Author: Victoria Danann
Series: Sons of Sanctuary #1
Pages: N/A
Date Published: 2015
Publisher: 7th House Publishing
Format: Kindle
Genre: Romance
Brigid was a graduate student at the University of Texas. She had no trouble getting her thesis approved, but finding a Hill Country motorcycle club willing to give her access to their lifestyle was looking impossible. Then she got a lead. A friend of a friend had a cousin with family ties to The Sons of Sanctuary. Perfect. Or was it?
What Brigid wanted was information to prove a proposition. The last thing she had in mind was falling for one of the members of the club. Especially since she was a feminist academic out to prove that motorcycle clubs are organized according to the same structure as primitive tribal society.
Brash was standing in line at the H.E.B. Market when his world tipped on its axis. While waiting his turn to check out, his gaze had wandered to the magazine display and settled on the new issue of “NOW”. The image on the cover, although GQ’d up in an insanely urbane way, was… him.
After reading the article, Brash threw some stuff in a duffle and left his only home, a room at The Sons of Sanctuary clubhouse, with a vague explanation about needing a couple of days away. He left his truck at the Austin airport and caught a plane for New York, on a mission to find a mysterious guy walking around with his face.
~Try an Excerpt!~
“Sir?” Brash
Fornight gradually became aware that someone behind him in the grocery checkout
line was trying to get his attention. “Sir?” He refocused and glanced behind
him. The woman leaning on a cart overflowing with chip bags and cookie boxes
nodded toward the cashier indicating that it was his turn to move forward.
Brash looked her in the eye and had to give her props. Most people wouldn’t
have the balls to try to herd a guy wearing Sons of Sanctuary MC leather.
The club
employed a woman who cooked and did grocery shopping several times a week as
part of her job description, but Brash didn’t like to explain his relentless
craving for peanuts and he liked being teased about it even less. He didn’t
know whether it was the Vitamin B or the fat or just because he liked the
taste, but he couldn’t imagine going a day without them.
That’s how he
came to be standing statue still In the grocery checkout line, being prompted
by some woman with more nerve than sense. While he was waiting, his eyes
drifted over the magazine display and settled on the cover of “NOW”, on the
Most Eligible Bachelor edition no less. The debonair figure staring back was
wearing Brash’s own face and body. He looked different with short hair and a
four thousand dollar suit with the shirt fashionably open at the neckline, but
the similarity was inescapable.
On impulse he
grabbed the magazine and tossed it onto the conveyor belt with his week’s stash
of peanuts.
He stuffed
the bags into the saddlebags of his bike and roared toward home, nervously
tapping his fingers on handlebars at red lights, riding on shoulders to keep
from slowing down. He was anxious to get to the privacy of his own room and
read about Branach St. Germaine.
Two beers,
one jar of peanuts, and one “NOW” article later, Brash was sitting on the edge
of his bed looking at the wall, seeing nothing but his own heavy thoughts. He
pulled out his phone, looked up a website, and waited on hold for ten minutes
to hear the time of the next flight from Austin to New York.
There was a
flight to Newark in a little over three hours. He looked at his watch and
calculated the time it would take to drive from Dripping Springs at that time
of day. As he booked the flight, he stood up, walked to the small closet,
grabbed a duffel bag, and began shoving stuff into it. Ten minutes later, he
closed his door and locked it, threw the duffel over his shoulder, and headed
straight for the office downstairs. He dropped the duffel on the hallway floor
beside the closed door and knocked.
“Yeah?” Brash
looked inside, glad that his dad was by himself, and stepped in. “What’s up?”
“I’m takin’
personal time, Pop. Gonna be gone for a couple of days.”
“What the
hell is ‘personal time’?”
The gruffness
made Brash smile. “It means I’m not gonna be here if you call and I’m not
tellin’ you why.”
The Sons of
Sanctuary President looked up at Brash, over the top of his readers, and
narrowed his eyes. “You got a secret?”
“Everybody’s
got secrets.”
Brandon
Fornight studied his son for a minute. “True enough. Is it the kind of secret
that could affect this club?”
Brash shook
his head. “Don’t see how.”
“Well, then.
See you… When did you say you’d be back?”
“I didn’t.”
“Bein’
purposefully vague, are you?”
Brash
grinned. “That’s why they call it personal time. But I expect to be back
Friday.”
“You gonna
have your phone with you?” When Brash nodded, Bran looked back down at his
ledger in a deliberately dismissive gesture. “Well, get outta here then.”
Brash parked
his bike in the airplane hangar. The structure had already been on the property
when the club had bought it and turned it into a compound twenty years earlier.
They used part of it for vehicle maintenance and repair and part for parking.
Some of the
guys who were working looked over and shot curious glances his way when Brash
threw his duffel into his pickup and started it up, but it wasn’t their way to
ask questions. The Sons figured that if somebody wanted you to know something, they’d
tell you.
Brash took a
cab to a midtown hotel, wondering all the way why human beings would choose to
live in such a place. As he slid his credit card across the hotel counter to
the agent on duty, he glanced at the name, Brandon Fornight. It seemed unlikely
that it was a coincidence that that the mysterious look-alike’s first name
began with the same four letters. He ordered room service and pulled out his
laptop.
Getting intel
on the guy didn’t take advanced ops. Within an hour Brash knew where Brannach
St. Germaine worked, what kind of car he drove, what kind of women he dated,
who his tailor was, and where he liked to dine. There was no shortage of photos
online, but the one that grabbed his attention wasn’t one of the many with
starlets or debutantes on his arm. It was the one taken with his arm around his
mother as they were arriving together for some red carpet fundraiser. Brash had
an almost irresistible compulsion to reach up and touch her face on the screen
in front of him.
The knock on the
door signaled that room service had arrived. It cost a fortune, but looked and
tasted like shit. So he closed the computer and went out for a walk to clear
his head and find something edible.
~Meet Victoria!~
Victoria will be awarding a copy of the memoirs of Ash Armand, the celebrity who appears on the cover of Two Princes to 3 randomly drawn winners via rafflecopter during the tour.
The Order of
the Black Swan has won BEST PARANORMAL ROMANCE SERIES TWO YEARS IN A ROW (2013,
2014). Reviewers Choice Awards, The Paranormal Romance Guild.
Victoria
writes cross-genre with uniquely fresh perspectives on paranormal creatures, characters,
and themes. She is making her debut into contemporary romance with publication
of the SUMMER FIRE ultimate romance collection anthology with the intro to the
Sons of Sanctuary MC series. The first novel of that will be released June 16,
2015
Thank you for hosting
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