It’s my turn for the month over on ROMANCING THE GENRES and this month the topic is a timely one for me: recycling old stories.
I had quite a few old books recently updated and published. Hop on over to the RTG site and read about it today. Here’s the link: RTG
Filed under Romancing the Genres
I’m so excited to be a part of @NNP_W_Light’s Celebrate Weddings Bookish Event.
BAKED WITH LOVE ( A Match Made in Heaven, book Three) Is spotlighted today.
You can check it out here: BWL or BookishEvent
And, of course, you can buy it for yourself or someone else who loves Wedding Romances, here: UNIVERSAL CODE
Check out all books featuring weddings and enter the giveaway to win a $20 Amazon gift card: https://www.nnlightsbookheaven.com/celebrate-weddings-bookish-event
Innkeeper Maureen O’Dowd lives to cook and bake, spoils her family and friends, and is an expert at keeping secrets, especially about the man who’s held her heart for years.
Police Chief Lucas Alexander is dealing with an aging father and a moody teenage son, and he’s in love with a woman who only wants to be friends.
How can these two fiercely private people reveal their feelings for one another without destroying the friendship they already have?
And if they’re successful, will another secret, if revealed, drive a wedge between Maureen and Lucas that can never be repaired?
Who doesn’t love a wedding? Hee hee
Filed under A Match Made in Heaven
I hate asking ( well, maybe not so much! hee hee) But I could use your help. AS the title suggests, the book is up until tomorrow for voting, so if you have a moment and the inclination to do so, here’s the link: VOTE
THANKS, OODLES!!!! Peg
Filed under Writing
It’s been a long time coming, but the day is finally here! I’m so excited about this first in a new series book that I am giddy.
It’s a bit of a departure for me because the book is a sweet romance. Just one brief kiss, but a lot of character emotion, development, and storyline. We’ll see how the readers like reading no sex from me (LOL!)
Early reviews have been lovely and you can read some of them here:
Hope you enjoy Jasmine and Donovan’s story. I hope to have book 2, LOVE MATCH Layla and Cody’s story available on August 31, 2022- International Matchmaker day! Stay tuned
Filed under Writing
Hubster and I met at a hospital where I was working as a nurse and he was interning. Yes, we are that quintessential Doctor/Nurse relationship older romance book lovers adored, heehee.
When my husband discovered my love ( not obsession!) of holiday ornaments, it stood to reason at some point we would get a few that espoused our professions.
We weren’t wrong.
One of my best work friends who had watched us all through our courting years and through our long-distance engagement, gave us these the year we got married.
My sister-in-law Mary gave Larry this one eons ago. I love it sosos much!!!
DO you have any profession-themed ornaments? I’ve given a glass blow-dryer to my hairstylist and one year to my manicurist I gave a tiny replica bottle of polish. Cute, you know??
More tomorrow, peeps.
~Peg
Filed under Writing
It is so hard for me to believe Thanksgiving ( in the US) is tomorrow! Where the heck did this month go? Or for that matter, this year?! With the birth of my first grandchild in September, the loss of my father-in-law two weeks ago, and the marriage of my nephew last weekend, I am one tired chickie! And just for giggles, let’s throw in the fact I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year.
Yikes. I guess I’ll sleep in….well, I really don’t know because next month is pretty filled, too.
While I am decorating for the Christmas holidays starting tomorrow, I wanted to let you know about two events going on concurrently this week.
First, FIXING CHRISTMAS – A Dickens Holiday Romance ( Dorrit’s Diner) is on sale for only #99cents for one week. Amazon jumped the gun and started the sale yesterday, but for every other venue, it begins on Thanksgiving day. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, now is the perfect time to order it!
On Black Friday I will be signing books at the TOADSTOOL BOOKSHOP in Keene, NH from noon until 2 pm signing FIXING CHRISTMAS and all my other Holiday books:
So get your Holiday reading started – or buy some books as gifts for the romance lovers on your holiday gift list!
Books are a great gift anytime of year, but especially during the Holiday Season!
Happy Thanksgiving, peeps and hope to see many of you on Black Friday – also called Plaid Friday for those who shop local – at the TOADSTOOL! ~ peg
Filed under Writing
I know it’s only November, but a writer’s actual holiday preparation starts in the Spring and early Summer. That’s when the new crop of holiday romance books must be completed so they can be put on sale from October through December. Some authors even have Christmas in July events to promote their new and upcoming holiday romances.
I simply adore a good holiday love story no matter what time of the year it is. I don’t get my fix of holiday romcoms and smalltown stories from the Hallmark or Lifetimes channels on TV, though, but through reading. I can count on several authors each year releasing a new book for the season and like clockwork, I buy them all.
I adore slipping away for a few hours with the newest Nancy Naigle holiday story, or Jill Shalvis’ most recent holiday romcom. Brenda Novak and Debbie Macomber never disappoint in the holiday fiction department, either.
My love affair with holiday romances began when I read Nora Robert’s ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS when it was released in 1994. This lovely story of twin boys who ask Santa to bring a new mommy for them and their daddy pulled at every heartstring in my chest. Since then, reading these kinds of stories has become my happy place around the holiday season.When shopping, decorating, cooking, baking, office parties, and relatives-you-could-do-without-seeing alloccur within a ten-week period of time, hiding out for an hour or two with a good holiday-centered-romance is my way of staying sane. In fact, now that I write my own romance books, holiday love stories have become a thing for me to release into the world too!
This year’s addition is FIXING CHRISTMAS – A DICKENS HOLIDAY ROMANCE ( Dorrit’s Diner), which released on 11.9.2021. Last year I was honored to be part of a group of authors who penned the CHRISTMAS COMES TO DICKENS stories about a small fictional New England town during the holidays. Several of the authors – including myself – loved telling the stories so much we teamed up for another season. Each book is a standalone romance but from book to book you meet some of the same townsfolk. It’s a truly charming town and the stories are all heartwarming.
Here’s a little about FIXING CHRISTMAS:
She’s a neurotic, snarky, chatty writer trying to get her professional and personal life back on track.
He’s a quiet, widowed, ex-military handyman.
When her rental house starts falling down around her ears, he’s charged with fixing the issues – and just might be exactly what she needs to fix her own ones as well.
You can get your copy here: FIXING CHRISTMAS
Who are your favorite holiday romance writers?
Filed under Writing
You all know how much I lovelovelove having my Wild Rose Press sistahs come visit me. This year. the WRP has a new series titled CHRISTMAS COOKIES, and one of my favorite sistahs, Maria Imbalzano, has a new addition to the series that just released yesterday: RED VELVET CRINKLES & CHRISTMAS SPRINKLES. The book sounds as delicious as the title implies!!!! Maria is stopping by today to tell us all a little about the book.
Maria…
Hi Peg: Thanks so much for having me. I’m thrilled that my newest novella “Red Velvet Sprinkles and Christmas Sprinkles” has been released this week. It’s part of the Christmas Cookie Series published by the Wild Rose Press. This is the first Christmas story I ever wrote and I loved writing it almost as much as I love the Christmas holidays. One of our family traditions that I follow every year, is baking Christmas cookies. I always did it with my mom and now I do it with my daughters, although my cookies never come out as good as my mom’s did. I’m a little casual with measurements for ingredients and I don’t always have everything I need, so I substitute. The heroine of this book, Bella Simonetti, is very similar to me in that regard and there are some funny scenes where she and her mom don’t see eye to eye in the baking department. Despite that, Bella has a plan to help transform her parents’ failing business, just in time for the holidays.
Competitive, work-obsessed Bella Simonetti has just been fired from her high-paying job at a Manhattan law firm. At an all-time low, she returns home and helps her parents at their small-town gift shop, but the business is failing and may not make it past the Christmas holidays.
Successful landscape architect Dean Jackson is like a son to Bella’s parents. But he’s a persistent annoyance to her—he seems to have forgotten his unforgivable blunder thirteen years earlier.
When Bella transforms her parents’ gift shop into a cookie cottage, Dean’s generosity and magnetic smile are hard to resist, and those feelings of unrequited adolescent love come rushing back. But can Bella let go of the past and accept Dean for the man he is today?
Just then the bell over the door signaled a customer. Bella glanced up to see if their guest was here to browse or needed help, but no customer materialized. It was her dad with Dean in tow.
She had to admit he was even more striking than in high school. His light brown hair, sweeping from left to right in a perfect wave of silk, still had sun streaks from the summer, no doubt enhanced while playing on the links. And those green eyes had always been like flashing gemstones that sucked her in. But the best was his roguish smile—half teasing, half serious, but permanently heart-stopping.
Her best bet would be to prevent any cause for cheerfulness. Yet his intense frown was also mesmerizing. Staying away from him altogether seemed the ideal solution, but her parents had different ideas. Of course, her surliness toward him might make him rethink his charitable desire to help.
“Hi, Bella. How’s it going?” Even that simple greeting came with a full-blown smile.
She was screwed. “Fine.” She got right to the point—no friendly chitchat. “If you and Dad bring the boxes up front from the storeroom, Mom and I will take care of the decorating. You won’t have to stay.”
“Are you kidding? I love to decorate for Christmas. I’ve been helping your parents do it for the past few years while you’ve been AWOL.”
She blew an errant strand of hair out of her eye. “I wasn’t AWOL. I was working. In New York. I couldn’t up and leave on a Wednesday afternoon to come home and decorate.”
There came that half-teasing, half-serious smile. To avoid it, she started pulling Christmas balls hung on red-and-green silk ribbons from the large box she’d brought out.
“I can help you hang those in the window. I hid the hooks above the molding last year so we don’t have to remove them every year.”
“Clever.” Her sarcastic tone couldn’t be mistaken.
“We’ll need a ladder,” he determined. “I’ll get it from the back, then you can hand me the balls, and I’ll attach them.”
She slitted her eyes at him. “I want to hang the balls. You can do something else.”
“Fine. But it takes two for this job. You don’t want to be going up and down the ladder each time you hang a ball. It’s inefficient.”
He had a point. She’d have to bury her reluctance to work with him at the risk of coming up with some other childish excuse.
Once Dean brought the ladder to the window, she climbed up three steps and took the first ball from him. Not a well-thought-out plan since her butt was now at his eye level.
“Can you stand over here, please?” She pointed to the other side of the ladder.
“It’s better if I stand behind you, to spot you. In case you lose your balance.” His grin emerged, and she gritted her teeth to prevent a growl.
Inhaling, she reached up to tie the ribbon on the hook. Her sweater inched over her midriff, giving him a view of her torso. This day just couldn’t get any worse. If she hadn’t been so stubborn in demanding that she hang the ornaments, she’d have the pleasure of staring at his physique, not the other way around.
BUY LINKS
Amazon ** Barnes and Noble **Apple
Maria Imbalzano …
is a retired matrimonial lawyer who now writes full-time. Instead of drafting motions, legal memoranda, and briefs, although fascinating, she now spends her days creating memorable characters and taking them on their emotional journeys through her contemporary romance novels.
Her novel, “Unchained Memories,” won the Wisconsin Romance Writers Write Touch Readers’ Award and the ACRA Readers’ Choice Heart of Excellence Award. “Sworn to Forget,” the first of the four-book Sworn Sisters Series was a finalist for the illustrious RONE award as well as the Book Buyers Best Award. Two of her novellas, “The Blueberry Swirl Waltz” and “A Song For Another Day” won first place awards in their categories in the NEST (National Excellence in Story Telling) contest. Both of these novellas were also finalists for the Beverley Award.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mariaimbalzano
Blog Link: http://www.mariaimbalzano.com/category/blog/
Website Link :http://www.mariaimbalzano.com
Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7276749.Maria_Imbalzano
Book Bub Profile page : https://www.bookbub.com/profile/maria-imbalzano
Filed under WIld Rose Press AUthor
I am so tickled pink this morning because the latest addition to the PRIDE OF BROTHERS series – AIDEN – dropped at midnight. This story just wrung me dry when I was writing it and I am so in love with the three main characters – yes 3! The hero Aiden, a cancer surviving Private Investigator with a naughty side and a twinkle in his eyes; Lexi, the trivia-Tourettes’ spewing Ph.D who doesn’t know her own worth; and Bronte, the chocolate lab who makes Aiden’s life run smoothly from a medical standpoint and who is more human than most, well…humans! Bronte even made it on the cover!
I hope you enjoy their story. If you’ve read any of my WILL COOK FOR LOVE series, or the first book in this one, Rick, you will recognize many of the characters that help Lexi and Aiden discover the truth behind her (Lexi’s) sister’s death.
Protecting her is his job. Loving her was never part of the bargain.
Lexi Buckley wants answers about her younger sister’s death. The police have labeled it a suicide, but Lexi doesn’t believe it. Stymied in her investigation, she doesn’t know where to turn next. After a chance encounter with a private investigator, she thinks her prayers have been answered.
Aiden Keane has never been an answer to a prayer before, but he agrees to help Lexi. A quirky combo of brains and beauty, the pixie blonde makes him feel things no professional ever should for a client.
When their investigation puts Lexi’s life in jeopardy, her safety becomes his number one priority. The hard part is not falling for her.
“Lexi?”
“You are, without a doubt, the most attuned and insightful man I have ever met.”
He cocked his head, a ghost of that sexy grin lifting one corner of his mouth. “I think that’s a compliment.”
“It is. Believe me, it is.” She clasped her hands in front of her, her own smile finally making an entrance. “You just put into words what I’ve been thinking but felt if I said it out loud I’d come off like a total bitch.”
He took a step closer, bringing them almost into contact. Lexi willed herself to stay put and not dissolve against him like she so ardently wanted to.
“I don’t think that word can ever apply to you.” He lowered his voice and dipped his head a bit, giving her the impression his words were only meant for her to hear. Fixated now on her and not the man—and woman—up ahead of them, his pupils grew in size, shoving the riot of blues to the edges, as he gazed at her face. The opposite corner of his mouth lifted, mimicking its twin, to create the most charming and seductive of grins. “In fact”—he was so close his body heat warmed her from head to toes like a blanket fresh from a hot dryer—“I don’t think you’ve ever had a bitchy thought or moment in your life.”
“You’d be surprised,” she mumbled. Of its own free will, her gaze dipped down to his mouth. She licked her lips at the thought of how they would feel against her own, and the rush of air he sucked in pulled her along with it.
Without warning, Aiden lifted a hand, caressed her cheek with the back of it, as he sighed her name.
The notion he was going to kiss her barreled through her, and she couldn’t think of one reason why she shouldn’t kiss him right back.
He swiped his tongue across his bottom lip, his lids dropping half closed as he continued to concentrate solely on her. It didn’t matter a whit they were standing in the aisle of a crowded bookstore surrounded by books and people and waiting to speak to a man who may be able to answer some questions about her sister’s death. All that did matter was the attraction crackling in the air between them—an attraction growing hourly since he’d sat himself down next to her on that first flight.
Just as he bent a bit more toward her, and she responded by lifting up on the balls of her feet, the moment shattered.
“Excuse me, but can you move up?” An irritated voice from behind yanked them out of the sexual fugue they’d both drifted into. Aiden’s eyes opened wide again, his lashes beating a rapid tattoo against the top of his cheeks. He shook his head like a dog shucking water from its back, turned to the woman with the annoyed voice and said, “Please. Go ahead of us.”
Without waiting for a response, he wrapped a hand around Lexi’s arm and gently tugged her off the line. Silently, he propelled her to the back of the store, down a secluded hallway near the restrooms. With a furtive glance to the right, then the left, assuring they were alone, he spun her so she faced him.
Brows pinched together and looking at her through inquiring eyes, Aiden took a breath, let it out slowly, then said, “I have to ask. I’m pretty sure of the answer, but I have to hear it from you first, Lexi.”
She stopped him before he could give a voice to his question by rising up on her toes and fusing her lips to his.
For the second time in the span of a few minutes, her never-resting mind went completely still. No data spewed forth about how humans were the only species who kiss, or the crazy laws about kissing still on the books and punishable by fines or imprisonment in some states, or even that, on average, each person spends about 330 hours of their life engaged in the art of kissing.
Intrigued? I hope so.
You can get your copy here if you are (hee hee): APOBA
Happy reading, peeps. For me, I’m off to eat cake to celebrate!
Filed under A Pride of brothers: AIden
Hey kids, if you are a reader/reviewer, A PRIDE OF BROTHERS: AIDEN is up on Booksprout, available for request, read, and review. The date for the review is set at September 9 – the book releases into the world on 9.8.
For those of you not familiar with Booksprout.co it is a reading/review service authors can use to find new readers for their work. You will need to set up an account ( it’s free to readers -always) and then you can troll through the genres to fins books that appeal to you. You just may find a new favorite author, too!
Here’s a bit about the book:
Lexi Buckley wants answers about her younger sister’s death. The police have labeled it a suicide, but Lexi doesn’t believe it. Stymied in her investigation, she doesn’t know where to turn next. After a chance encounter with a private investigator, she thinks her prayers have been answered.
Aiden Keane has never been an answer to a prayer before, but he agrees to help Lexi. A quirky combo of brains and beauty, the pixie blonde makes him feel things no professional ever should for a client.
When their investigation puts Lexi’s life in jeopardy, her safety becomes his number one priority. The hard part is not falling for her.
If you decide to request it, I hope you enjoy it and that you post your review when it’s due. Amazon is a must for the review to go to. Goodreads as well.
Happy reading peeps ~ Peg
Filed under Alpha Hero, WIld Rose Press AUthor
Peggy Jaeger, Author 