Adriana Kraft

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

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Happy Thanksgving

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I hope your day is filled with good food, good company, good times, and gratitude.

I am grateful for so many things. Beauty surrounds me constantly and makes me smile daily.

Sabino Canyon, left
Crescent Moon Ranch, above

A stormy evening from our patio

I’ve fully recovered from Covid. I’m fully vaccinated, and my case was mild, but the subsequent exhaustion has just lifted – for now, at least.

So I’m grateful for the many activities I can resume. Taking walks, hiking, golfing, bowling, line dancing, working out. All in time if I start out slow.

Like so many, I always miss loved ones in this season. But with the sadness comes gratitude for having had them in my life. Today we’re sharing Thanksgiving dinner with a friend who’s husband died last Christmas. We didn’t want her to be alone this first Thanksgiving without him. I hope if you’ve also had a recent loss that you have friends and family to surround you and share the memories.

A Pony for Christmas? Or some steamy romantic suspense horse stories? #Series #RaceHorses #RomanticSuspense #KU

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Does your little girl want a pony for Christmas?

THIS little girl did, as far back as I can remember. Or better yet, an actual horse. Growing up, I read every book I could get my hands on about horses. King of the Wind, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, books on how to ride, horse breeds, the parts of a horse, how to care for them.

I even vaguely remember a book I read as a pre-teen about a girl my age at a horse related event who talked her father into buying each of them a raffle ticket for a beautiful horse. He promised if her ticket won, she could have the horse. He left both tickets with her while he went to purchase something, the drawing was held – and she switched tickets and lied and told him she’d won. I remember she eventually broke down and confessed what she’d done; I don’t remember what her punishment was.

I could never understand in those days why my parents wouldn’t let me get a horse. We lived on seven acres – never mind that none if it was fenced, none of it was “pasture,” we had no stable, no tack – and neither of them had ever had any experience with large animals.

Mr. Kraft grew up on a dairy farm, where when he was very little, his father kept a team of matched Belgians. When his father purchased his first gas powered tractor, he kept the horses a few more years to cross-check his rows of corn as he planted. There was no way a farming family was going to keep a pair of horses just for “riding.” They had to earn their keep. But Mr. Kraft kept dreaming anyway.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that In our middle adult years, we found a way to own horses off and on. For a while, some low-end race horses, which gave us an inside view of trackside life and the horseracing industry. Later on, the Arabian/saddlebred foal in the photo above. We poured that love and that knowledge into our four-book romantic suspense series, Riders Up.

All of the main characters in this series love horses as much as we do. Each story features danger, suspense, stunning race horses, courageous heroines, and the complicated men who love them. Each can be read as a standalone. And each story is definitely steamy ~ if you do have a little girl who wants a pony for Christmas, she might have to wait a couple decades to read this series…

All four books are available exclusively at Amazon, and all are free on Kindle Unlimited:

Riders Up Series Buy Link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CH2C33

Cassie’s Hope (Book One)

High stakes,

a fiery Irish redhead,

her stunning racehorse,

and a fiercely loyal half-blood rancher. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GDWTUGY

 

Heat Wave (Book Two)

Hang onto the land – but at what cost?

Feisty widow hires ace racehorse trainer to salvage her family’s heritage.

Can they survive escalating threats to life and limb?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JZ6GW6G

 

Willow Smoke (Book Three)

When the chips are down, there’s nobody there.

Apprentice racehorse trainer Daisy Matthews has survived the Chicago streets with this mantra but is unprepared for the much older Nick Underwood’s urgent pursuit. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N0DH13I

 

 

Detour Ahead (Book Four)

Threatened race horses,

city slicker attorney,

sexy California wrangler

—what can possibly go wrong?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RPT6YJA/

Did our newest characters read this article? Sex and the over-fifty crowd #MidLifeHeroine #EroticRomance

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For starters, Mr. Kraft and I, who write together under our pen name, are older than fifty. You can bet that as we’ve aged, we’ve learned as much as we can about sexual health in the over-fifty crowd. I’ve said elsewhere that writing these stories keeps us young, and I’ll stand by that. But this article from AARP – tweeted by Ageless Sexuality Advocate Joan Price – pulled together things even I didn’t know about the health benefits of sex after fifty: ”10 Surprising Health Benefits of Sex After 50”

So even though Cliff and Carol, our Reluctant Santa and his paramour (yes, they do get it done), may not have read the article, we wonder if something about turning fifty drove them to abandon their dedication to the single life and find a partner.

Here are just a few things I learned – some of which I’d guessed, but it’s nice to see them confirmed.

“Regular romps with your partner are linked to a lower risk of heart problems.” Maybe that’s why Mr. Kraft, in spite of having a heart attack three decades ago and a triple bypass fifteen years back, now has a heart as healthy as any other male in his age cohort, regardless of heart history. I’ll add that there’s a vast amount of strength training, aerobic exercise, and healthy eating involved in addition.

Regular sexual activity (with or without a partner) boosts immunity. Who knew? It strengthens the pelvic floor (makes sense), an issue of particular concern for aging women. It reduces the risk of prostate cancer. It relieves pain – via the endorphins it releases. It reduces stress and improves sleep (all of which is likely related to the benefit for heart health).

Perhaps not surprisingly, given this wide range of benefits, regular sexual activity also increases life expectancy. Lest thinking about aging bodies getting it on disgusts you (and here’s hoping any such disgust decreases as you age!), here’s what’s happening elsewhere in the world: “In Ikaria, Greece — one of the regions of the world where people live significantly longer than average — more than 80 percent of people ages 65 to 100 are having sex.”

So we hope if you’re fifty or over, that you’re as eager as we are to think about fifty-year-olds having sex, and that you’ll enjoy our characters as they muddle through their awkward beginning. And we hope if you’re somewhat (or a LOT) younger than fifty, that you’ll keep an open mind and never give up on both the pleasure and the benefits that come with a healthy sex life.

Release Date: December 2, 2022

Publisher: Extasy Books

Word Count: 12,698

Genre: Erotic Romance, Mature Heroine, Holiday Story

Heat Level: 3 flames

 

BLURB

Is it ever too late to find happiness?

They’re in their fifties. Grief-stricken (her) and battle scarred (him) from their previous loves, they don’t want to risk more heartbreak, ever. They’ll have to take it slow, talk it through, test the waters carefully. Can they make it happen at this speed, get it done in a short story, and reap the benefits of sizzling sex at their age? Why not?

BUY LINK

Available for Pre-order at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSB5DKS/

 

“Then he can watch…” Steamy Teaser from Meghan’s Playhouse #menage #LGBTQIA

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Ready for some serious steam? You won’t want to miss our six book series, Meghan’s Playhouse. 

Here’s a teaser from Book One, Seducing Cat:

What could college English Professor Caitlin Shanahan ever have in common with the brash carpenter Kurt Davis?  The sexy sprite Meghan Keenan, that’s what.

Meghan’s Playhouse

Book One, Seducing Cat
Extasy Books
Novella, 28,000 words
Cover by Syneca Featherstone
Heat Rating
Four Flames:
Explicit sex: M/F, F/F;
Ménage: F/F/M, F/M/F;
anal sex; sex toys

BLURB

Level headed English Professor Caitlin Shanahan has finally earned tenure and purchased the century-old two-story house of her dreams in the college town of Burntside, Wisconsin—at thirty-four, she’d better face facts: her future is teaching college and writing plays, not falling in love.  So why is she so drawn to foxy little hometown actress Meghan Keenan, who’s rented her upstairs apartment, or worse, to the girl’s gorgeous hunk of a lover Kurt Davis, a carpenter who’s never even been to college?

Twenty-year-old Meg has a plan. First she’ll seduce the reluctant professor, then she’ll share her sexual delights with both Cat and her brawny carpenter, and when she’s successfully brought them together, she can make her escape and explore what’s beyond the only town she’s ever lived in.

Kurt can’t stand the up-tight professor who’s hired him to build a gazebo and refurbish her old house—the house he wanted for himself. Even if Meg’s scheme succeeds, he knows Caitlin would never look at him twice.  No need to go there in his fantasies…

EXCERPT

Set up: Cat, Meg, and Kurt have just returned to Cat’s home to celebrate opening night of Cat’s most recent play…

Cat sensed Meg’s fingers working the zipper of her robe down. Meg snaked a hand between the folds to fondle a breast. Cat moaned and inhaled deeply. The warm hand caressing her skin was so right. She opened her eyes to drink in the view of her lover.

Her eyes sprang wide and she yanked her robe shut. There was Kurt Davis sitting ten feet away, watching, as if he’d paid the price of admission.

“Kurt…” she stammered at Meg. “He’s still here.”

“Of course he is,” Meg said, smiling indulgently and continuing to massage an aching breast through the robe. “You know he knows about us.”

She nodded. “But…”

“You’re not ashamed of us, are you, Cat?”

Cat shook her head. “Of course not. I’d never be ashamed of you. Of us.”

“Good. Then he can watch. Right?”

The air turned electric. Cat couldn’t manage to speak. She gazed into Meg’s pleading eyes and raised and lowered her chin slightly.

Seducing Cat (Meghan's Playhouse Book 1)

SERIES BUY LINK:

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HM3G789

 

My Review: Code Girls, by Liza Mundy @lizamundy #WWII #WomensHistory #Review #KU

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Code Girls, by Liza Mundy, is the third book in my current series of book reviews featuring the role of women in the WWII Allied victory. The first two books – The Atomic City Girls, and Daughters of the Night Sky – are historical fiction based very closely on actual events and characters.

Code Girls is not fiction, even though through most of its pages it reads as smoothly and dramatically as any novel. Following interviews with more than twenty participants and years of meticulous research, much of the data having spent decades as classified and unavailable, Liza Mundy has crafted the story of over 10,000 American women, most freshly out of college, who secretly worked during the war to break the German and Japanese military codes. These women saved thousands of lives and in no small part helped to bring down first Germany, and then Japan.

They – and their superiors – could tell no one about it for decades.

In November, 1941, letters began going out to select women who were seniors at several of the nation’s elite colleges. The letters invited the women to an interview, where the questions simply were whether they liked crossword puzzles and if they were engaged to be married. If they answered appropriately, they were invited to further meetings where they learned about “cryptanalysis” and were told never to utter that word to anyone else. They entered on-campus training in code breaking – again, about which they could tell no one, not even family members. Those who passed the rigorous training were the earliest recruits to facilities being readied for them in Washington, D.C., by both the Navy and the Army.

Over the ensuing years, recruitment criteria broadened, but secrecy, the ability to identify patterns, and having a bright mind remained paramount. Mundy’s account traces the initial American codebreaking developments between the wars, then proceeds through the war years chronologically. By weaving together historical data and material from her interviews, she provides a window into the mundane as well as the dramatic. We learn what interaction was like in the cramped working quarters; how the women were treated by outsiders – who could never know how technical and important their work was – how they spent their relatively few free hours; and, for many of them, how their lives unfolded after the war.

Most of them remained unacknowledged and unsung for the rest of their lives. Some family members never learned what a mother – an aunt – a grandmother – had accomplished, how many ships were sunk because the Navy “happened” to be in the right place at the right time, due to intelligence provided by the codebreakers.

I found this book to be both informative and very engaging, and I highly recommend it.

BUY LINK

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316439894/

Code Girls is available exclusively at Amazon
and is currently on Kindle Unlimited

Do you Play by the Rules? #RomanticSuspense #CrimeFiction #Danger

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Looking for a steamy read full of danger and suspense? Check out my romantic suspense, The Heist.

BLURB

A heist? A murder? It’s villain’s choice.

A special-order art theft? Tedious, but seamless – until small town museum director Kara Daniels calls in the experts. Furious her favorite trio of priceless impressionist paintings has been stolen from its traveling exhibit on her watch, Kara is determined to save not only the paintings, but her future in the art world. She’ll stop at nothing to entrap the thief.

Ted Springs knows the underbelly of the criminal world a little closer than he might like—but he’s turned it to good advantage, first as a police officer, and now as detective for the Upper Midwest Arts Council. His job? To guarantee the security of the valuable paintings in the Council’s traveling exhibits.

Heat sizzles when Ted and Kara collide—can they work together, before it’s too late?

EXCERPT

Set Up: Embarrassed from an earlier encounter where she literally bumped into detective Ted Springs, Kara is cautiously bantering with him as she drives him from the airport to Elk Grove.

“If you ever get to know me, you’ll find there’s nothing unreal about me.”

He exhaled slowly. “And do you think I’ll ever get to know you?”

She giggled softly. “Not in the way you’re thinking.” She thrust out her chin. “At least not while you’re working this case.”

He took his time to chew on that information. “Fair enough,” he said. He wished he knew what he’d done or said to disarm her. Maybe it had been the memory of their brief encounter. “Not that I need more incentive to wrap this museum situation up quickly.” He paused. “Do you suppose we’ll be able to hug now and then like friends, now that we’ve cleared the air? Shaking hands seems so stodgy.”

Kara laughed quickly and then peeked over at him with a devastating smile. “As long as you don’t paw my boobs.”

Smiling, he didn’t miss a beat. “How about your rear?”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “That is a different matter. Your large hands did leave a pleasant impression on my ass.”

So she didn’t mind a little flirting even while he worked the case. “Good. I believe in first impressions, and I always like to be clear about the rules of the game. Now maybe you should tell me how you think one or more people entered the museum supposedly without a key.”

She scrunched her mouth. “So do you play by the rules?”

“I didn’t say that. I just like to know what they are.”

BUY LINKS

Available in e-book and print

https://books2read.com/u/4D65wD

Always free to read at Kindle Unlimited