Mind Games by Susan Kaye Quinn is a paranormal-futuristic book. I gave it four stars.
"Raf, a regular mindreader, is in love with Kira, the only girl in school who can't read minds."
I received a complimentary copy from Amazon. That did not change my opinion for this review.
Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Mindjack-Kira-Book-ebook/dp/B007ZRYPWU
The plotline was a tad obvious, but no less cute. Kaye tests the boundaries of friendship and love with a passion as addictive as her characters. Will and Cassie are contagiously charming, frustratingly predictable and so hard not to love. A Friendly Wager is an enchanting friends to lovers tale.
One second can change the course of so many lives. A Game Changer marks the beginning of new kind of life for a heartbroken little girl and her clueless, yet adoring Uncle. Here's the story of how three strangers became a family. One young girl changes the trajectory of two lost hearts. Kaye does it all. She touches your heart, stirs your senses and inspires your soul. All while making you think and doling out smiles. From first time read to one click author, I can't wait to see what's next.
A beauty stolen from Earth.
Gifted to an alien Beast.
Can love set them both free?
Amelia:
Abducted by aliens and taken to their ship, my best friend and I are desperate to escape and return to Earth. I'm tossed into a cell with a reptilian alien and told I must satisfy him or they'll hurt my friend. I never thought giving in to his needs might satisfy my own...
Then they put me with a new beast and say we're going to compete in a deadly game called the Rampage. Alien Hunger Games anyone?
The beast is snarly and ferocious, and he could rip me apart with his tusks and claws. Yet in his eyes, I sense something vulnerable. Lonely. With hints of something I found with the other alien.
I'll do whatever I can to soothe the beast and convince him to help me win the Rampage. Because losing means death.
Jrecatoa:
I was once a man, a Krakarian warrior.
That's all gone now. Hidden beneath this abominable exterior, far more Beast than man. Not only in appearance, either; because the scent and the sight of this female does things to me. Things that surely no man would ever feel.
Of course, I've wanted women before. Had women before.
But I've never needed them like this.
She's awoken my Hunger.
But maybe that's just as well--without the fury of the Hunger, neither of us has any chance of surviving the Rampage.
Beast's Beauty is book one in our new Scifi Alien Abduction Romance Series, Fractured Fairytales & Mangled Myths. Look for Book two, Minotaur's Mate, releasing soon!
Our alien romance series guarantees hot males, fierce women, steamy, on-the-page romance, and a satisfying happily-ever-after. Each book features new characters and can be read as a standalone though they may be more fun if read in order.
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Beast’s Beauty by Christina Wilder & Laney Kaye
Series: Fractured Fairytales & Mangled Myths
Genre: Adult Paranormal Romance
Publisher: Independent
Publication Date: September 20, 2019
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BEAST’S BEAUTY
A Fractured Fairytales & Mangled Myths Novel
© 2019 Christina Wilder & Laney Kaye
CHAPTER ONE
Amelia
Funny how music could turn out to be prophetic. Maybe not immediately, but eventually…
“Starfall is moonfall,” Lily and I sang out together as I drove through the night. The miles clipped beneath my vehicle in a long, black strip stretching toward the horizon, punctuated by a yellow stripe down the center. With too much of the night left to travel, we hoped to make it through the desert and then to our home in northern California by morning. Just in time to crash, sleep twenty-four hours, then get up and go to work the next day.
“Stars align. The world collides,” I shouted, my hand drumming on the steering wheel as I tapped into my inner rock star. Without the voice, because I couldn’t sing for crap.
After shoving her long blonde hair up into a hasty ponytail, Lily cricked her neck and pointed out the windshield, toward the sky. “The world’s…” Her voice trailed off with a squeak. She leaned forward in the passenger seat as far as the seatbelt would let her.
“Hey, what’s that?”
Clutching the steering wheel to pull myself closer to the glass, I eased my foot off the accelerator and strained to see what she was talking about. Stars peppered the indigo night, and I easily picked out the familiar constellations of Hercules and Draco.
Plus, the brightest object I’d ever seen hovering above and to the right of us. A glowing yellow ball. Not tiny like something you’d throw for a dog to fetch but big, the size of the silver globe at Epcot. From what I could see from here, that is.
Was it a meteor? Though, being stationary, that idea didn’t feel right.
“I gotta see.” Lily tapped my arm. “Pull over. Pull over. I want to get out. Look at the light.” She pointed again. “It’s aliens.” Her voice took on a fake, creeped-out tone. Eyes widening as she grinned at me, she hummed the music from the Twilight Zone.
“Oh!” I said, getting into the mood she’d set. “They’ve come to abduct us and take us to their spaceship where they’ll…” I shivered through my laughter.
“Please no anal probes,” Lily said, and we snickered together.
“Nothing like that,” I said. “They’ll extract our DNA before returning us to Earth completely unaware of what happened. We’ll wake in the car with a headache and bad breath, wondering why the hell we decided to sleep by the road.”
She frowned. “Why bad breath?”
I shrugged. “Maybe we’re forced to eat alien food while we’re up there and it’s garlicky?”
She chuckled as I put on my blinker to indicate I was pulling onto the rough shoulder. Not that there was anyone around to care if I didn’t signal my intentions. But I was known as the Safety Queen. I avoided danger.
No harm in stopping a moment to see what was going on. We needed to stretch our legs anyway.
As I came to a stop and shifted the vehicle into park, Lily unbuckled. “Come on,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “I want to see what it is!”
The thought of trooping through the desert at night made goosebumps pepper my skin. Most of the time, I played it safe and remained on pavement. Nothing dangerous there other than slimy dudes telling me to smile. “There could be snakes out there. Scorpions.” I wasn’t making this up. “Other creepy desert creatures.”
“Noooo,” Lily said in awe. “Snakes and scorpions in a desert?” She popped open her door and thrust her feet out, totally fearless. “Don’t worry about it. It’s nighttime. They’re probably curled up under rocks, asleep.”
Did desert creatures ever sleep?
Grumbling good-naturedly about how we were going to wind up in trouble, I opened my door and stepped outside. Cool air greeted me, the heat of the day having fled hours ago. I lifted my long hair off my neck and let the light breeze drift down the back of my shirt. Puffing, I fanned the front of my tee. Lily insisted ice ran through her veins and had turned on the car’s heat the second the sun set. I’d been roasting for ages.
As I strode around the back of my car, the pavement radiated warmth up through my sneakers, toasting the soles of my feet. “Hey. Wait for me.”
“I’m going pee while we’re here,” she said. Standing on the white line marking the edge of the road, she fumbled with her shorts’ waistband. “You need to go, too.”
“Don’t have to,” I whined.
“But we agreed that we’d always pee at the same time,” Lily said, hauling down her shorts. Tissues in one hand, she held the material to the side with the other while squatting and jutting her butt out. “Then we won’t need to stop ten thousand times.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “You want to go here? You could poke your butt with a cactus.”
“Nothing wrong with doing it as nature intended. Besides, you’ve seen my worldly charms before.”
Since we shared an apartment, I had. “Still.”
“Your snake friends won’t care,” she added.
I snorted as I passed her, trooping down the sandy gravel sloping away from the road, my shoes crunching on small sticks and rocks. Thicker vegetation brushed against the calves of my jeans but I wasn’t too worried about running into a snake or a scorpion. There must be a better place for them to hang out other than beside a road.
I’d only gone about twenty feet from the car when a sense of unease made me stop abruptly. Too dark to see, I stumbled over a root or rock or something, almost falling on the ground.
“My God,” Lily squeaked out behind me, horror and amazement rising in her voice.
“What?” I asked, peering around. Dusky hills rolled away ahead of us interspersed with random scruffy shrubs. Fortunately, no snakes I could see so far. “False alarm? Our aliens fled the scene?”
“It’s…it’s…” Head tipped back, she stared up with creases deepening on her pretty face. Her hand fluttered against her chest. “Something’s…”
I looked up, expecting to find who-knows-what. Perhaps an oddly placed streetlight? Or a cell tower with a light on top.
The enormous, glowing ball far above us pulsed and flickering red and blue lights flared in a rolling circle around the outside of the large object. A low rumble shook the ground, and the glowing thing grew larger as if it came closer.
Chills tripped down my spine and every hair on my arms stood on end.
Before I could shout run, a long beam of light shot from the ball, in our direction. It hit the ground about five feet away without making a sound, not even stirring up a puff of soil. Wide, the ray pulsated like the ball had seconds ago. Something—no, multiple somethings—slowly solidified in the beam.
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To celebrate the release of BEAST'S BEAUTY by Christina Wilder & Laney Kaye, we're giving away a $25 Amazon gift card to one lucky winner!
GIVEAWAY TERMS & CONDITIONS: Open to internationally. One winner will receive a $25 Amazon gift card. This giveaway is administered by Pure Textuality PR on behalf of Christina Wilder. Giveaway ends 9/30/2019 @ 11:59pm EST. CLICK HERE TO ENTER!
CHRISTINA WILDER writes books featuring cocky-beta heroes (is that a thing?) and kick-ass heroines who find love together in strange and exotic places. She lives in the wilds of New England, where turkeys and deer on the front lawn are a regular thing. She's a member of RWA.
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HEROES, HEART, & HEAT
A professional counselor, Laney messes with heads by day and imaginations by night. Living in the wilds of Australia -- okay, not so much the wilds, as in a country town -- her property is inhabited by a generous mix of bitey, stingy, poisonous, and furry varieties of Australian wildlife, as evidenced by her twitter feed.
LANEY KAYE writes steamy contemporary, light fantasy and edgy Outback Noir (dark thrillers with a strong romantic element). Under her "real" name, she also pens award winning young adult and women's fiction titles.
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Well, that was somewhat more of a slog than I had expected -- and only in a minor part owing to M.M. Kaye herself; even though she does rely more on "dark and stormy night" scenarios than I would have liked to see, as well as on characters, including protagonists, behaving TSTL to such an extent it's a wonder they don't all get killed in the first chapter.
Chiefly, though, it just puzzles the heck out of me how anybody at Audible could have thought it was a good idea to let a book set firmly in the British colonial establishment, and featuring exclusively characters belonging to said establishment (with the attendant accents and attitudes) be read by an Indian narrator with a very pronounced Indian accent (whose narration moreover resembles that of an automaton, but let that be) -- and who doesn't have the first clue how to pronounce English place names and certain other English terms, to boot. I mean, yeah, the book has "Kashmir" in the title, but it should have been some sort of clue in selecting the narrator that it was written by a British author and is set immediately before the end of the Raj ...
Oh well. Onwards and upwards. At least I finished it just in time to be allowed to roll again tonight!
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