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Release Blitz: Bleeding Dawn by Layla Dorine

Bleeding Dawn |Layla Dorine

Road to Rocktoberfest 2022

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Release Date: October 28th, 2022

Publisher: Desolate Press

Cover Artist: Natasha Snow

Length: 321 pages

Heat Rating: 3 flames

Buy Links

Amazon US | Amazon UK

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Blurb

Melt into the desert, bleed into the dawn, follow the melody, the music knows the way.

Identical in appearance, twins Winter and Tripp are as different as night and day when it comes to everything but the music they’ve spent the bulk of their lifetimes composing. Now they’ve attained the fame they always hoped for, and it’s as empty and meaningless as the remains of route 66, and about as broken too.

Would help if Winter could see it. Tripp’s sure he’ll lose his shit completely the next time some random groupie leaps on the hood of his car and begs to take a selfie, but to Winter, every night is a party, he lives for the crazy hookups, lives for the crazy, period.

Another place they differ.

Tripp would kill for one season to slow down. Just three months where he and Zakk could melt into obscurity and be whomever they wanted, together. Only Zakk’s band, Tattered Angel, is on fire too and it’s starting to seem like the music he’s always loved is hell-bent on keeping him from exploring love of a different kind. Last year’s Rocktoberfest was an amazing triumph, this year, it’s starting to feel like the road to the desert is burning him alive.

Would be so easy to slip off across the sand, melt into a dune on the back of some strange, psychedelic serpent, never to be heard from again. If only there was a way to ensure Zakk took that last ride with him.

Bleeding Dawn is part of the multi-author The Road to Rocktoberfest 2022 series. Each book can be read as a standalone, but why not read them all and see who hits the stage next? Hot rockstars and the men who love them, what more could you ask for? Kick back, load up your kindle and enjoy the men of Rocktoberfest!

Characters from a previous Rocktoberfest book, Tattered Angel, do appear and feature prominently.

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Excerpt

“Okay, I’m sitting, my supper will apparently have to remain raw a little longer.”

“It’s all for a good cause, I assure you.”

“It better be, I skipped breakfast.”

“So nibble a graham cracker and open your ears. Don’t try telling me you don’t have any when Winter said you have s’mores at least three times a week when you’re home.”

Huffing, Tripp yanked the drawer open and snatched the package from inside.

“Thank you. Now, they need small shows, we need some soft runs on the new material, so I was thinking…”

“No, hell no. Fuck you for even thinking we should go back on the road again. I just got a new couch. We haven’t even broken it in yet. Not a single divot.”

“Thought that’s what you and Winter would be writing the new songs on.”

“We have, doesn’t mean we’ve made a suitable imprint yet.”

“Okay, guess we’ll put off working the kinks out. Too bad. Jesse suggested we invite Riley and his crew to give them a chance to work on their new material. I hear Dez and Zakk have almost two albums worth of material. It’s a good idea, if you ask me. Oh, and get this, Saint’s Seduction reached out to Dez, again, and tried to get him to come back and play for them. The way I heard it; he never took the call. James gave them the flat ‘no’ Dez had conveyed to him the previous time and hung up on them.”

“Can’t say I blame them, the guy is talented.”

“If you think so, why do you two end up foaming at the mouth every time you’re in proximity to one another? I can practically hear you snarling from across the room.”

Tripp sighed, ‘cause he’d asked himself that for a couple of months now and what he kept coming back to was a relationship he didn’t know what to do with.

He was jealous.

Not of anything musical when it came to Dez’s ability and experience, but of the man himself and the time he spent with Zakk. Even the knowledge that Dez was dating Riley didn’t dull the possessiveness he felt towards a man he was barely lucky enough to see six times a year.

Wait…

Something clicked in his brain, along with a voice telling him to stay the fuck outta his own way before he fucked things up, again.

“Are you saying it would be us, Tattered Angel and Wild Child?” Tripp asked, excitement beginning to surge through him.

“Yup.”

“And who the hell would book that insanity?”

“James and Russ are raring to be unleashed on the project, but there are a few hiccups to iron out.

“Like?”

“Who would headline?”

“We’ll rotate, everyone should be good with that.”

“Band members are, a few of the venues are not.”

Why did it sound like he was chewing? He’d better not be eating anything good after the way this conversation had derailed Tripp’s meal.

“Hey, did you hear what I said about the venues?”

Tripp pulled the phone away from his ear, scowling at it for several seconds before warily drawing it close again. “My ears were working just fine until you bellowed in them!”

“Then pay attention, damn. Now, what do we do about the venues.”

Grumbling beneath his breath, Tripp tried to figure out why he was being asked to problem-solve for an issue he wasn’t completely on board with being a part of yet. Still. It would provide plenty of opportunities to spend time with Zakk. “Okay, so, we give them what they want and schedule the rest of the rotations around it.”

“Good idea on the surface, but when you see the emails I sent you about the locations, you’ll see why the issue came up.”

“Yea, okay, I’ll take a look. Next.”

“Besides the animosity between you and Dez?”

layla dorine

About the Author

LAYLA DORINE lives among the sprawling prairies of Midwestern America, in a house with more cats than people. She loves hiking, fishing, swimming, martial arts, camping out, photography, cooking, and dabbling with several artistic mediums. In addition, she loves to travel and visit museums, historic, and haunted places.

Layla got hooked on writing as a child and she hasn’t stopped writing since. Hard times, troubled times, the lives of her characters are never easy, but then what life is? The story is in the struggle, the journey, the triumphs and the falls. She writes about artists, musicians, loners, drifters, dreamers, hippies, bikers, truckers, hunters and all the other folks that she’s met and fallen in love with over the years.

Sometimes she writes urban romance and sometimes its aliens crash landing near a roadside bar. When she isn’t writing, or wandering somewhere outdoors, she can often be found curled up with a good book and a kitty on her lap.

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Release Blitz: Stop The Wedding by RJ Scott

Stop The Wedding | RJ Scott

Snowed Inn #1

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Release Date: November 1st, 2022

Publisher: Love Lane Books

Cover Design: Meredith Russell

Length: 45,000 words

Universal Link: https://rjscott.co.uk/read-stop_the_wedding

Add to Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60529655-stop-the-wedding

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/books/stop-the-wedding-snowed-inn-book-1-by-rj-scott

READ MY REVIEW

Stop The Wedding

Blurb

One drunken phone call with a desperate plea for help and an admission of love, and Patrick races to stop his best friend from marrying the wrong man.

Patrick never stopped loving Declan, even if he did shove him away at graduation when they kissed. His alpha-type brothers and father, with all their firefighter history, would never accept him being bi, or understand his need to step outside of the family firm and be a cop.

So, he hides how he feels, and ends up losing the only man he’s ever really loved. The only reconciliation they tried was on the night he found out Declan was engaged, and he never imagined he’d have a chance to make things right. That is, until he receives a desperate phone call from Declan asking to be rescued. Through travel chaos and storms, Patrick finally reaches the venue in the Colorado mountains, but with an empty wedding room and no sign of Declan or the fiancé, he knows he’s too late.

All too familiar with rejection, jilted by his fiancé on his wedding day, and lost, Declan has no idea what comes next. He never imagined he’d be entirely alone after his former fiancé and the wedding party leave, or that an avalanche would trap him in the hotel over Christmas.

And worse? Patrick is in the hotel with him and won’t leave him alone. Sharing a room with his former best friend is the last thing Declan wants, but maybe nature has given him a sign that he needs to confront the past and find a way to move on with his life. If only it was easy to fall out of love with the man who holds your heart.

Part of the Snowed Inn collection of standalone stories connected by the avalanche. All the books in the Snowed Inn collection are standalone stories and can be read in any order.

StWimage2

Excerpt

Chapter One

The day of the wedding

Declan wasn’t answering his phone or reading any of the hundreds of messages I’d sent him in the last two days since he’d called me. We hadn’t seen each other since the summer; not talked since he’d ghosted me, deleted me, decided enough was enough. 

I couldn’t blame him. 

I played his last message again, and again, until I knew it by heart, picked apart every detail, and heard every desperately sad hitch in his breath. I knew him; I should be there for him. 

He needed me.

The message was long, rambling, and ended with a succession of beeps as he’d attempted to delete it. 

Thank god he hadn’t managed to delete it at all. It was still here for me to listen to, and it shattered my heart every god damn time, because I had ignored him, too lost in my own misery that he was getting married to want to even listen to his voice.

His sexy, beautiful, voice.

“Hi, it’s uhm… it’s me… Declan, obviously… or not… uhm… I get you won’t answer this call, and that makes me so damn sad. I miss you. Look… I know things were said at the gallery opening, but I know you were trying to do the right thing with Lennox. It’s all you’ve ever done, looked out for me, wanted to find the best man for me. 

I just hoped that, maybe, you’d see that it was you that I… no, that’s not what I wanted to say. I guess you’ve moved on, but I want to try for us to be friends again. I invited you to the wedding, but you never responded.

I miss you, Pads, I miss us, and when I sent you the invitation, I hoped that you’d call me, and you’d be my best man. I want to move on, but I can’t… shit… this is stupid, right? Because I could just as easily have called you. Fuck. Jesus, why is this so hard? I just wanted to let you know I’m okay. I don’t know why Lennox wants to marry me—apparently, he wants his brother at a wedding, and this was the only day, and it made sense for me to say yes. 

Right? 

I mean he said he wanted his brother at a wedding, not at our wedding, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t ask him what he meant by that. 

Stupid. 

Ignore that. 

What I have with him might not be perfect, but I’ll try my hardest to be happy, so don’t worry… but… god… I wish you’d accepted the invitation. I wish you were here to be my best man, my best friend, even if you can’t love me the way I used to love you. 

I wish you could rescue me from this… No… Shit, ignore I said that, too. 

My head is all over the place. 

I don’t need rescuing. I’m doing the right thing, and you’re in my past now. Look… just… please stay safe eh? No taking down criminal gangs and ending up shot… I needed you to know—it’s important you know— that you’re my best friend, and I will always love you, Pads, and, fuck, I hope you’re okay. 

I just wish you were here to help me make sense of things.

I think I’ve done the wrong thing.

I don’t know. 

Shit. Ignore that as well. I’m okay. 

Just yeah… I wish you were here Pads. 

Shit. Shit. 

How do I delete this? I’m gonna delete this. 

Can you please drive faster?”

Bob-the-cab-driver didn’t answer, mostly because he was concentrating on not ending up in a snowdrift, and also it would’ve been the same answer he’d given me on the four occasions I’d already asked—that he was driving as fast as he could, and he assumed I wanted to make it to the inn alive.

I’d visualized the journey from the small local airport to the hotel because that was all I could look at on the many flights it had taken from Charleston, diverted to New York because of a snowstorm, stranded there, then through to Denver by train, car, and bus, then getting local flights. Leave the local airport, find a cab, head north, and on a good day the journey from door-to-door would be twenty-one minutes. Bob raised an eyebrow at me then concentrated on his driving. I sat back in my seat with an exasperated huff because if I was at the wheel right now, snow on the ground or not, I’d be pushing the speed limit. Of course, knowing my luck, I’d be pulled over by the cops before I even left the town, let alone made it up the mountain to the inn, but I had my ID, and I was still in the same suit I’d left Charlotte in, so I hoped they’d give a cop in service a pass when I told them the mad dash was a matter of life and death. 

I wouldn’t tell them it was mostly a matter of love, because who would even rush madly cross-country this close to Christmas, through the snow, for love? 

Bob navigated around yet another drift, and I hung onto the door as we swerved before the tire chains caught, and we were once again heading down the only road leading to the hotel. There were banks of snow on either side, but I should count my lucky stars I’d finally outrun the storm that had crippled the East coast and made my journey to this small mountain outside Denver near impossible. 

“What’s waiting for you at the other end?” he asked conversationally, as if it were okay to take his eyes off his driving.

“Sorry?” 

“Why do you need to be at The Rainbow Inn so quickly?”

“No, wait. What? I need to get to The Retreat.”

“Yeah, same place, just we call it The Rainbow Inn because…” He flapped his hand, and I wasn’t sure what he meant, although I thought he might be feigning a limp wrist, and that got my back up immediately. Still, I didn’t have the energy to answer his questions about why the need for speed, fixated on the idea of getting to The Retreat before the worst of all things happened and I lost Declan forever. “Yeah, so why you going there?”

I used to love you.

“It’s complicated,” I offered in the well-worn tradition of offering nothing and hoping the person asking the question backed off. 

“Aah.” Bob laughed. “Girlfriend trouble, huh?”

“No.” Please, just look at the road, then you can drive faster.

“Wife trouble?” He frowned into the mirror. 

I needed him to stop the questions right now—not getting to the hotel in time was messing with my head, but I didn’t want to die before I’d had a chance to talk to Declan—not when I’d gotten this far. “Best-friend-who-is-a-guy trouble.”

“Ahh, so the best friend is the one with the girl trouble?”

Jesus. “Please, can you drive any faster?” I checked my watch again, and there was only ten minutes to go until the wedding started. 

Six hundred seconds to let him know I’d been wrong, that I did love him, and he needed to know that before he married Lennox.

I was selfish, fucked-up, and grieving; and I’d been so stupid, hiding parts of myself so my family wouldn’t disown me, when in doing that I’d lost everything. 

I held my breath as Bob rounded a tight bend, swerving to avoid a truck heading our way, and skimming so close to the snowbank I could’ve reached out and grabbed a handful of the white stuff. 

Bob didn’t seem fazed, humming along to Mariah, bopping his head to the Christmas beat, yet still managing to keep the car on the road. How the man could sing, chair-dance, and drive was beyond me, but it was all too fucking scary, so I closed my eyes and focused on what I was going to say to Declan when I got there.

“We’re nearly there,” Bob announced.

I leaned to the side to stare through the front window past the banks of snow and got my first glimpses of The Retreat.

It was an old building—rustic and with a lot of wood—set back into and sheltered by a rocky overhang, and there was so much stone it was as if it had been built right into the side of the mountain. A circular driveway had us up to the front door. I thrust a pile of bills at the driver, not caring if I’d given him way too much. 

“Good luck, son! Go get her!” 

Clearly, he hadn’t heard a word I said, and I didn’t bother to correct him again.

“Thank you.” I grabbed my duffle, exited the car, and ran, jumping the steps to the front door three at a time and barging my way through so fast a man standing just inside tumbled backward into the wall in surprise.

“Sorry, I’m looking for the wedding hall.”

He shook his head and shrugged, probably still in shock at the sight of the idiot in a worn, crumpled suit who pushed past him. There was a small line at the reception desk, but I bypassed everyone, slamming my hand down on the counter and frightening the women behind it. “The hall with the wedding, where is it?”

“Sir, there’s a line.” She was so startled her eyebrows vanished under her bangs, and she gave me a thorough once-over, and her eyes widened. I knew I was disheveled, exhausted, and travel-rough. Come on, just tell me where Declan is. 

“Sorry, please, I don’t mean to be rude, I just need the hall with the wedding.”

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, a woman in a ski cap. “I think it’s that way.” She pointed toward an area behind reception. I nodded my thanks and sprinted so fast past a few small boutiques that, I swear, I left scorch marks on the wooden floor. I went through the double doors with more care, not wanting to flatten anyone standing on the other side, and found myself in a corridor, with doors to the left and right. Where now? I glanced at my watch, seventeen minutes past eleven, and in my heart I felt that maybe I was just too late.

“The wedding!” I shouted, not thinking through what I was doing, and rounded on someone who’d followed me through double doors. “The wedding?” I repeated as the same woman who’d tapped me on the shoulder, sans ski cap, gestured to the middle door and the discreet sign to the side that said Essex Hall in small letters. I schooled my features into what I assumed was a pleasant smile of thanks, but the woman took a hurried step back, and I guessed my smile needed some practice. I didn’t have time to apologize, and steeling myself for what I needed to do, I thrust open the doors and stepped into a vast high-ceilinged room. All I could see was white from flowers and ribbons, and I shouted as loud as I could.

“Stop the wedding!”

The room was empty. Beautifully decorated with pale roses and fairy lights draped everywhere, there was no one there. I slumped to the nearest chair, every breath I’d been holding sweeping out of me, and emotion knotting in my chest.

I couldn’t rescue him.

I couldn’t tell him I loved him.

I was too late.

Snowed Inn

Series Link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BHH63KVV

RJ Scott – Stop the Wedding

H.L Day – Five Night Stand

V.L. Locey – Checking it Twice

LC Chase – Breakfast Included

Xenia Melzer – The Real Kaimana

Meredith Russell – Stuck With You

Eli Easton – A Changeling Christmas

About The Author

RJ Scott logo

RJ Scott, author of M/M romance.Writing love stories with a happy ever after – cowboys, heroes, family, hockey, single dads, bodyguards

USA Today bestselling author RJ Scott has written over one hundred and fifty romance books. Emotional stories of complicated characters, cowboys, single dads, hockey players, millionaires, princes, bodyguards, Navy SEALs, soldiers, doctors, paramedics, firefighters, cops, and the men who get mixed up in their lives, always with a happy ever after.

She lives just outside London and spends every waking minute she isn’t with family either reading or writing.

The last time she had a week’s break from writing, she didn’t like it one little bit, and she has yet to meet a box of chocolates she couldn’t defeat.

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StW Out Now

A lovely festive best friends to lovers romance from RJ

Stop The WeddingStop the Wedding by R.J. Scott

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a super sweet best friends to lovers with a bit of a journey to get there set in the new Snowed Inn series.

I really liked seeing how Declan and Patrick reconnected after they’d drifted apart when Declan kissed Pads in front of all his family and inadvertently outed him at their Graduation.

There was perhaps a little bit of repetition in the push-pull but, overall, it worked totally for me as they dealt with being stuck at the inn where Declan was supposed to have got married to a complete douche.

The setting is a fun one, I beta read one of the other books in the series for Eli Easton, so it was cool to see one of her characters, Riggs, turning up here and getting the story from the other perspective.

Overall this is a lovely, easy-to-read romance which is perfect for a cold, chilly evening, with a hot chocolate and a fluffy blanket.

#ARC kindly received from the author in return for an honest and unbiased review

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