Adriana Kraft

When it's time to heat things up...

Adriana Kraft

Midweek Tease ~ Download if you Dare #MWTease #MFRWAuthor

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Welcome to Midweek Tease, hosted by Angelica Dawson, where authors tease you with a little something to help you stay warm till the weekend…

Five Stars? One Star? Smoking hot? Sleazy?

All of the above? Kitty Paige and Jared Jacobs would embrace the entire spectrum of reader reviews and laugh all the way to their next hot scene, and they’d hold nothing back when they got there.

The Best ManPersonally, we love Kitty’s bold approach to life and sexuality. But don’t download this book unless you’re ready for some edgy characters who enjoy things like man-sandwiches, ménage, sex buddies, scarf play, spanking, and polyamory, to mention a few.

Romance with two people who only ever have sex with each other? We like that too, and we’ve got some coming out later this year, but this isn’t one of them. Here’s a taste of Kitty and Jared’s repartee—they’re at Arlington Park Race Track. How far will they go in public?

EXCERPT

“What have you two been up to,” Jared asked, “besides food gathering?”

“Conspiring.”

“Conspiring how to make me rock hard?” he whispered in her ear as she slid in front of him to take the seat on the other side.

“Of course.” Kitty batted her eyelashes. “Isn’t that the point?”

“Do you know you have the sexiest damn feet?”

“Uh huh.” She slapped his hand off her thigh. “You’ve told me before. And we have a much larger crowd today, so be a good boy—for a change—if you can.”

He leaned away from her and chortled, then glanced over at the tote board. “It’d be a lot easier to be a good boy if you weren’t so intent on being a naughty girl.” He gave her a crooked smile and laid half the Daily Racing Form across her lap.

She scowled at him when she felt his fingers toying with the hem of her skirt, which had ridden half way up her thigh. “If you persist on being bad, I’ll have to spank you when we get back home.”

He withdrew his hand from under the newspaper and leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Is that a promise?”

BLURB

Bad boy meets bad girl. Is there anything more?

Passionate, hard working and every inch a business woman, Chicago realtor Kitty Paige likes her sex raw and edgy, and sees no reason to limit herself to just one man. Never married and not quite forty, the striking blonde has successfully raised her daughter, Susan, and is already pushing her new-found freedom to the limits.

Wealthy commodities middle-man and race horse owner Jared Jacobs is father of the best man at Susan’s wedding. He is smitten by the vision in yellow who exudes sex as she escorts her daughter down the aisle. Also single, the handsome mustached California ranch owner with mischievous eyes views his sex life as a series of splendid love affairs, and sets out to make Kitty next on the list.

Together and apart, their chemistry is explosive, and their sparkling repartee and steamy sex catch both partners by surprise. Jared is first to recognize he’s fallen in love. When Kitty panics, can Jared finesse his every move and reel her in?

BUY LINKS

   

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Don’t forget to travel to all the other tempting mid-week teases!

The family said WHAT? #MFRWAuthor

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Week 2 of the MFRW year-long blog challenge! Click on the list at the bottom to travel to all participants. This week’s theme? How my family supports my writing.

 

None of us could do what we do without support, and when family is on our side, we thrive – we can take on the world. For starters, the most important family member in my life – my husband – is my co-author, so we face the world with a solid foundation.

We got a good head start in the families we grew up in. Our parents are gone, but all four of them encouraged creativity and supported unconventional choices, however ill-advised some of those choices might have seemed at the time.

Hubs’ mother was an avid romance reader, especially during the nine years she was a widow after his dad died. As her eyesight worsened, we’d hit our local used book store for a half-dozen large-print romance books every three weeks before making the five hour drive to check in on her for the weekend. She did read (and liked) a couple of our early romantic suspense stories, although she confessed she “skipped over” the sex parts. She would probably not have approved of the erotic direction our writing later took.

Both my parents, on the other hand, probably would have, and I think my dad would even admit to some envy, were he still here. His older sister – my aunt – worked for the Kinsey Institute, so no topic was off limits when she was around. She and he are probably doing fist pumps as they watch us navigate the publishing world with our sexy stories. My mother would probably have kept her approval more hidden (she disapproved of my aunt). But when it came time for me to clean out their last apartment, on the bookshelf hidden behind the clothes in her closet I found a well-read copy of the Kama Sutra, so I know her heart would have been on our side.

We carry their support with us, always.

A Bright New Dawn

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Happy New Year!

Wherever you are, whatever your New Year’s morning sky looks like, both of us who write as Adriana Kraft wish you the fresh beginnings of a bright new dawn.

Looking East at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains

I took this photograph on my morning walk last summer just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we spent a month traveling and touring. So many mornings looked just as beautiful that it was hard for me to select which picture to feature. As I sorted through them, it suddenly struck me that only with clouds do we receive the gift of the most brilliant sunrises. So our New Year’s wish for you is that even when there are clouds, there will be new dawns that beckon with opportunity.

Maggie Anderson, heroine of Heat Wave, has come through a lot of dark times, including the loss of her parents and her husband. Now she’s struggling to raise her two children and make a living off the Iowa farm her parents left her. Farmers around her are bailing out and selling off—instead of knuckling under, she makes a daring move and seeks her new dawn:

BLURB

During an oppressive Iowa summer of drought and farm foreclosures, widowed Maggie Anderson makes a bold decision: She’ll merge her love of horses and her family’s three hundred and twenty acres into a horse farm and try her hand at nearby Prairie Meadows Race Track, where racing purses have just been augmented by the recently added casino gambling.

Down on his luck after being falsely accused in a racing scandal and banned from training, former Arlington Race Track trainer Ed Harrington has skulked home to Des Moines to drown his sorrows and wait for the dust to clear. He’s unprepared for the piercing robin’s-egg-blue eyes of pint-sized Maggie Anderson, who finds him at a flophouse and offers him a job. Can he pull himself together and meet the challenge?

As the two forge a tumultuous working partnership, they soon discover someone is out to get Maggie’s farm and will stop at almost nothing to force her off the land. Can they find and stop the culprit before someone is killed? Can they survive the far greater danger unleashed by the raw passion simmering just beneath the surface of their relationship?

BUY LINK
Print and Ebook

You can read an excerpt HERE

Evening Walk – Evening Sky #MFRWauthor #Mindfulness

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Much of the year we take our daily walk in the daylight or early twilight. But southern Nevada June temps have driven us to wait until after nine in the evening – and even then sometimes it’s still over ninety degrees.

The upside? Getting reacquainted with the night sky. Our RV resort has an irregular shape, so as we walk its one-mile perimeter, we can take in the 360 degrees of the night sky from a range of viewing angles.

20150421 waxing crescent and venusTo the west as we begin our walk, Venus, Jupiter, and Leo’s largest star, Regulus, hang suspended like brilliant spangles on the strand of a necklace. I can’t remember seeing Venus look so large or so bright, but it turns out this happens every eight years or so, a combination of when it is closest to earth, and when its angle to the sun illuminates the greatest portion of its surface, from earth’s point of view. Watch your night sky the next two or three nights to see the waxing crescent moon in the vicinity of this stunning necklace. Here’s a photo I took at dusk in April in southern Arizona, waxing crescent and Venus.

Our next turn takes us facing south. Arcturus is nearly overhead – but we’ve learned we can always find it in any season by following where the handle of the big dipper points. Dropping toward the horizon from there, we find Virgo’s largest star, Spica.

As we turn east, the Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb and Altair (in Lyra, Cygnet and Aquila, or the Lyre, the Swan, and the Eagle) is just starting to rise. When we first bought our telescope and began to study the night sky, this landmark – or perhaps skymark – formed the anchor of our summer sky. In that season it sits directly overhead in the evening, is visible from dusk to dawn, and is a roadmap to the Milky Way.

And finally the north, with the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the North Star, probably the most familiar part of the sky, Why? Because our night sky circulates around the North Star, and these constellations never set, though this week, here, Cassiopeia is lost in the haze close to the mountains on the northern horizon.

This doesn’t always happen, but last night as we gazed north, I suddenly experienced the sensation of being wrapped in splendor and flooded with gratitude.

A little dream #MFRWauthor #seizethemoment

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In last night’s dream, I am traveling somewhere and it’s a beautiful day, but I need to get my morning Sudoku worked, and I don’t have a pencil. Whoever I’m traveling with (vague, in this dream) goes with me searching all over the city for the perfect pencil – not just any pencil will do. We finally find it, but we’ve missed seeing the beautiful sites we traveled to see.

The dream morphs (as dreams do) and now I’m on Dancing With The Stars, and it’s performance time, and I’ve completely missed the final rehearsal and don’t know my dance.
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I don’t want to preach 🙂

So I’ll just say that this morning, before writing this post, I took my Sudoku and my perfectly ordinary pencil outside with my morning coffee and watched the sunrise light up the clouds over the mountains. I’m refreshed and ready for my day – I hope the same for you.

pahrump mountain sunrise

Day One #MFRWAuthor #Stayfit

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Anyone who works at staying fit knows the syndrome – life is never static, and keeping healthy turns out to involve an endless series of starting over.

Today, it’s Day One after a fun three days at The Golden Nugget and The Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas (well, no end of exercise, between all the dancing and the walking), and also Day One of changing up our timing.

Palo-Duro-Adriana-300x200Summer has arrived. Mimosa sweetness fills the air and the heat is intense. Ten AM bike rides are no longer an option – we’ve got to get up early and ride before breakfast to have a comfortable cruising temperature. It’s only 9:30 as I write this and already 87 degrees – we took our ride (ten minutes, to ease back into the routine) at 7:30, when it was only in the high seventies. This afternoon, instead of walking, we’ll hit the pool around 3 PM. (pic above is Palo Duro Canyon, TX, November, 2012).

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives…