#SPeekSunday - 11/23/14 - Mortal Illusions - Familiar and Appealing #Vampires #Paranormal

For a vampire, love means watching someone you care about die.

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly excerpt hop where each author shares six paragraphs from a published work or a WIP (work in progress).

My submission for this week is from my 1st book, Mortal Illusions. A vampire romance published by New Concepts Publishing, Mortal Illusions is currently the first in a series of 3 books.  Its sequel, Fatal Desire, is currently under production.

In this excerpt, which is the beginning of the first chapter, Germaine St. Justine has sensed his former lover's pain and visits her in the hospital in an effort to ease her suffering.  After some gentle teasing combined with a soothing back rub, he gently bites her neck and draws out a few seconds worth of blood, then uses a hypodermic needle to withdraw blood from his arm.  Germaine adamantly refuses to make another vampire, but he doesn't want Marguerite to suffer.  Unfortunately, she wants more than he is willing to give, so to reassure her his affections haven't altered despite the many years they've been apart, he kisses her.  When Claire walks in to discover a stranger kissing her dying mother, she assumes the gentleman is up to no good and reacts accordingly.  Marguerite informs Germaine that Claire has set herself up as her personal watchdog--wanting to know what kind of treatments the hospital is giving her, along with all the other gory details about her care.  Germaine suggests Marguerite humors her daughter, by having her temperature taken again.

            Marguerite accepted the thermometer he held out for her without protest, but her eyes remained fixed on Germaine's.  Well? she asked him silently.

            Germaine could hear the frustration in Clarissa's sigh as she turned away from them in a pointed show of disapproval.

            I begin to wonder if George wasn't just a little too lenient with both his children, Germaine answered her.

            George believed in solid reasoning and praise, she responded in quick defense.

            Spare the rod . . . Germaine intoned.  Retrieving the thermometer, he extended it toward Clarissa without looking at it.  "Miss Danielson, you requested this I believe?"

            She practically snatched the glass tube from his fingers, then skirted around him to read the tiny numbers by the room's only light, a chrome-based lamp with a sixty-watt bulb.  "This is no better than candlelight," she grumbled, her face nearly pressed to the plastic shade.  While she was preoccupied with deciphering the tiny numerals, Germaine conducted a longer, more thorough appraisal of Marguerite’s daughter.  She was taller and thinner than he liked, as most young women of her generation tended to be, yet not too thin.  She had a delicately boned face capped by a fluff of wind-combed hair that was short by his standards, but not unattractively so.  And though he much preferred petite, soft-spoken women with long, silken curls a man could wrap his hand in, something about this female appealed to him in a strangely familiar way.

Marguerite's feisty daughter tends to attack first and ask questions later, a trait that is going to get her into a lot of trouble.

M/F, Contemporary vampire romance in a society based on D/s.

Read the first three chapters at: Mortal Illusions

Buy the book at NCP, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or ARe

Thanks for visiting.  I hope you enjoyed this brief excerpt and want more. Please click the link below to continue your hop Sneak Peek Sunday Wishing you a wonderful journey.