Adriana Kraft

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

A Day in Adriana's Life

Gardens: Mine, and my heroine’s #Gardening #RomanceHeroine #EroticRomance

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Most of the year here in the southern Arizona desert, “gardening” consists of either (a) nothing, or (b) moving landscape rock around. Having spent many years in the upper Midwest, I miss so many of my perennials – the snowdrops, daffodils, tulips, iris, peonies, and hostas I kept in several beds. None of those would survive here.

So I always welcome the moment when I can get my hands in the dirt again and cultivate growing things.

Thankfully, now is the season for setting a potted plant in the ground, and now is when our Desert Marigolds send up what seems like thousands of seedlings in front of the house.

I’ve nursed a fledgling bougainvillea in its pot through two summers and one winter. It’s finally happy and established enough to be set in the earth. We spent a week digging the hole – with our hard soil, the process consists of soaking the spot with water, waiting a couple days, digging down 4 or 5 inches, then repeating the process – to 10 inches, for this one. But it’s planted and thriving.

And the marigolds? Here’s a photo from a few years back. They’re a major natural wildflower throughout much of the Sonoran Desert, and our plot was seeded with them when we moved in. I quickly learned that unless I thin them as they emerge, I’ll have a messy non-lovely patch of tangle. Since they pop up everywhere, each year I decide where I want them to end up, then rake the rocks over the spots where I don’t want them, uprooting the sprouts. This year, they’ll circle the white Oleander we just planted out front as well.

Most of the characters in my novels are too busy with other things to spend time gardening, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like gardens. Here’s a scene from a recent release, Smoldering Passion. Melissa lives in a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, but she’s only a few blocks from the beautiful Brooklyn Gardens, where she often escapes when she needs a break.

EXCERPT

Melissa stood and rotated her shoulders. She had to get out of her apartment. It was a beautiful day, and she didn’t want to spend it all inside.

She grabbed her keys and some cash and headed down the stairs to street level. She walked briskly, suddenly knowing where she wanted to be.

Shortly, she turned in at the entrance to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and slowed her pace, pausing to watch the ducks in the Japanese water garden. This was space for relaxing – for breathing deeply, soaking in colors and breezes and scents. The riot of spring blooms was long gone, and summer was at its peak.

She headed for the Shakespeare Garden and was relieved to find a shady bench empty in a secluded corner. Daisies, black-eyed Susans, and daylilies formed a casual cluster in yellow, white, and orange beside the bench. Further off, some taller mauve blooms she couldn’t name were full of butterflies, and a curly-headed toddler ran up to them laughing gleefully. The child’s parents stood nearby, holding hands, happy, as if they had no care in the world.

BOOK INFORMATION

Title: Smoldering Passion
Passion Series, Book One
Can be read as a stand-alone
Author: Adriana Kraft
Publisher: eXtasy Books
Publication Date: April 7, 2023
ISBN 9781487438159 ASIN B0C211488L
Length: 70,259 words   249 Pages
Genres: Erotic Romance, LGBT Romance
Pairings: MF, FF, FFF, FMF, MFM
Tags: Contemporary, Menage, Bisexual, FM, FF, New York City, struggling artist, age gap
Heat rating: four flames

BLURB

Her passion smolders. Will it ignite?

When art student Melissa Hopkins finally unpacks the two boxes her Aunt Phoebe left for her and sees Phoebe’s black and white photos, it’s like opening Pandora’s Box. A simple quest to find a new job morphs into an about face—not just in her art, but in her career and personal life. Short on funds now that her graduate stipend is ending, she applies to work where Aunt Phoebe once worked: a center for sexuality and sex studies.

Sworn off women after a disastrous relationship, Center Director Harry Gage ignores the danger signals and hires the striking young woman who reminds him of his former lover. Her air of innocence will captivate center viewers, so he’s sure she’ll be a hit on camera. What he’s not prepared for is how she pierces his heart.

When the sparks flare up, is it love or just sex—and what must each of them risk to find out?

UNIVERSAL BUY LINK

https://books2read.com/u/3nDdOe

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.
~ ~ ~
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…

Time to Play!

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Blogging about what we love

20150605Fremont StreetFreemont Street Any time I feel like I might be crazy or off the charts, The Fremont Street Experience sets my perspective to rights, so we always try to catch it when we come to Vegas. Usually we’re here on a weeknight – the crowds last night were so thick it was hard to see the impromptu acts along the sidelines. Or maybe just hard to distinguish the actors from the crowd! Gotta love Las Vegas.

Triple Crown Fever I may have to eat my words (it’s happened before) – I truly think this is the year of the Triple Crown. There’s always racing luck, but American Pharoah looks like he has what it takes to win the Belmont. Can’t be there this year (LOVED our trip to the Belmont Stakes in 2001), but you can bet we’ll be glued to the TV this afternoon and hoping!

Dancing Then we’ll top the evening off by going dancing. Did I mention we’ve been taking dance lessons all winter, twice a week most weeks? Time to put our moves on the dance floor in the city that never sleeps. Might sleep late in the morning though…