Barton Strong thought seeing Tessa would be a good distraction. Boy, was he wrong. The woman was a slob, and all they did was fight. She had to go, and Barton was swearing off women. He was happier with his own company.
Toria Davies lost her husband to cancer after only sixteen months of marriage. Her son, Sherman, was all she had left of that relationship, and the young boy had been through a lot. Kidnapped at four, he had a fear of all men who weren’t immediate family.
The senior Barkley Strong wanted Toria to merge their finance companies. It could be a win-win situation for both. But when a disgruntled customer threatened her mother and upset her son, Barton stepped in and calmed the boy. Shermie went straight to him. She didn’t like Barton, but her son did. Now, what was she going to do?
Jade Anderson would miss the restaurant where she had worked her way through school. The closing was bittersweet, but she was happy that Ms. B was getting to retire. It wasn’t the money. She had more lucrative endeavors than waiting on the tables. It was the regulars that came in she’d miss the most. Especially the elderly Strong couple that used to come in all the time before they passed away.
Jenson Strong was told to invite the pretty waitress to a get-together for his deceased grandmother, but instead, he insulted her for being a waitress and said that she better dress appropriately for the event too.
When Jade tried to politely decline the invitation, Jenson wouldn’t take no for an answer and pushed her back down in her chair. Jade didn’t just punch him in the face but knocked him back on his ass. There was going to be hell to pay.
When Clay Strong was admitted into the hospital for emergency surgery, he first thought it was the worst thing to ever happen to him until he laid eyes on his OR nurse Lizzie. He could only see her eyes but knew he wanted to see more of her. She laughed and told him it was the medicine talking, but Clay knew better.
Clay had been working with Jade in a complex job for NASA for the past five years, developing intricate equipment for them, and a new position was opening. Clay was a shoo-in for the job, or so he was led to believe. But when the idiot told him his girlfriend’s “pedigree” didn’t meet their standards, Clay was livid, and so was Jade. Heads would roll for this….
Barkley Strong had had a rough day. He was starving, so he stopped at the mall for a quick lunch. Normally, he would stay out of other people’s business, but when he heard two women shouting at each other, he was worried for the two children in the strollers next to the fighting women. When the sound of a gunshot rang out, he knew he had to do something….
Carrie Boone hadn’t seen her sister Mattie in over fifteen years. She nor the rest of her family didn’t want anything to do with her. Mattie wasn’t a good person. But when Barkley Strong called her to tell her that her sister was dead, killed by her own mother-in-law, and her sister’s twin girls were in protective custody, Carrie wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She had already written Mattie out of her life. She didn’t want to care. But when she received a threatening phone call warning her to stay away from her sister’s babies, she knew something wasn’t right. She would get to the bottom of this….
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Fowler had no desire to take over as king of the dragons, at least not yet, anyway. His grandmother, the former queen, was pressuring him into taking a mate. He didn’t need a mate, and that was that.
Amy hated rich people with a passion. If she wasn’t forced into going into this lunch meeting with the Walshs, she wouldn’t. And she certainly wasn’t going to be forced into eating a hamburger she didn’t order by some handsome, arrogant prick. Enough was enough; she was out of there, and when he grabbed her arm, all bets were off…
Newsletter winner prize pack is Julie Ann Swaney Signed Paperback Debbie Whitley Signed Paperback Julie Bystedt Signed Paperback
Your packages will be mailed out Week of Jan 29th, 2024
Debbie Hudson Prize Pack Julie Ann Swaney Signed Paperback Debbie Whitley Signed Paperback Julie Bystedt Signed Paperback
If you are a winner and have not gotten your prize yet, please contact my PA Denise at
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Happy Reading,
The Gathering Storm The Peace of Being Without War Evenness of mind, temper, and composure Created by imagination, invention, and design storm walked around the little store listening to the gossip about one of the biggest disasters ever recorded—at least how these people were now witnessing it. She shook her head in amazement. How could humans be so insensitive? Not to mention stupid. That was one of the million and one reasons that she didn’t hang out with humans, too. The rumor mill was running full blast, it seemed today.
“They say that thousands of those bastards are dead. Whole place just split the roads and ate’em right up. Can’t you just imagine what they were thinking when they were being swallowed up like that? I can’t, I tell you what.” “Heard tell that them their houses just toppled over like the kid’s blocks. Smashing people while they slept in their beds.” The man speaking shook his head. “Mercy sakes alive. It sure did a nasty bit of business over there on that street.” “God is taking some sort of vengeance on them their foreigners. Sure as I’m a ‘sitting here, it’s God doing them people in.” She actually had to physically close her own mouth when the person made that statement. “They should have stayed in their own place, not here where we people are.”
Wondering what they’d say about her and her sister if they knew what they really were made her smile. She wasn’t going to speculate on it too much, but they’d have plenty to say. There was no doubt about that. Storm and her twin sister, Ember, were time adjusters for the world. They moved throughout time and made slight adjustments in the fabric of reality when and where it was needed, smoothing out the lines so that it looked untouched, perfect. They’d been doing it longer than any of the beings in this room had been alive. And they would continue to do so long after they were nothing more than dust in their graves.
To do their jobs, they and a great many others, like the two of them, would travel back and forth, sliding into whatever persona was needed to blend into the world they were in. It took great strength and lots of practice to even attempt what they did for the world. Sometimes, they were the only ones standing between the extinction of mankind and the world being populated at any given time. Storm caught a reflection of her face as she walked around the little odds and ends store. Tall, at just over six-foot, Storm was well-proportioned and athletic. Of course, no one would see that under her long dress and equally long sleeves. Her long dark hair, when not pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head as it was now, hung nearly to her waist in springy corkscrew ringlets.
Her skin, like her sister’s, was alabaster and smooth as velvet. The only mark that marred their skin was the tattoo of their kind. It was a dragon that curled around their back, clawed hands seemingly holding onto their shoulders while the tail trailed down their ribs and wrapped around their legs. Storm’s on her left leg, Ember’s to her right. Their wings spread and covered their arms from their shoulders to their wrists. Smiling at the men when they tipped their hats at her, she put her purchases on the counter and waited her turn to be waited on.
At the moment, Storm was in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-three in the body of a school teacher about to start “schooling” the area children in their reading, writing, and arithmetic. It was the closest body that fit her size when she popped into the time zone. The teacher would have no memories of her being Storm for a bit. There would be a slight accident, a small tumble that would alter her memories. Not that she’d remember Storm and what she had done, but the teacher would recover easily and never be the wiser of what she’d done for her world.
This time, working in this area, it had been a small fix. A mountain had come down on a family that was digging for clay and killed the youngest child. Storm had been tasked to save the child. Her future and that of a great many generations beyond her hadn’t been born when she’d been killed. Saving the family, simply making them go to the mountainside later than they had planned, had done the trick. Storm loved it when it was something like this had been. There were times when whole realities had to be altered. Generations needed to be moved ahead to save someone. Sometimes, it was to save a being or one of the descendants of a human who was needed in the future. Other times, it was to erase a horrific time in the lives of humans—mostly, it was natural disasters where many deaths occurred.
Humans, for the most part, would change up their entire lives, nothing to do with the ones that had been killed because they were witnesses to something so horrific that they had seen. Other times, the consequences of the disasters were too large and affected too many things when they rippled down through the ages and had to be removed. Something as simple as a house being crushed with their things inside. It could have been the witnessing of a family pet being killed. Any and all things that would alter everything, and it was up to them to repair the damage that had been done.
As Time Displacement Officers, they were there to insure that the shifts were smooth, with no overlapping lines after the time frame was removed or fixed. Storm would watch and event, something that she’d fixed a thousand times to make sure that things were normal. However, gifted humans or small children saw the flaws. It was easily explained as déjà vu. Or a dream, too. Storm was also there to capture another of their kind and bring him to justice. It was he who had moved the family to the mountain for the one to be killed. And he would have profited off the disaster had she not been there when it unfolded.
His name was Grail. He didn’t like being in this room. It wasn’t like the room wasn’t nice. It was, but when your benefactor summoned you, you did what you were told. Bowing before her when she entered the room—just to piss her off—he stood up when she told him to. “Do stop. Why must you be so annoying? Someday, you’ll be king, and I do hope that someone does the same to you.” He had been altering reality to suit his own personal gain and to profit for a while now, but no one could catch him. She was determined to find and make him pay before he could cause any more trouble. Altering a timeline too often would lead to sloppy work and time twitches that people would notice.
And that was something that she was afraid of more than anything that she’d encountered in the human world. Profit and notoriety from their jobs, both of which were laws that carried the sentence of death if broken, was what he had been doing today. Storm shuddered at the thought of the death he would endure when they took him back to Chilast, their magical realm. Death would not come easily or quickly for one like Grail. He had to know that. So why was he doing this when he knew it was only a matter of time before he was caught? They didn’t have the people to chase after him and keep the world and its people safe. As it was now, they were stretched to the limit. Working from sun up to sun down and all the between time too.
It had been so long since she’d had a day off that she wanted to just lie down, pull some leaves over her, and go to sleep for about a thousand years. Storm’s twin sister, Ember, had gone to Tokyo to study and gather names of their kind for the continuation of their race. So far, all she’d been able to find was the list of dead. All of the dragons that had come after her and a few others that had been killed. That wasn’t doing any of them a bit of good, and they all knew it. They were aging out, the lot of them, and there wasn’t anything that they could do about it.
It didn’t bother their kind when they would wind time backward. It was the moving of time forward that would harm them. Time, it would add, even if it was only a click of a second to their age. And having to look at something over and over, forward and back, it might well add as many as ten minutes onto their long lives. After a while and all those adding up, a dragon would age quicker, worn down by time and effort.
Author Kathi S Barton 