Gifts of Love - 'The Desert King's Secret Heir' by Annie West

Hi everyone! I'm thrilled to be sharing news of my current release THE DESERT KING'S SECRET HEIR, and to muse a little on one of the themes that found its way into the story - love tokens.

I was talking with one of my children recently about how special it is when someone prepares a meal for you, not because you paid for one but because they care for you. That led to a discussion about the many ways we show love, with gifts or favours, with actions as well as words. And that led me straight back to my desert king! Hey, I'm an author - of course I spend my time thinking about my characters.

This is a reunion story about a couple who were lovers for a brief time years before but were parted in difficult circumstances. When they meet again, under the scrutiny of the world's press, Idris is now a royal sheikh. He demands Arden marry him for the sake of the son she'd had and who Idris hadn't known about. They embark on a marriage of convenience, each believing the other couldn't possibly love them. 

I don't think I'm giving away secrets if I tell you they're both wrong! Along the way the reader sees the various ways they begin to reveal their love in actions if not words.

But one of the tokens of affection that becomes a real theme in the book is flowers. Arden is a florist. On her way to Idris's royal palace, passing through streets lined with silent people paying homage to their prince and his soon-to-be-bride, she sees one person with a gift for her. It's the first evidence of affection Arden receives in her new country. Here's a snippet. Idris is on horseback while Arden and their son Dawud are behind him in a limo:

‘Highness. The car. It’s stopped.’

Instantly alert, Idris whipped around, pulling his horse to a halt.

There was no sign of a problem yet his heartbeat quickened, his body tense, ready for action as he scanned the street for signs of an ambush. Security was a necessity these days, yet in his homeland Idris had always felt his bodyguard was more to satisfy tradition than because of any threat.

But if anyone were to threaten Dawud and Arden—

The rear door of the limousine opened and she emerged, the afternoon sun turning her hair to spun rose gold. The quiet crowd seemed to still completely. The silence grew complete so that the thud of his horse’s hooves as it pranced towards the car filled the void. That and the rough pulse of blood in his ears.

What was she doing? No stop had been scheduled. Was she ill? Was his son ill?

Idris vaulted from his horse, thrusting the reins into the hand of a nearby guard, then slammed to a halt.

That’s why the cavalcade had stopped?

Arden crossed to the side of the street where the onlookers crowded in the shade of an ancient shop awning. Near the front of the packed group one single person had ignored tradition. A girl, no more than six or seven by the look of her skinny frame. She sat in a wheelchair, gripping a straggly bouquet of flowers, her eyes huge as Arden approached.

In her slim-fitting, straw-coloured suit that gleamed subtly under the fierce sun, Arden probably looked like a creature from another world to the girl.

The sight of Arden, cool and sophisticated with her high heels and her hair up, unadorned yet lovely, had stolen his breath when he’d seen her. The air had punched from his lungs as desire surged, as fresh and strong as it had been years ago. Desire and admiration and something else, some emotion that was tangled up in the fact she’d borne his child. His responsibility to protect. His.

His visceral reaction had been possessiveness. The desire to claim her, and with far more than words, had sent him into retreat. He’d taken a separate vehicle to the airport and then on the plane had immersed himself in work. Keeping his distance meant keeping control.

Arden stopped before the girl and crouched down, saying something he couldn’t make out. He strode across, his steps decisive on the ancient cobbles.

The girl whispered something, shyly smiling, and held out the flowers which, he saw now, were no more than a collection of wildflowers such as grew in the rare fertile areas near the city. One of them, yellow as the sun, looked like a dandelion.

But Arden held them carefully, as if they were the most precious bouquet.

When Idris's people see Arden's response to the bouquet word soon gets out that she loves flowers. Soon the palace is bombarded with floral gifts, but not quite in the way you would expect (you'll have to read the book to discover why). And if you want to read it, here are a couple of links to buy it:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
iBooks
Kobo
Harlequin

I love receiving flowers and I've included here a photo of one of my favorites: tulips. There's something about them that always makes me feel good.

I'd love to hear what gifts you've given or received with love - the ones that stand out to you!

Don't forget, if you want to know more about any of my books, head to my website where you can sign up for my exclusive newsletter and read excerpts, news and behind the scenes details.

Spring has Sprung! :: Anne McAllister

It's that time of year again!

I've spent lots of years in a cold climate  blessed, most years, with plenty of snow.  So when it gets to be March, I start looking around for signs of spring.

This year the signs began appearing well before March.  I teach class one day a week, and the first week in February one of the women in my class came in late and rather breathless and announced, "I've just seen a flock of robins!"

We practically all stampeded to the door to see what she'd seen. And yes, there they were.

There were crocuses well above the snow a couple of weeks ago, and the daffodils are pushing their way up by the back door.

When we went for a walk with the dogs yesterday, I could see that the scilla was beginning to come up, too. In a few weeks -- or less -- it will be blanketing the lawns hereabouts.

Blue lawns always make me smile.  I didn't grow up in this climate, so I've had to learn all about it. The first time I saw a

blue lawn, I thought I was seeing things as I drove past in a car.   I couldn't imagine what was making it blue.  Now I always make it a point to walk the dogs past all the blue lawns in our neighborhood just to enjoy the spectacle. It doesn't take much to make me happy, I guess.

Or maybe it's the feeling that we are coming out of hibernation, that we don't have to bundle up to our eyeballs to go out and get the mail anymore.

It even makes me happy -- most of the time -- to wipe the dogs feet every time they come back in after an excursion around the back yard.

In spring I measure the weather in 'dog-foot days.'  The more times they go in an out, multiplied by how many feet I have to dry (or sometimes wash and dry) is an indication of just how muddy it is out there.  Today was a "48 dog foot day," which is pretty

muddy -- particularly since I ended up washing one dog's feet every time she came in.

Still, I'm not complaining. It's spring. The book is coming along.  I'm going to see three reprints this spring when my Tanner Brothers trilogy comes back with brand-new covers. And I'm going to get to post them on my newly updated website (still in progress, but check around Easter and it might well be there!).  That will feel like spring all over again!

What are your favorite signs of spring?  (My apologies to all readers from Down Under for this very geographically oriented post. Feel free to tell me what you love about autumn.  I'm pretty fond of it, too!).


Photo credits: 
1) Dakota Lynch: own work. An American robin searching for food in a Missouri field.          CC BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license.
2) crocus By Thomas Wolf (Der Wolf im Wald) (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
3) Ixtlilto (Own work) [Public domain], Creative Commons via Wikimedia 
Commons
4) BSchenck: own work 
5 BSchenck: own work

Christina Hollis: Six Tips For Keeping Your Valentine's Day Flowers Fresh

On Sale Now!

Happy Valentine's Day! I’ve written before about how I had to wait until I’d left school and started work before I experienced the romance of getting an  anonymous Valentine's Day card. As for flowers—well, not one of my boyfriends was old-fashioned enough to send me a bouquet, until I met OH. He knows how much I love flowers, so he often picks up a bunch on his way home from work. It's a really romantic gesture, which is why I’ve made sure Sara, the heroine of my new book, His Majesty's Secret Passion, gets the right royal treatment. Her boyfriend has just dumped her, and she makes an embarrassing mistake in front of a handsome stranger. King-in-disguise Leo sends her a huge explosion of sumptuous lilies—but it's not the romantic gesture you might expect.  There's a sting in the tail (and the tale!) of Leo's generosity.

Sara's flowers are arranged for her by staff at the luxury hotel where she's having the holiday of a lifetime. If you want to keep your Valentine's Day bouquet (or any cut flowers, for that matter) fresh for as long as possible, here are my top tips:

1. If your bouquet comes complete with cut-flower food, mix that up according to the instructions. Use tepid water, as flowers find this easier to drink. If your bouquet didn’t come with a sachet of flower food, you can make your own. Dissolve a dessertspoon of sugar in a little hot water, add a teaspoon of bleach, and put this mixture to your vase before topping it up with plain water.  

2. Work at a sink—or over the bath, if you’ve been very lucky! Strip off any leaves that would be under water when arranged in your vase. Trim off the bottom half inch of each stem at a slant, to give a big surface area. Then put each flower straight into a bucket of tepid water, so the cut surfaces don’t have time to dry out. 

3. Flowers with hollow stems need help to draw up water, as those stems are full of air. Turn each one upside down, fill the stem with tepid water, and put your finger over the end. Turn the flower right way up again, get the cut surface below the water in your vase, then take your finger away. It helps to work fast with this trick!

By Liz West

4. Stand your finished arrangement out of direct sunlight. The flowers won’t open so quickly, and they’ll keep their true colours for longer. Don’t stand them near the fruit bowl, either. Bananas in particular give off ethylene gas, which promotes ripening in fruit, and ageing in flowers. 

5. Last thing at night, move your flowers to the coolest part of the house. This could be at the bottom of the stairs, but you may need to take them out to the garage. Just make sure they are kept cool, but not frozen. 

6. Every few days, empty out all the water, wash the vase and repeat the stem trimming. Snip off any flowers and/or leaves past their best. Fill the vase with fresh, tepid water including more cut-flower food, or the home-made sugar and bleach mixture.

You can keep some cut flowers going for nearly three weeks using these tips, although what starts out as a full bouquet will dwindle as time goes on.   

What’s the best Valentine’s Day present you’ve ever had? There’s a signed copy of His Majesty's Secret Passion on offer for a comment drawn at random, after 15th February.

Christina Hollis writes contemporary fiction starring complex men and independent women–when she isn't cooking, gardening or beekeeping. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she’s sold over two million books worldwide. You can catch up with her at http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com, on Twitter, Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at http://www.christinahollis.com. Her current release, His Majesty's Secret Passion, is available from its publishers,  Wild Rose Press, and also from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Signs of Spring :: Anne McAllister

I just came home from a week in Texas.  It was like fast forwarding through the first bit of spring.

Or it should have been.

As it happened, I packed spring things – you know, t-shirts, cropped jeans, sandals – and I should have packed a heavier jacket, a raincoat, and umbrella and more wool socks.  But that’s beside the point because, despite unseasonably lousy weather for half of my visit, the other half was splendid.

And I saw spring flowers. Bluebonnets, actually. Lots and lots of bluebonnets.  And I saw buds on trees. I saw flowers that we won’t be seeing for at least another three or four weeks. 

It was lovely. It was like skipping through the last dregs of winter – those snowstorms that the weather people promise (well, hint, anyway) will be the last of the season.  It was going to bed one night with the temperature at 39 and piling four (count ‘em. I did, religiously, as I piled them on because there was really nothing much in the way of heat) comforters, and waking up in the morning to find it was 60 degrees – and by noon it was 75. 

Sorry, I’m not going to convert that to Celsius for you.  Think of this as your math lesson today, and you can have extra credit if you get all the temps right.  What’s the extra credit?  Brownie points?  A free book?  Take your pick.

Anyway, I had a great time.  And I came home last night –and brought the rain with me.  Not sure how that happened, but all night long we had thunderstorms and I had a dog doing heavy-breathing in my ear. He has a Thundershirt, but I had to get up and find it before I could put it on him – and I had to turn on the light to do that. And after that, well, who could go back to sleep?

Like I said, signs of spring.

Here we are getting a few – the daffodils are not quite ready to burst into flower but they are at least poking their stems above the parapet these days.  When I left they weren’t.  The robins are out in full force – flocks of them. The geese are hedging their bet by flying, well, sort of due east these days. But once in a while a vee of them turns north.

And the dandelions are actually making a showing. Trust weeds to get a jump of everything else.  But they are cheerful and bright and that’s what we need now that the snow is gone (momentarily at least) and the grass still isn’t totally green yet.

My book, too, is looking cheerier. After a year-long winter, it’s moving into spring. My hero, who has been hibernating for I don’t even want to tell you how long, has yawned and stretched and opened and eye. He’s actually deigned to say a few things that I’m not instantly inclined to delete. My heroine has her bridesmaid dress for the wedding that will happening in June. 

Not long now.  Summer will be here before we know it.  But I’m going to bask in spring for as long as I can.  How about you?  What’s your favorite season? What signs of spring make you happiest? Or if you’re heading into autumn and winter, how do you feel about that?  Ready for it?  I’ll share mine with you!

photo credits:

1: User:Drumguy8800/Picture|Scalable Vector Graphic map of the location of Tarrant County in the state of Texas, via Wikimedia Commons.

2: Mannypr (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

3: Christoph Michels (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)  via Wikimedia Commons.

4: Photograph taken by and (c)2007 Johnathan J. Stegeman (Midimacman) (Own work) [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.

5: By Sujit kumar (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

 

The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring, Tra La!

by Anna Campbell

As promised last month, today I've got a stack of photos of Ballarat's beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens to share with you all.

I hope you're in the mood for spring flowers!

Here's the website for the gardens if you'd like more info on this beautiful corner of Australia: http://www.ballarat.com/botanicgardens/gardens/index.htm

At the start of October, I had a week of travel. I had a weekend in Melbourne and then went out to stay with good friends in Ballarat.

The last time I was in Ballarat, it was a dust bowl. They hadn't had rain for years. The huge lake in the center of town was a paddock with a muddy puddle in the middle of it. Trees that were hundreds of years old were dying for lack of water. All very tragic.

This time I visited after Victoria has had extensive rainfall and it was a different place. Lush and verdant and teeming with life. You would honestly think you were in England, some of these fields were so green and pleasant.

I had a lovely morning at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens and went wild with the camera. These are some of the shots!

You'll notice that there's a definite European flavor to the plants and design of the gardens. Deliberately so. Ballarat is a town that was founded on the fortune in gold discovered in the area. In the Victorian era, it was packed with homesick and well-to-do Britons who wanted to recreate a corner of their homeland in what they saw as an arid and alien landscape.

So we get roses and poppies and camellias and magnificent European trees. Because of Dutch elm disease, the elms in Victoria count as one of the last places in the world where you can see mature versions of these magnificent trees.

A treat at the Ballarat Gardens is Adam Lindsay Gordon's cottage. ALG was an early Australian poet who is the only Aussie writer featured in Westminster Abbey, quite an honor.

Here's his Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Lindsay_Gordon

He had a difficult and tempestuous life full of drama and incident. This scion of an aristocratic Scottish family was famous as a jockey and a wild boy.

Here's a picture of his statue which currently stands outside the Victorian parliament in Melbourne. That's a saddle at his feet, in tribute to his abilities as a horseman.

His poetry is full of vim and vigor. One of my favorite quotes of his is the one that many people know, even if they don't know who penned it:

Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone -- 
Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own.

It's not a bad philosophy, is it? The Queen quoted it in her Christmas message a few years ago - which I thought was a nice tribute to Adam Lindsay Gordon.


But enough  literary stuff, let's look at pretty flowers! It's spring down here in Australia. Let's celebrate!

What's your favorite flower? Do any flowers have a sentimental meaning for you? I must say I love a lot of flowers, but I think my taste tends to lean toward the traditional. I particularly love roses and peonies. What about you?