Blog Tour & Giveaway: Into the Fire by Amanda Usen

 

 

 

Today I'm excited to be participating in the Blog Tour for Into the Fire by Amanda Usen!  Read the excerpt below and see why cooking isn't the only thing getting the kitchen hot!! This tour is hosted by Entangled Publishing.  Thanks for allowing us to participate!  Be sure to scroll down and enter the giveaway in the rafflecopter below.

 

 

 

Into the Fire by Amanda Usen

Publication Date: June 10th 2013 by Entangled Indulgence

Pages: 201

Genre: Romance

Purchase Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Kobo

 

About the book: Jackson Calabrese has a lot of nerve. He beat Lila Grant in the Culinary Academy competition using her recipes. Now, he’s opening a restaurant and wants her help? Fine, she'll fix his menu, but it's going to cost him.

Heir to the Calabrese restaurant empire, Jackson can buy anything he wants, except creativity, so he buys Lila's instead. He can craft perfect paella, but to take New York by storm he needs her innovative spark.

Skillets aren't the only things hot in the kitchen, and an uneasy truce ignites into passion. They’re great in bed, but Jackson doesn't trust her, and Lila is contemplating revenge. The restaurant opening approaches, the menu is completed, and the tables are set for one final act of betrayal. How can love bloom in the midst of such a hot mess?

 

EXCERPT

Lila felt her jaw drop. Hell, no. Not again. “The last time you proposed something, I said no, and you ran roughshod over my life. I’m not real fond of your propositions.”

“Don’t knock it. That particular proposition is going to make you a wealthy woman…if you can fix the menu. But you just said you need my help to do it. You want something from me. I want something from you, too. Let’s negotiate.”

He made it sound logical, but she didn’t trust the gleam in his eyes. Maybe she could do the menu without him after all. Maybe she hadn’t tried hard enough. In fact, she had a great idea for another chicken dish right now. She turned her back on him and headed for the line.

Jack followed her. “It isn’t going anywhere,” he said quietly, as she pulled marinated chicken halves out of the lowboy.

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“The attraction between us. It isn’t going anywhere.”

Her heart hammered in her chest, and she fought a wild urge to pinch herself. She was awake, right? Her dreams about Jack had become so real, she woke up aching, wanting him more than she wanted her next meal or even her next paycheck, but that was fantasy Jack. This was real Jack. Real Jack was a user, and since it was hard for her to fight her natural inclination to be helpful, she had to resist him. No more propositions.

She ignored him and laid the chicken breasts on the grill.

He took the tongs out of her hand. “I propose we declare a truce.”

She tried to snatch the tongs back, but he held them out of reach. In order to get them, she’d have to climb straight up his body. Heat flashed through her. The thought was so tempting, she went to the dish room to get another set of tongs.

When she turned back toward the kitchen, Jack was standing directly in front of her. “Move,” she commanded, staring at the center of his broad chest.

He didn’t budge. “You want to talk about food so you can fix my menu. I propose we have some fun while we do it.”

“Fun?” She was having trouble focusing on his words and even more trouble stringing a sentence together. He smelled good, like rosemary in the sun. The gap at the top of his chef coat displayed his tan throat, making her remember how good it had felt to press her lips to the hollow where his pulse beat. It didn’t make sense. She did not like this man. He was arrogant, manipulative, and utterly used to getting his own way. She should not want to kiss him. Kissing Jack was dangerous—like drowning in something that tasted good. He was like the chocolate cake she couldn’t resist, full of artery-clogging butter and heavy cream, heaven in her mouth but hell on her heart.

“Fun.” His eyes gleamed, and a wicked smile crossed his lips. A strangled sound escaped her throat. She clamped her lips shut. He chuckled. The bastard knew exactly what he was doing to her. The heat between them was undeniable and impossible to ignore. She was trying, though. He could cut her a break and try a little harder, too.

 “Jackson,” she warned. “Get out of my way.”

His throat was so close to her lips, her mouth watered.

“Remember the graduation party, Delilah? The dry storage room? Remember how much fun we had? Before all the other stuff got in the way…”

“You mean before you used my ideas, bought Personal Chef, forced me to work for you…”

“The sex part is good, Lila. The best.”

 

 

About the Author: Amanda Usen knows two things for certain: chocolate cheesecake is good for breakfast, and a hot chef can steal your heart. Her husband stole hers the first day of class at the Culinary Institute of America. She married him after graduation in a lovely French Quarter restaurant in New Orleans, and they spent a few years enjoying the food and the fun in the Big Easy. Now they live in Western New York with their three children, one hamster, two guinea pigs, a tortoise, and a new-to-them beagle. Amanda spends her days teaching pastry arts classes and her nights writing romance. If she isn’t baking or writing, she can usually be found chasing the kids around the yard with her very own hot chef husband. Find Amanda on:

 

Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Facebook | Sign-Up for Newsletter

 

Want chimichurri, chocolate cake or Chicken Alighieri? Visit Amanda at http://www.amandausen.com, where you can find recipes for many of the yummy dishes in her books. She can also be found on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/amandausen) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/AmandaUsen) if you want to chat about romance, writing, or recipes.

 

 

Tour-Wide Giveaway

 

Amanda Usen is offering winners a chance to at some wonderful prizes during the Into the Fire Blog Tour.

Grand prize: $25 gift card (Amazon, B&N, or The Book Despository) and gets to name Betsy’s hero in Book 3 of the Hot Nights series & give him 1 author-approved trait".

Runner Up: $15 gift card (Amazon, B&N, or The Book Despository) and the chance to pick a dish to go into book three of the Hot Night series (Amanda will also share the recipe on her website).

Consolation Prizes: 5 random winners will get Amanda’s favorite kitchen tool: a mini offset spatula

Simply fill out the rafflecopter form provided below for your chance to be entered.

Review: Wife in Name Only by Hayson Manning

Wife in Name Only by Hayson Manning
Published on April 1, 2013 by Entangled Indulgence
Purchase: Amazon

About the book
Trapped in a loveless marriage, Zoe Hughes escaped to make a new life for herself on the tiny island of Tonga. Now she runs a successful boutique honeymoon resort. Selling true love is easy. No one needs to know she's married in name only. At least until America’s premier honeymoon magazine wants to publish a feature on her perfect marriage. Now she must convince her estranged husband to rip himself away from plotting corporate takeovers in LA to save her island paradise.

Rory agrees to come for forty-eight hours, but only because he needs the positive PR. To his surprise, the wife he finds in Tonga isn’t the same woman he married. Now she’s so much more…

When a storm strands Rory in Tonga, will he win back his wife or leave paradise empty-handed?

My Thoughts
Wife in Name Only was your typical romance storyline with a slight twist.  Sometimes this typical storyline works and sometimes it doesn't.  Hayson Mannings story does work with a few exceptions.

Zoe and Rory haven't lived together or spoken in over a year.  When Zoe felt like her marriage wasn't going to get any better she ran.  She ran several miles away to start a Honeymoon resort on a secluded island, but she needs publicity.  And with everyone still thinking her marriage is wonderful she calls the one person she swore she never would again, Rory her husband.  With both of them needing to look good in front of the media he agrees to come to the island and help her.  Little does she know that Rory has another agenda, bring his wife home to L.A.  Problem is Zoe is happy on her island and L.A. does not agree with her so Rory has to figure out a way to convince her otherwise.

This story was a lot of push and pull.  One minute Zoe and Rory are all heavy stares and sexual tension and then in the next line someone is stalking off or remembering why they aren't together anymore.  This kind of push and pull works in the beginning but after a while it gets to be a little irritating.  I liked that Zoe wasn't falling over herself to sleep with Rory, but at the same time she let her hormones get the best of her too many times.  Rory had the same problem.  These two needed to learn what went wrong in their marriage and deal with it.  I wanted them together of course and I am happy with the way things ended but the way to their HEA was a bumpy one that I think could have been smoothed over.

There were a couple of things that bothered me with this story.  The main one being all the descriptions on how hot both characters were.  If felt like every other sentence one of them was detailing how hot the other was.  It was too much in my opinion and didn't make me feel connected to either character.  I prefer realistic characters and while yes I know fictional characters need to have that fantasy appeal I still want the ones I read to be a little more down to Earth.  Rory was too hot and felt like the guy that I never would have approached and might have even felt ridiculed by in real life.  I did like Zoe's personality and I probably would have connected to her if she hadn't been overly described.

My other problem was the flow of the story.  The writing felt a little too stilted at times and I felt myself getting lost from chapter to chapter.  I always had to reread the previous lines when the scene would change because the story didn't flow and left me confused.

Other than those two things I did enjoy the story.  There is a slight twist with Zoe and someone on the island that gave the story a mystery I appreciated.  I did at the end enjoy both Rory and Zoe I just wish that had happened a lot sooner.

 3 Suns