Another of those throw-away holidays no one knows about. And it’s a cryin’ damn shame.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but back in my youth, I was the girl in bellbottoms and embroidered headbands. I was sent home from school to change when I appeared wearing peace signs on my blue jeans. When I was a young woman, the thing I wanted most from my nation was for the passage of the ERA—the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s long, long overdue. Can you imagine if our equality under the law was guaranteed? Sure, we’ve had piecemeal protections put into place, but depending on the flavor of government that exists, those can disappear with the stroke of a pen.

Not to get political, and I don’t think this example is, but can you imagine if we used that amendment to make sure that government dollars going toward research for things like for heart disease had to pay equal attention to a woman’s pathology as they do men’s? Maybe doctors would actually have a better understanding of what happens when WE have heart attacks and better advice for prevention.

Equality—when did it become a bad word? And why does the majority (women) put up with being less than? Okay, I’ll take a deep breath now and push down my former flower child into the deep recesses of my heart and wish you all a very happy, thoughtful Women’s Equality Day! ~DD

UPDATE: The winner is…Beverly!
*~*~*

It’s another Play Date for all you “word nerds”!

Solve the puzzle then tell me your favorite types of romance book heroes for a chance to win a $5 Amazon gift card!

I’m absolutely thrilled the Forgotten Brotherhood is back. ANCIENT DESIRE is the latest installment in the paranormal romance series. Those of you who have read my Blood of the Drakon series will be familiar with drakons. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll fall in love with Lucius as much as I have. There’s nothing more possessive and protective than a drakon with his treasure.

Who are the Forgotten Brotherhood? They’re a group of paranormal assassins, the misfits that other paranormal creatures fear. They aren’t the monsters lurking under the bed. They’re the ones that kill them.

They live by a strict code: Kill only those that truly deserve it and let their gods sort them out. Kill them before they kill you. Never, ever betray a fellow assassin.

Ancient Desire
Forgotten Brotherhood Book 5

Nothing was supposed to wake half dragon, half human Lucius from his Deep Sleep. Nothing. And yet something, or rather someone has. The unexpectedly attractive human not only touched him. She kissed him. Now Lucius is awake, and more powerful than he has ever been in his 4,000 years of existence. And once he finds out who led her to his cave, he’ll deal with his 300 years of hunger…

College professor Raine Carson spent her life obsessed with myths and legends. And now she’s woken one up. Only, Lucius is nothing like anything she’s ever seen or read about in her history books. Because this man is part sexy badass and part terrifying…monster. Yet she wants him with a hunger like nothing she’s ever felt before.

Lucius used to be part of the Forgotten Brotherhood—a ruthless group of paranormal assassins. Now he’s unsure if his former Brothers are their allies…or enemies. All he knows is that someone is hunting him, and Raine is just as tangled up in this mess as he is. And he’ll protect her—even if it means unleashing his Dragon and all of its power.

TEASER:

“Who am I kidding? I’m going to die here with a stupid stone dragon who won’t even talk to me.” The glare she sent him was fierce. “This is all your fault.” She sniffed and pointed her finger at him. At him. He didn’t know whether to smite her or applaud her bravery. “If you hadn’t been here, I would never have come. I can’t figure out Mack’s angle. Why lead me all the way out here and trap me with you? The whole ‘an angel told me to do it’ adds another layer of weird. He could have killed me on the hike in, if all he wanted was my death.”

She wasn’t wrong. The whole thing seemed to be some kind of elaborate setup. He waited impatiently, wanting to know more.

“It has to tie in somehow with the grant I got to write my book from—wait for it—the Angel Foundation. That’s not a coincidence. Talk about too good to be true. I should have suspected something was up. My field of study isn’t exactly one that gets a lot of funding.

“I love teaching, don’t get me wrong, but I wanted time to write a book, maybe even two. And the grant was enough for me to take an entire year off work. Yesterday was my first day of my new adventure, and it probably marks the beginning of the end.”

She lifted her sleeve and rubbed it over her face. “I’m sorry to dump all this on you, but let’s face it. You’re the only one here.”

Giving a sigh, she leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s my own fault for believing in myths and legends. Did you know there are urban legends about werewolves and vampires in North Carolina?” She took a tiny sip of water. “But you’re real. You’re a freaking stone dragon.

Her insistence on referring to him as a dragon was beginning to annoy him.

“Are you based off some prehistoric flying dinosaur? Maybe they found some fossilized bones and this was their interpretation of what you might have looked like. Yeah, you’re probably nothing more than a flying dinosaur.”

The rumble came from deep inside him. Cracks appeared in his stone covering and traveled down to the ground beneath him.

“Holy crap.” Raine jumped to her feet, her hand pressed to her chest, her eyes wide.

The thick casing that had protected him for centuries crumbled. His limbs were stiff after so long, but there wasn’t enough room for him to stretch, not unless he wanted to bring the ceiling down around them.

He swiveled his head in her direction. “I’m no dinosaur. I am a drakon.”

Links:
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B7G3QHRK/
Entangled Publishing: https://entangledpublishing.com/books/ancient-desire
B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ancient-desire-n-j-walters/1141872172
Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/ancient-desire
iBooks: https://books.apple.com/us/book/ancient-desire/id6443213388

Check out the rest of the series: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086BT7QJL/

About the Author

N.J. Walters is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who has always been a voracious reader, and now she spends her days writing novels of her own. Vampires, werewolves, dragons, assassins, time-travelers, seductive handymen, and next-door neighbors with smoldering good looks—all vie for her attention. It’s a tough life, but someone’s got to live it.

Visit N.J. at:
Website: https://www.njwalters.com
Blog: https://www.njwalters.blogspot.com
Newsletter Sign Up: https://eepurl.com/gdblg5
Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/N.J.WaltersAuthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/njwaltersauthor
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/NJWalters
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/author/njwalters
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/n-j-walters

This post is just a shout-out to my loyal readers so you know what’s in the works. I love all the covers here, especially this one for Guarding Hannah, which will be my next new release! I’ve had a blast working with a special authors group inside my sister Elle James’s Brotherhood Protectors world. I’ve written Defending Evangeline and Victoria’s Six. Next up is Guarding Hannah! It’s part of the special Team Wolf series. Check out all the stories in that short series here: Team Wolf.

Let me know what you think of this lineup!

Guarding Hannah

Guarding Hannah
Book #2 of Brotherhood Protectors, Team Wolf
Coming October 18

Nate “The Edge” Edgerton prefers dogs to humans, like Pierce, the retired war dog who saved his life in Afghanistan, because he prizes loyalty above all else. He trusts his team and his dog but has learned to be cautious trusting women. After Pierce rushes to the rescue of a nature photographer being threatened by wolf poachers, Nate earns his first assignment as a Brotherhood Protector. He’ll keep her safe but keeping his heart secure will prove to be the hardest part of the job.

Hannah Mackey, a nature photographer tracking wolves, photographs poachers in the act of killing a wolf and she’s a second away from being shot herself when a large black dog rushes to her rescue, followed by a very handsome and angry man.

When Nate brings her to the Brotherhood Protectors, she’s dismayed that they’re insistent on providing her protection from retaliation by the well-organized poachers, especially when they assign Nate as her protector. She has a job to do, and she’s not going to let the threat from a criminal gang stop her from doing it. She also doesn’t need the big, brooding man following her around. His dog, she’ll take, but Nate? Hell, no. Been there, burned the wedding dress.

Pre-order your copy now!

More books to add to your pre-order list!

Hard Knox
Book #1 of We are Dead Horse series
Coming October 25

Pre-order here!

Mica
Book #8 of Montana Bounty Hunters: Dead Horse, MT, series
Coming February 28

Pre-order here!

Cold Hard Cash
Book #2 of We are Dead Horse series
Coming April 25

Pre-order here!

Jackson
Book #9 of Montana Bounty Hunters: Dead Horse, MT, series
Coming June 16

Pre-order here!

UPDATE: The winner is…miki!
*~*~*

The last line of “The Star-Spangled Banner” has always struck me as the greatest irony of the entire song. “Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” So many people in this country have that flag waving over them yet they are not free to be their authentic selves because of the -isms running rampant throughout US history. Jews who chose to change their names, gays who chose to remain in the closet, people of color who chose to pass for white. These subterfuges many times were taken not because of shame for their identity but because of lack of opportunity and/or safety. Such is the story of Belle da Costa Greene.

Belle was born Belle Marian Greener in Washington D.C. to an African American family, which numbered among the Black elite of the late 1800s. Her father, Richard T. Greener, was the first African American to graduate from Harvard. Although light enough to pass for white, he never did. Despite the horrific dismantling of Reconstruction and its immediate impact on their family’s situation in South Carolina, Greener lived his life as a vocal advocate for equal rights for his race. His wife however came to a different conclusion: passing for white would enable her family to have the opportunities and safety they deserved. They moved to New York and lived as whites. This choice however led to her parents’ separation.

Belle’s father’s love of illustrated manuscripts instilled a love for the written word in her. She trained as a librarian and was working at Princeton University’s library where she caught the eye of Junius Morgan, J.P. Morgan’s nephew. This led to the opportunity of a lifetime, and in 1905, she became the librarian/curator for J.P. Morgan’s library. She helped him amass a collection that became world famous and envied by museums around the world. Quite an accomplishment in the days before suffrage was achieved and career women were looked at with suspicion.

She retired from the Morgan Library in 1948, one year before her death. By then, she had enabled Morgan’s dream to come true: to make his library available as a resource to the public. I was glad once again to learn of another heroic Black woman, both from The Personal Librarian, a fictionalized account of her life and the biography, An Illuminated Life: Belle Da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege. However, I felt sad society wouldn’t have allowed her to accomplish all she had if she’d claimed her true heritage. I was also moved by the emotional costs Belle paid for choosing to live while hiding in plain sight. Her choice showed a woman could still be brave even if the land in which she lived wouldn’t let her be free.

For a chance at a $10 Amazon gift card, share the name of someone you admire who may have had to change their name or hide some part of who they were to succeed.

One Breath Away

Sentenced to hang for a crime she didn’t commit, former slave Mary Hamilton was exonerated at literally the last gasp. She returns to Safe Haven, broken and resigned to live alone. She’s never been courted, cuddled or spooned, and now no man could want her, not when sexual satisfaction comes only with the thought of asphyxiation. But then the handsome stranger who saved her shows up, stealing her breath from across the room and promising so much more.

Wealthy, freeborn-Black, Eban Thurman followed Mary to Safe Haven, believing the mysteriously exotic woman was foretold by the stars. He must marry her to reclaim his family farm. But first he must help her heal, and to do that means revealing his own predilection for edgier sex.

Hope ignites along with lust until the past threatens to keep them one breath away from love…

Excerpt from One Breath Away…

The forecast is for thunderstorms and rain throughout the day. We’ve been up early, preparing.

My dd and SIL fed and thoroughly walked dogs. We’re all charging devices.

I’m trying to get as much work crammed into the time we have left as possible. If you don’t live in a rural area where you don’t have buried power lines, you haven’t “enjoyed” the kinds of outages we experience when trees topple over lines (and we are a heavily forested area!). Some outages can last days, and we have a nice generator to keep the fridge cool and charge up our phones. However, running computers is a luxury. There’s no internet except for what we can get when we walk far out into the yard to get some bars. We have a propane grill and a charcoal smoker, so we can cook food. We won’t go hungry.

Hopefully, we’ll only go down for a few hours or a day.

Longer becomes a problem because we all like warm showers! The girls will be screaming about not being able to use their blow dryers getting ready for school, but that’s the trade-off for living in the country. Wide open spaces, trees, wildlife—goats—vs. “power insecurity”. We’re okay with that. I’ll charge up my laptop and keep it open so dropbox continues to update. I’ll pull out my paints and use daylight and then candlelight to play. My dd and her kids will pull out board games. It’s all good.

What about you? Do you suffer power insecurity from time to time?

Have you ever given your significant other a second chance? This is Chloe Morgan’s dilemma. She’s fed up with Ward Reyes. He’s a part-time boyfriend and she wants more. She wants dates. She wants a guy to wake up to on a lazy Sunday morning. Ward isn’t that guy. So, when she dumps him, Ward sits up and takes notice. He isn’t willing to simply walk away from the best thing that’s ever happened to him. Not without a fight.

Last Chance to Call You Mine: Dirty Addiction

Obsessions come in all flavors…

Chloe Morgan is weak. At least she is when it comes to Ward Reyes. She can turn down donuts like a wrestler during training, but when her on-again-off-again boyfriend blows into town looking for a booty call she goes down like a sinking ship. Only a drastic action can get her to move on with her life and away from the silver-eyed devil. Was it wrong to send him a break-up text? Definitely, but her choices are limited considering she’s an addict. But what if Ward is the only man that can give her what she so badly desires?

“We’re through.” Ward read the text a dozen times and still can’t believe it. But the proof is there in black and white. His sweet Chloe is giving him the boot. At first, it’d been the blazing heat between them that captivated Ward. It was Chloe’s giving nature and sarcastic wit that kept him coming back for more. Unfortunately his life is a mess, thanks to his brother’s gambling habit. Ward has spent the better part of his life cleaning up Malcolm’s messes. He’s tried to keep the ugliness of it all from touching Chloe. Now, she’s threatening to walk away and Ward isn’t about to let her go without a fight.

Will Chloe give him one more chance? Read the excerpt from Dirty Addiction and find out!
Universal Purchase link for My Perfect Pleasure Anthology:
https://books2read.com/u/mZQqql

Excerpt:

Ward closed the distance between them and wrapped an arm around her middle, tugging her up close. “I’m not walking away without a fight. I care about you. And I know you care about me.”

One brow lifted as she stared up at him. “I’ll get over it.”

“No, you and I belong together,” he explained. “I fucked up, I admit that, but I’m going to fix it. I promise you.”

She bit her lower lip and looked away. “It’s too late for that, Ward.”

“It’s never too late, baby,” he murmured, aching to kiss her senseless.

The doorbell rang and Chloe let out a heavy sigh. “That’ll be Lauren.”

He let her pull out of his arms, but Ward wasn’t through. “I’ll go, but I’m coming back tomorrow. You and I have unfinished business.”

She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “If you come back, then you’d better be ready to share everything with me,” she warned. “Everything, Ward. No more half-measures. It’s all or nothing.”

He watched her, knowing it was now or never. “I hope you’re ready for that.” And he hoped the truth wouldn’t send her running in the opposite direction…