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“Suspenseful, intriguing and truly romantic!” #RomanticSuspense #KU #IndiePub #HorseRacing #Thoroughbred #SportsRomance

January 29, 2024 by Adriana Kraft

Most of the books Mr. Kraft and I write together are steamy erotic romance, typically (but not always) featuring bisexual women. But that’s not where we got our start. When I started this year-long backlist review in my New Years Day blog post HERE, I noted that we accomplished our first goal – to be a published author – in 2005, with a contract for publication in 2007.

That novel is in our other major genre, romantic suspense, where we typically feature a romance between a man and a woman. In the beginning, we attempted to keep a different pen name for each of the two genres, but this quickly became cumbersome, and we brought all our work together under our “Adriana” name in short order.

The press that first released Willow Smoke in 2007 was sold in 2012, so when we received our rights back, we brought it out under our indie imprint in 2014.

Willow Smoke is actually Book Three in our four-book suspense series set in the horse racing industry, Riders Up, but it was the one we polished first, before the other three were fully fleshed out. Each of the books can be read as a standalone, and they can be read in any order.

WHY WILLOW?

When we lived in northern Minnesota, our forty acres included a small marshy area that grew willow shrubs. Following my mother’s custom, I always cut some branches early each spring and set them in a vase inside to open as pussy willows, usually the first blossoms of the year. My husband dabbled in wood carving while we lived there, and gnarled willow sticks made inviting projects to carve, sand, and stain.

Enter Daisy Matthews, the waif Cassie rescued through her Chicago group home job in Riders Up, Book One. By Book Three, Daisy is tall and lanky and holding her own as an assistant trainer at Chicago’s Arlington Park Racetrack.

We did not have a title when we began writing this book, but we did know our characters. The much older Nick Underwood has left the stock market, where he made a killing, and he now runs a small company crafting handmade wooden canoes. When he first encounters Daisy in the Arlington Park track barn, he doesn’t know her name, but he’s struck by her smoky eyes and her tall willowy frame. He decides to call her Willow. Our title was born, but we had no idea how important this small shrub genus would become in our story.

As the story gradually made its way onto the page, we sent Nick and Daisy on a canoeing trip to northern Minnesota’s boundary waters, which we so often enjoyed ourselves. On their way home, he stops at a friend’s home (forty acres and a farmhouse, imagine that!). Daisy has often watched Nick working the wood at his shop, and his friend finds an appropriate willow stick and talks her into getting started carving it.

I won’t give away the story’s ending here – I’ll just say that Daisy’s willow stick plays an important role when the chips are down.

REVIEWS

Five stars at Amazon “Adriana Kraft has created memorable characters that linger long after the story has ended and I’ve closed the book. She has done what an author should—brought me into the book’s world and made me care about the characters so that my world will not be the same as before their foray into it.” Sheila G.

Five stars at Goodreads “Suspenseful, intriguing and truly romantic! What a fabulous story of the blending of two worlds… the plot twists and turns and keeps you on the edge of your seat and the pages turning.” Risha C “…dreams can become reality, love can transcend age… Exciting, engaging and very entertaining story. The character interplay is spot on and the story is extremely well written.” Donna H.

BOOK INFORMATION

Willow Smoke (Riders Up, Book Three)
Cover by Rebecca Poole
B&B Publishing, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9907476-0-4
ASIN: B00N0DH13I
Length: 88,000 words
Genre: Romantic Suspense
Tags: Horse Racing, Age Gap, Sports Romance
Heat rating: three flames (explicit sex, m/f)

BLURB

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

Apprentice horse trainer Daisy Matthews grew up on the streets of Chicago, and if she learned anything, it was that she could count on no one to help her, ever. She knows she has to tough it out, protect herself, and when necessary, protect anyone she cares about. All by herself. No one else will do it for her.

Wealthy businessman Nick Underwood receives a thoroughbred in payment for a bad debt and is thrust into Daisy’s world.  She teaches him about horse racing; he teaches her about love.  When Daisy’s seamy brother-in-law threatens Nick’s safety, she doggedly tries to stop him by herself, but flees to the familiar streets when he attacks. Can Nick find her in time – and if he does, will she still want him?

EXCERPT

Set Up: An interloper has appeared at the stall where Daisy is soaking her horse’s front legs to cool them.

“So tell me,” Nick said, “where can I find a horse named RainbowBlaze?”

“RainbowBlaze!” Daisy gasped and glared at him again. “Why? What do you want with her?”

“Damn, you’ve got to be the most protective woman I’ve ever encountered. If you must know, she’s my horse.”

Daisy opened her mouth as if to speak. She glanced quickly at the chestnut mare. “There must be a mistake,” she stammered. “RainbowBlaze belongs to Michael Barnes.”

Nick crossed his legs and leaned against the stable wall, giving Daisy Matthews a slow satisfied smile. He’d found his horse. And he had a new employee. This could be more interesting than he’d imagined.

Furthermore, being his employee made Matthews safe to be around. He had a firm rule against personal involvements with employees. He flashed a look at the slender woman’s nipples that showed faintly through an orange tank top. Didn’t she know what she looked like?

Too young. He closed his eyes. He might be old enough to be her father. His eyes sprang open and he appraised her again. Maybe, maybe not.

“The horse did belong to Michael Barnes.” Fright flickered across the blonde’s face and quickly disappeared behind a steely gaze. “Mike’s fallen on bad economic times. Turned out he couldn’t pay his debts. Showed up at my office with a bill of sale for some damn race horse and begged me to take it to clear what he owed me. Against my better judgment, I agreed.” Nick raised his open palms upward. “So, here I am.”

Daisy’s hands, resting at her sides, curled into fists.

“You look like you’d like to slaughter me for your supper.” Nick stood. Ignoring the woman, he pointed at the horse with the oversized socks. “So I take it this is RainbowBlaze.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the woman. She gulped and nodded. “Is the horse any good? How much can I get for her?”

Daisy sputtered and Nick suppressed a laugh.

“She’s a damn good mare. She’ll run her heart out for you, if you treat her right. But she won’t work just for anyone.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a thing for my horse, kid.”

“Suppose so.” Daisy studied the dirt at her feet. “I’ve known her since she was foaled. Was there to help her mother give birth. I’ve been there every step of the way when Rainbow was with Cassie Travers, and then when Michael Barnes bought her it was with the understanding that she’d come to Sam’s barn and be with me.”

When the woman stopped to catch her breath, Nick said, “You didn’t answer my question. How much is she worth?”

Daisy shrugged. “Maybe,” her voice quaked, “fifty thousand. Maybe more.”

“Hmm. Michael said a hundred grand.”

He watched the spirit flow out of the young woman. Her glistening eyes grabbed at something inside him that he hadn’t experienced for a long time. Not thinking, he reached for her chin.

“That horse,” he said softly, “means a lot more to you than a hundred grand, doesn’t it?”

BUY LINK

Available exclusively at Amazon and on Kindle Unlimited

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

 

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Filed Under: Blog, Excerpts, Romantic Suspense Tagged With: age gap, Contemporary, Contemporary Romance, horse racing, KU, Romantic Suspense, sports romance

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

November 19, 2022 by Adriana Kraft

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

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Filed Under: Adriana's Library, Blog Tagged With: American history, Book Review, Codebreakers, codebreaking, codebreaking machine, codes, enigma, Her Story, history, KU, review, Women’s History, WWII

It doesn’t take any more time to dream big than small. #NewYear #Dreaming #RomanticSuspense #HorseRacing #MFRWAuthor #KU

January 2, 2022 by Adriana Kraft

Happy New Year!

What are your dreams for this year? Do you even let yourself dream? I hope so.

Part of my daily practice is using the Daily Calm meditation app, first thing after I get up and start coffee. This morning’s meditation was on dreaming, and among other things, it pointed out that every new invention, every solution to every problem, has come about because somebody had a dream.

Mr. Kraft and I have been writing fiction for over two decades, published for a decade and a half. That all got started because of a dream each of us had held since childhood but never nourished until after we got together.

Each of us had also always dreamed about owning horses. As a child, I read every horse book I could get my hands on, including how to care for them, the different breeds, riding instructions, as well as all the famous children’s horse fiction, from Black Beauty to King of the Wind and Misty of Chincoteague Island.

Because we dreamed about it, we’ve been able to own horses at various points in our life; race horses in the early 90s, and a Saddlebred/Arabian gelding a decade later.

 

We pour our dreams and our hopes into our characters, so it seemed appropriate today to pull a quotation from one of them that surfaced for me after my meditation:

“Listen kid, if you hang around me much you’ll have to get used to expanding your dreams. I don’t dream small. It doesn’t take any more time to dream big than small.”

 

BLURB

When the chips are down, there’s nobody there.  Willowy blonde Daisy Matthews has survived the Chicago streets with this mantra, but she’s unprepared for the much older Nick Underwood’s urgent pursuit. The wealthy businessman receives a thoroughbred in payment for a bad debt and is thrust into Daisy’s world. She teaches him about horse racing; he teaches her about love. When Daisy’s seamy brother-in-law threatens Nick’s safety, she doggedly tries to stop him by herself, but flees to the familiar streets when he attacks. Can Nick find her in time – and if he does, will she still want him?

BUY AT AMAZON

Always free to read at Kindle Unlimited

 

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Filed Under: Blog, Romantic Suspense Tagged With: Dream big dreams, Dreaming, Happy New Year, horse racing, KU

Why had he come? #Sunday8 #wewriwa #SundaySnippet #MFRWAuthor #Contest

January 5, 2020 by Adriana Kraft

Our giveaway of an autographed print copy of Willow Smoke lasts all month – of course, you can always read it free at Kindle Unlimited!

Be sure to visit Weekend Writing Warriors to check out the rest of today’s exciting excerpts!

Contest details after our Sunday Snippet:

Riders Up

Book Three:

Willow Smoke

This May/September romantic suspense follows the teenage waif from the group home where Cassie worked in Book One. No longer a teenager, Daisy is carving a life for herself in spite of threats from her past.

EXCERPT

The sputtering sounds of the apartment buzzer penetrated Daisy’s sleep. She rolled over and pulled a pillow over her head. The buzzer continued ringing sporadically. “Go away,” she grumbled. “It’s Monday. It’s my day off.”

Scrambling off the futon, she grabbed her robe and poked her arms through the armholes as she strode angrily toward the entry. She’d have to remember to get the landlord to fix that damn buzzer. Maybe she should just snip the wires.

Daisy peered through the peephole and grew deathly still. Why had he come? She didn’t want him to know this part of her world. With fingers trembling slightly, she turned the knob and opened the door.

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Filed Under: Blog, Contests, Excerpts, Romantic Suspense Tagged With: contest, horse racing, KU, Romantic Suspense

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REVIEWS


Erotic Romance “Seducing Cat is a Must Read…Hot in all the right places!”


Love Bites and Silk Ties
Romantic Suspense: Mystery and Romance are woven well in The Painter is a Lady.


Romantic Suspense: “The Unmasking is a fascinating tale…some emotionally trying scenes.”


Erotic Romance FFM Menage: “Edgy characters, inclusive sexuality…The Reunion is not for the faint of heart.”


Erotic Romance FFM Menage: “The intimacy is genuine and breathtaking”

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