Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Travel in Time With Clover Autrey's Sweet Romance

Why a Time Travel?
I love the idea of a contemporary woman traveling back to a time and place where she is totally out of her element and has none of her support group, friends or family to go to. Surviving depends solely on her own wit and courage—as well as having to trust the not-so-modern-thinking hero.
What’s not to love about that scenario? Throw the heroine back into the arms of a guy in a kilt and I am so there.
Of course I can’t leave a world alone without magic, so I made the bare-kneed hero a sorcerer, tossed in some witches, healers, vampires, dragons and shape-shifters, and I have a whole new universe to play in.
Highland Sorcerer is the first of my Highland Sorcery novels where the heroes and heroines are flung back and forth through time and into alternative universes where all sorts of magical beings reside and history gets mucked up time and time again.
It all begins with Charity Greves who has the gift of healing. So when a wounded bleeding Highlander materializes out of the air into her kitchen, she does what any rational free-thinking herbalist under the same circumstances would do--she heals him. She didn’t expect to be drawn back to the 13th Century where a dangerous whacked-out witch holds the jaded Highlander captive.
Excerpt:
Charity Greves barely plunked her purse down on the counter when a mini-cyclone rippled through her kitchen, lifting her hair and zinging an electrical current down her spine—and a naked bleeding man materialized out of thin air.
And dropped to the linoleum.
Hey. She'd just mopped that floor.
She frowned. Sorcerer.
Had to be a sorcerer. They were the only magic wielders around who had the ability to travel a rift from one place to another.
A powerful one by the looks of him. There weren't many who could tune in and sense a healer across distances and fewer still who could open and travel through a rift while in the weakened condition he appeared to be in.
Her pulse kicked up a notch in fear. Backing up toward the door, she grabbed her cell phone to punch in 911, wondering just how dangerous the sorcerer could be, except…he didn’t look all that dangerous sprawled on her floor, bleeding all over it. Kicked puppy was more like it. And she was a healer who couldn’t exactly explain how a naked guy ended up in her apartment in that condition. Geez, get a grip and take care of the man.
He’d obviously come for help. Which was mildly flattering that someone within the magical community had actually heard of her for him to seek her out. Unless he had simply let his senses pick a healer out at random. All right, that wasn’t so flattering.
Charity pulled a stack of hand towels from a drawer and knelt down beside the guy. After all, it wasn't everyday she came home from the herb shop to have a wounded sorcerer travel across space especially for her world-renowned healing abilities.
Okay, so she wasn't world-renowned, and she’d only been sought out maybe three times before. At most. And one of those was a sorcerer seeking her mother, but technicalities. She'd been present when he came.
"All right, big guy, what's going on with you?" Yikes. These were not wounds of the stubbed-my-toe variety. He was covered in welts and gashes, blood and grime across his torso, hips and legs. Some of those cuts looked pretty deep. His eyes remained closed though the thick lashes fluttered with each pain-filled rise of his chest. His wrists were torn and chafed as though some kind of bindings had encircled them for a long time, some kind of thick band, not rope. Since nothing inorganic traveled through a space rift she couldn't be sure.
Whatever he'd endured, it had been horrible and her heart went out to him. What on earth had this sorcerer gotten himself into? And a more troubling thought: Would whatever he’d gotten himself into follow him here? She really didn’t want to get into any magical squabbles.
She lifted his head off the floor to get a few of the folded towels beneath him and then smoothed a lock of sweaty dark hair off his cheek.
He flinched at the touch, eyes snapping open, and before she knew what hit her, Charity was rolled onto her back with two hundred pounds of disoriented naked male on top of her, pinning her wrist against the floor.
His gaze tracked around her kitchen, dark brows scrunching together at the shiny red trash compactor before settling back on her.
"Are ye the Healer Enchantress?" he rasped and promptly passed out.

A little about Clover:
Clover’s books have been referred to as “Romance in the Safety Zone.” The pages are chock full of adventure, attraction, fantasy and love, safe enough to read with your daughter or your grandmother, yet not so sweet it will put you in a sugar coma. Clover calls Texas home and the world her backyard.

Highland Sorcerer on the Nook   http://bit.ly/bnhighlandsorcerer 


10 comments:

  1. Welcome to Sweet Not Spicy, Clover. Great excerpt!

    Morgan Mandel
    http://morgansbooklinks.blogspot.com

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  2. Thanks Morgan. I'm so excited to be here.

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  3. I love time-travel romance! This looks great!

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  4. Thanks Sally. They're so much fun to write.

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  5. I must confess that I haven't read any time-travel romance... but I'm going to start! This sounds fantastic. :)

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  6. Thanks Jaime. Glad to volunteer my book as a test subject.

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  7. Oooh! And now I want to read it too, in the limited time I DON'T have! :D

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  8. Ha! I hear you, Krysti (nice name btw). Never enough time for reading.

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  9. I have never liked standard scfi time travel fare because of all the technical convolutions that try to develop and then resolve the inevitable space/time conundrums (Your great great grandfather falls in love with you instead of your great great grandmother and poof, you don't exist anymore). Your story seems to be circumventing all of that by assuming that what happens is by metaphysical means and is just accepted without concern for the burdensome technical consequences. Good job avoiding all that!

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  10. Ha! Yeah, keep it simple--that's my motto. Magic beats technology every time. Just ask Luke Skywalker, which by the way, it's Star Wars day. May the Fourth be with you.

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