Book Blast: Audition

Publication Date: December 9, 2019

GENRE: Contemporary Romance

Summary

Blood and sweat. Bethany Lewis danced her way out of poverty. She’s a world class athlete… with a debt to pay.

Joshua North always gets what he wants. And the mercenary wants Bethany in his bed. He wants her beautiful little body bent to his will.

She doesn’t surrender to his kiss.

He doesn’t back down from a challenge.

It’s going to be a sensual fight… to the death.

Audition is the first book in an enthralling new trilogy from New York Times bestselling author Skye Warren.

Excerpt

Blinding lights. Aching lungs. Thunderous applause. The final show concludes the same way we rehearsed for months, the same way we performed for weeks. My muscles know the movements better than they understand rest. The prospect of after, of what comes next, makes my breath catch. Even as the primas take their bows, relief echoes around the stage. Vacations are planned. Relief for strained muscles. Everyone needs a break, even professional athletes. I’m the only one onstage dreading it.

We bow and curtesy with practiced grace. The curtain descends to the floor. Almost to the second we break formation—a flock of crows startled from the woods. The more exuberant among us, the young ones, the new ones, the ones using steroids, prance and jete toward the dressing rooms. Most of us limp our way out. One hundred percent of NFL players are injured every season. Professional dancing is the same. We hurl our bodies through the air, forcing massive impact through tired joints night after night. I catch my friend Marlena in my arms. Her face is white with pain.

“Ice,” she says. “Or better yet—tequila.”

I push my shoulder under hers as we exit the stage. “Don’t sell yourself short. You can have both.”

A delicate snort. “Not likely. We have to smile and flirt with the old men with big, fat wallets. And for what? I won’t be here next season. You won’t be, either.”

The reminder clangs inside me like a copper bell. I won’t be coming to the New York City Ballet after the break. We fall into our creaky chairs in the dressing room. “Are you going to miss it?”

“Miss it? Of course I’ll miss it.” Marlena turned twenty-eight last month. It’s comfortably retirement age for a dancer. “When the little children do their terrible pirouettes, when they sneeze and throw up and cry all over my leotard, I’ll think fondly of the beautiful art I left behind. Then I’ll be able to walk home. That won’t happen if I try to dance another season.”

“You’ll make a wonderful teacher. You know you were mine.” She didn’t teach me to dance. It was my first love, before I learned to flip and contort myself. Before I ever leapt from a trapeze bar.

Marlena taught me the ropes of the ballet company when I joined two years ago. Most of them thought I wouldn’t last a week. Some of them didn’t want me to. It’s a rigid world, the hierarchy stacked with graduates of Juilliard or the John Cranko school.

I don’t have a pedigree.

All I have is a body that does what it must, no matter how much it hurts.

Which means changing out of my sweaty leotard into a fresh one. We’re contractually obligated to attend the ball. Like Marlena said, we should smile and flirt with the high society people who attend. Both the male and female dancers have to do it. It’s what convinces the sponsors to write checks that will fund the next season. By the time they’re rehearsing The Nutcracker I’ll be in New Orleans, the place I swore I’d never return.

Author Bio

Skye Warren is the New York Times bestselling author of dangerous romance. Her books have sold over one million copies. She makes her home in Texas with her loving family, sweet dogs, and evil cat.

GIVEAWAY!!!!

Skye Warren will be awarding a $15 Amazon or Barnes and Nobel Gift Card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Click HERE to enter!!!

Wait

Synopsis

What are you waiting for?

Everyone has endured the endless traffic light, the queue that goes nowhere, the elevator music piped through the phone line. But what of those periods in your life when everything seems on hold? When you can’t do the next thing in your professional or personal life because you can’t get to it?

Waiting—be it for health, a life partner, a child, a job—can be an agony. The persistently unrealized goal feels like an endless road. And hope’s constant deferment can be exhausting. A firm answer against the thing you’re hoping for—”no”—might be easier than this constant lack of closure. It might be easier to give it up.

But what if waiting means to be something else? Waiting doesn’t have to mean idleness. Our prolonged state of need might teach us to look beyond the desired goal to something infinitely better. We find lessons on this throughout the Bible and, if we are paying attention, in our own lives.

Rather than fostering frustration, periods of waiting might have great truths to tell us. It might show us that hope is worthwhile. Waiting might even be a gift in and of itself.

Review

This is a book that I have not actually read yet; however, I am super excited about this book and what it has to offer. I honestly feel like I am always waiting on everything. Life, school, a long term relationship, happiness, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. And if I had to venture a guess, I would bet that I am not the only one that feels like their always waiting. As I read excerpts from this book, this one really hit home…

The first lesson of waiting is that we are on the outside. Like the boy on the sideline; like the not-engaged friend who pins wedding gowns on Pinterest; like me squinting for lines that fail to emerge on the pregnancy test; none of us–whether or not we are actively waiting– is where we want to be. This might not seem true, of course. This actually might seem patently untrue. You might be happily ensconced in a loving family, a marriage, a tight-knit circle of friends. You might belong to a country club or a sorority, a church, a civic group.

But, like that of all who wait, the human condition is actually a condition of being on the outside, an unhappy state that writers and poets have noticed since time out of mind. It’s true of all of us, but we manage to obscure it from ourselves with all manner of distraction: accumulated wealth and possessions, meaningful or frivolous activity, even what is truly good and beautiful.

The problem is that you can’t contend with something if you simultaneously ignore it. And the fact of our exile–the fundamental state of all human existence–is not going away.

Waiting can teach us this.

Wait by Rebecca Brewster Stevenson

I am excited to read this one, and it is defiantly on my TBR list in the near future!!!

Author Bio

Rebecca Brewster Stevenson is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She has a master’s degree from Duke University and has lived in Durham, North Carolina for over 20 years with her husband and three children.

Before dedicating herself to writing full time, Rebecca worked with Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill to develop the curriculum for their humanities department; she also worked as an English teacher at public and private middle and high schools in Durham and Pittsburgh.

Rebecca’s debut novel Healing Maddie Brees was published in 2016 to literary acclaim. Her beautifully crafted personal essays on her blog “Small Hours” have earned her a strong audience of readers who enjoy her explorations of themes relating to family, marriage, faith, writing, language, literature, and film.

To connect with Rebecca, visit her at rebeccabrewsterstevenson.com or follow her on Instagram @rebeccabrewsterstevenson.

Giveaway

Rebecca Brewster Stevenson will be awarding a $15 Amazon or B/N Gift Card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour. Enter to win HERE!!!