A Time for Everything

BLURB:

After losing her husband and only child to the ravages of the Civil War, twenty-five-year-old Portia McAllister is drowning in grief. When she sees an ad for a live-in tutor in another town, she leaves everything behind in hopes of making a fresh start. But as a Confederate widow in a Union household, she is met with resentment from her new charge and her employer, war veteran Beau Stanford.

Despite their differences, she and Beau find common ground and the stirrings of a second chance at love—until his late wife’s cousin, Lydia, arrives with her sights set on him. Burdened with a farm on the brink of bankruptcy, Beau is tempted by Lydia’s hefty dowry, though Portia has captured his heart.

In another time and another place, his choice would be easy. But love seems impossible amid the simmering chaos of Reconstruction that could boil over at any moment into an all-out battle for survival. Will Beau and Portia find their way into each other’s arms, or will they be swept away by raging forces beyond their control?

EXCERPT:

“Goodbye, Frank.” The words were just as difficult as she imagined.

The buggy lurched forward. Frank raised his hand in farewell, standing there in the dim lamp-lit shadows of early morning. Legs twitching, she had a sudden inclination to jump out and run after him. Maybe he was right to be worried, and maybe she was being unrealistic. Good Christian women didn’t leave home and hearth when life turned sour. The great Psalmist himself said, “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.”

They rounded a corner and she couldn’t see Frank anymore. She sat back in the padded seat and let out a sigh. Funny how Bible verses still lectured her when she had no faith left to back them. If she was anything, it wasn’t contrite. She had neither asked for nor wanted this life God had thrust upon her. He could go be nigh unto someone else and leave her be for all she cared.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Mysti Parker is a wife, mom, author, and shameless chocoholic. She is the author of the Tallenmere standalone fantasy romance series and The Roche Hotel romantic comedy series. Her short writings have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. Her award-winning historical romance, A Time for Everything, will be published this summer by EsKape Press.

Other writing pursuits include serving as a class mentor in Writers Village University's seven week online course, F2K. She has published two children's books (Quentin's Problem & Fuzzy Buzzy's Treasure) as Misty Baker.

When she's not writing fiction,Mysti reviews books for SQ Magazine, an online specfic publication. She resides in Buckner, KY with her husband and three children.

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Everything-Mysti-Parker-ebook/dp/B00ZFUKEC4

Author Links:

http://www.mystiparker.com

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mysti-Parker/103786449704221

https://twitter.com/MystiParker

The author will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn commenter via Rafflecopter. Use the link below to enter. You can find other tour stops at http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2015/06/book-blast-time-for-everything-by-mysti.html?zx=5e3f0450ff56d78a

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Moccasin Trace

Moccasin Trace

by Hawk MacKinney

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

BLURB:

… it was about the land…a tale of love and loss and hope…

“The most engaging and brilliantly crafted historical work since Margaret Mitchell’s great classic.”

Barbara Casey

Author, The Gospel According to Prissy

Hamilton Ingram looked out across the fertile Georgia bottomlands that were Moccasin Hollows, seeing holdings it had taken generations of Ingrams to build.  No drop of slave sweat ever shed in its creation.  It was about the land…his trust, his duty to preserve it for the generation of Ingrams to come…

It is July of 1859, a month of sweltering dog days and feverish emotional bombast.  Life is good for widower Rundell Ingram and his Hazel-eyed, roan-haired son, Hamilton.  Between the two of them, they take care of Moccasin Hollows, their rustic dogtrot ancestral home, a sprawling non-slave plantation in the rolling farming country outside Queensborough Towne in east Georgia.  Adjoining Ingram lands is Wisteria Bend, the vast slave-holding plantation of Andrew and Corinthia Greer, their daughter Sarah, and son Benjamin.

Both families share generations of long-accepted traditions, and childhood playmates are no longer children.  The rangy, even-tempered Norman-Scottish young Hamilton is smitten with Sarah, who has become an enticing capricious beauty—the young lovers more in love with each passing day, and only pleasant times ahead of them.

But a blood tide of war is sweeping across the South, a tide that might be impossible to stand before.

EXCERPT:

He took special care to have quiet times for Sarah, 'specially since night before last. He got real excited when she told him she might be with child again.  She hadn't been sleeping well, often wanted him to rub her aching back.  Now he knew why.

           

Threadbare clothes and unshorn hair gave Hamilton Bothington Graeme Ingram the look of a run-down, unkempt derelict instead of heir to one of the largest non-slave plantations in Saint George Parish.  He ducked under what was left of the split-rail fence with its crooked corner post.  Rails and most posts had long gone up in the smoke of hoards of campfires.

           

"Step wide."  He reached back to help her through.  "I don't want the mother of our children to step on a canebrake rattler catchin' sun on this fine day."

           

"Lord have mercy."  Sarah clutched her bonnet in her hand so as not to get it snagged in the coiled tangle of wire.  "I suppose it's up to me to get used to your hoverin' over me again."

           

"Yep," he grinned.  "Reckon my favorite sweetheart will have to do just that."

           

"Your favorite sweetheart?"  She giggled, wrinkled her nose at him.  "Just listen to you and your Ingram fiddle-faddled talk."

           

He grinned as she brushed back strands of the golden hair Hamilton loved to run his fingers through.  She gathered her mended skirt, slipped her hand into his, and quickly stepped wide over the fallen post.

           

"C'mon..."  Her voice lilted soft, and she squeezed her grip on his hand.  "Let's hurry."

           

Her singular tenderness refused to let the devastation around them blight their few alone-times.  In the spoliation around them, such times when they managed to make it just the two of them held a more-than-special meaning.

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

With postgraduate degrees and faculty appointments in several medical universities, Hawk MacKinney has taught graduate courses in both the United States and Jerusalem. In addition to professional articles and texts on chordate neuroembryology, Hawk has authored several works of fiction.

Hawk began writing mysteries for his school newspaper. His works of fiction, historical love stories, science fiction and mystery-thrillers are not genre-centered, but plot-character driven, and reflect his southwest upbringing in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma. Moccasin Trace, a historical novel nominated for the prestigious Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction and the Writers Notes Book Award, details the family bloodlines of his serial protagonist in the Craige Ingram Mystery Series… murder and mayhem with a touch of romance. Vault of Secrets, the first book in the Ingram series, was followed by Nymrod Resurrection, Blood and Gold, and The Lady of Corpsewood Manor. All have received national attention.  Hawk’s latest release in the Ingram series is due out this fall with another mystery-thriller work out in 2014. The Bleikovat Event, the first volume in The Cairns of Sainctuarie science fiction series, was released in 2012.

"Without question, Hawk is one of the most gifted and imaginative writers I have had the pleasure to represent. His reading fans have something special to look forward to in the Craige Ingram Mystery Series. Intrigue, murder, deception and conspiracy--these are the things that take Hawk's main character, Navy ex-SEAL/part-time private investigator Craige Ingram, from his South Carolina ancestral home of Moccasin Hollow to the dirty backrooms of the nation's capital and across Europe and the Middle East."

Barbara Casey, President

Barbara Casey Literary Agency

www.hawkmackinney.net

www.amazon.com

www.barnesandnoble.com

 Hawk will be awarding a $25 Amazon GC to a randomly drawn commenter during the tour. You can find his schedule at http://goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com/2014/01/virtual-super-book-blast-tour-moccasin.html

Please scroll down to the next post for a special announcement from Elaine Cantrell.