you're in the mood for something wintry there's also FIRE AND ICE, a boss and P.A. story with a cold and very hot erotic twist!

I'm also very excited about my next new release, this time from Carina Press, my first with them. This one is a very risque BDSM erotic romance novella, called INTIMATE EXPOSURE. I hope you'll like its wayward and sexy hero, Red Webster, a roguish photographer with more than one naughty secret. Publication date is 6th February.

FIRE AND ICE - officially out today

A couple of years ago, himself installed a new central heating system in our home. He did a mighty good job, and since then, in winter, we've been toasty and warm, with a boiler and radiators that perform efficiently, economically and are much 'greener' than the old system. But, for the period he was doing the installation, it was very, very cold in here, because it was also the dead of winter when he did it!

I was frozen, bundled up in layers and layers, wearing a woolly hat in the house, even. But somehow, this chilly condition was inspirational, and I got the idea for a story where the hero and heroine too had to contend with no central heating in the dead of winter. In fact, it was actually Christmas, and naturally, it being an erotic story, they found other ways of keeping warm, even though the hero had a bout of 24 hour flu for the first part of the proceedings. LOL

The result of these endeavor was FIRE AND ICE, my winter/Christmas extravaganza that originally appeared in the Mammoth Book of Hot Romance. You could say the very anthology title *really* seeded the story line, as I just knew I had to play with the concept of heat - and its opposite - in the tale.

And now, I'm self publishing FIRE AND ICE as an individual long story, with a few tweaks and polishes along the line, because we writers can't bear not to keep tinkering. As well as a seasonal story, it's also a boss and secretary, or in this case, boss and P.A. story, because heroine Cally also works for the deliciously hunky hero, Innes, in between completely adoring him.

Here's the blurb:

Surrender to sexual healing...

Super efficient P.A. Cally Hobbes is head over heels in love with her handsome boss, the urbane and delicious Innes McKenzie. Day after day, beneath her cool, businesslike exterior, she's simmering hot for him, and she knows he's not entirely immune to her either, despite their perfect, above board working relationship.

Icy weather, a broken central heating system, and a dose of 24 hour flu suddenly change everything. With Innes alone and laid low in his frozen flat, Cally's golden chance to get close finally arrives. Innes is freezing, and she's burning for his touch, so what else can a girl do but climb into her boss's bed to warm up his chilly limbs with a dose of body heat?

An overnight recovery quickly leads to a very different kind of therapy... making all Cally's dreams of passion flame into life. Sex with her beloved Innes is everything she's fantasized about, and more. Much, much more.

But will their mutual desire and tender feelings survive a return to office propriety? Working together as P.A. and boss again, can Cally and Innes share the lasting glow of love?

FIRE AND ICE is self published via the Walk on the Wild Side Books authors' collective and if you'd like to read an excerpt, you'll find one here, along with links to buy it at various online outlets. 

And this is a picture of me in that woolly hat! :)

Ooh look, covers!

Isn't this gorgeous? It's my next Spice Brief, A GENTLEWOMAN'S PLEASURE, due out in February 2012, and the story of Lucy Dawson, bespectacled spinster, who has a delicious adventure when she falls off her bicycle. And almost straight into the arms of a hunky and mysterious woodsman called Ethan...

Read an excerpt here.

This one's my own creation, the cover for my soon to be released Christmas/Winter story, FIRE AND ICE. It's a self published version of a story that was previously in an anthology, and it's all about super efficient P.A. Cally, who's head over heels in love with her gorgeous boss, Innes. Christmas, a dose of 48 hour flu, and a broken central heating system all conspire to bring the two of them together... and their working relationship will never be the same again!

Read an excerpt here.

Neither of these two choice items are available quite yet, but check back here for the latest news, or follow me on Twitter for updates.

Mammoth Book of Hot Romance

Pleased to announce that this beauty is now available in print in the USA! More info and a naughty excerpt of my contribution - FIRE AND ICE - available here:

http://www.portiadacosta.com/fireandice.html

If you prefer to read digital [like me!] FIRE AND ICE will be available as a single from major ebook outlets in the not too distant future.

Look at this beaut!

Isn't this cover for the Mammoth Book of Hot Romance gorgeous?

My contribution is FIRE AND ICE, a somewhat wintry story with a warm, naughty centre. Lots of other fabulous authors between the covers too, notably my super writing buddy, Saskia Walker!

Another sale!

It's been a very good week. First I sold my story THE EFFICIENCY EXPERT to Rachel Kramer Bussel for her PASSION anthology... and now I've sold another story to different anthology! :)

This time it's a tale called FIRE AND ICE and it's going to be in the MAMMOTH BOOK OF HOT ROMANCE, edited by Sonia Florens, which is due to be published in Spring 2011.

FIRE AND ICE is a fun story, and was a hoot to write. It's set at Christmas, and involves a boss and his P.A. So far, so good... but when the heating breaks down in Innes McKenzie's flat, it's adding insult to injury because he's in bed with the flu at the time! Enter the ministering angel of his personal assistant, Cally Hobbes, who has a major crush on her handsome boss and treats everything that ails him with a lot of very hands on TLC!