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Silver Wolf Book 1 Jinnis, Wolves, Spec Agents |
Virgin Queen Book 2 Jinnis, Wolves, Lions, Spec Agents |
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Kiss of the Jinni Hunter series |
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by Sharon Buchbinder
Kiss of the Jinni Hunter Book 1
After Charlene Johnson's parents are killed in a car accident, she becomes guardian to her disabled brother. With no income coming in, she is forced to move to Eden, Kentucky, the one place her mother told her to stay away from. Once there, she's certain her mother would also warn her to keep away from the dark and sexy Zack Abingdon. A man of mystery who claims Charlene is his mate.
Zack has waited for what seems a lifetime for the other half of his soul. He wants a family of his own, but the woman he has his eye on has no idea he is a werewolf. However, he knows he is the only one who can keep her safe from the evil that stalks Eden. While he tries to convince her he is the wolf of her heart, she is playing hard to get, and Zack is fearful he will lose her before he can mark her as his own.
While Zack and Charlene are finding their way into love, an evil jinni who has wreaked havoc on the town of Eden for decades decides he wants Charlene for his own. When she learns the truth of her heritage, Zack hopes he can convince her he is the other half of her soul before it's too late.
Note: This was originally published in May 2007. Ten thousand plus words have been added, and it has been re-edited.
Genre: Paranormal Fantasy Romance
Content/Theme(s): Werewolves, Jinnis, Special Agents, Urban Fantasy
Release Date: August 19, 2015
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Trailers, Excerpts, Kiss of the Virgin Queen & More
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Kiss of the Silver Wolf Excerpt:
Jethro cleared his throat. “And this is Zachariah Abingdon.”
Charlene expected to see someone the same age as Jethro and Rebekkah. She caught a whiff of soap and some unrecognizable musky spice and jumped, startled to find him standing at her elbow.
The younger man flipped shocks of silver hair away from his piercing blue eyes. A trail of heat blazed in her face and ignited a fire in her core. He gazed down at her, an amused hint of a smile playing on his full, sensuous lips. “Call me Zack.”
She felt as if he had reached out and caressed her cheek. He took her hand, and a surge of energy jolted her. Did he feel it, too? Dry-mouthed, she squeaked, “Are we related?”
He smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. “No. Is it a problem?”
Warmth filled her chest and suffused her face. She stared down at his large hand still clasping hers. She didn’t want to let go. How long could you hold a stranger’s hand without being inappropriate? “No. Not at all.”
Jethro cleared his throat again, and Zack grinned at her, a sly expression on his face as he slid his fingers away. She glanced down, half-expecting to see a visible red glow where his touch lingered on her skin.
“We should let other people speak with you.” Jethro pressed an envelope into her hand. “There are no orphans among our people. Come home. We can help you take care of Joey in Eden.”
Goose bumps ran up her spine. How did he know about her brother? Eden. Her mother had warned her. Who exactly are these people? She stared at the odd trio in their old-fashioned garb as they moved toward the memory table and whispered to each other. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tone sounded pleased.
Pleased by what? She examined her new bangle. Feathery-scripted Js twined across the surface. Joanna.
As she puzzled over the dark metal, a dumpling of a woman lunged at Charlene and pulled her into a bear hug. The brassy-blonde reeked of cheap perfume, and her nose bore the signs of time spent with a bottle.
“So sorry,” she slurred. “Tragic.”
Charlene remembered meeting the woman at Joey’s school. She’d overheard her whispering to another parent, making a joke at her brother’s expense: “Doesn’t he remind you of Lon Chaney as the Wolfman?” The gossip’s son attended school with Joey. Charlene liked her son, Todd. But the mother was a pain in the neck. What was her name? Did it begin with an N? M? “How’s Todd?”
“Oh, hon, you’re just like your mom. Even in your hour of need, you ask about my son.” The woman clutched her hand in a sweaty grip and pulled her closer. Her voice cracked and dropped to a hoarse whisper. Alcohol fumes mingled with the cloud of cologne. “You putting Joey in a home?”
Charlene jerked out of the woman’s grasp. “Why would I?”
“School costs money. Lots of it.” Todd’s mother straightened her shoulders and considered Charlene. “With your parents gone, you’ll never be able to afford it all by yourself.”
“Thanks for your concern.” She remembered the woman’s name. “I assure you, Mrs. Morton, I will not be taking my brother out of our home.”
The woman shook her head and moved to the memory table on unsteady feet.
Charlene scanned the crowd. Zack caught her gaze, and winked at her and turned away. A metal chain dangled out of his back pocket, much like one a biker would wear. He’s a bad boy. Her heart jittered. She drew a deep breath and chided herself for her instant and powerful attraction. Her brain chemicals were in hyper drive, nothing more. She recalled her mother’s firm warnings. He was from Eden. He couldn’t be good for her.
~~~~~~
Kiss of the Silver Wolf Purchase links:
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by Sharon Buchbinder
Kiss of the Jinni Hunter Book 2
No matter how far we are in the future, everything connects us to our past.
Join the Special Agents of the Anomaly Defense Division as they race to save humanity—and the people they love.
Homeland Security Special Agent Eliana Solomon is on a mission to prevent terrorist attacks. Hard enough to do when the threats are human, almost impossible when it's an evil, shape shifting jinni.
Eliana needs help so she calls the sexy and beguiling psychiatrist, Arta Shahani. However, no matter how good he is at his job, the man is on her blacklist. On their last case together, the guy left her for dead.
Arta is stunned when he receives Eliana’s call. Forced to abandon the woman he loves, he now fears she won’t accept his shape-shifting skills as a Persian Lion. Eliana, in the meantime discovers she is a direct descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba with special powers of her own. But will her skill and Arta's be enough to defeat the jinni, or will they lose the love history decreed for them as well as their lives in this battle of good versus evil?
Genre: Paranormal Fantasy Romance
Content/Theme(s): Werewolves, Werelions, Jinnis, Special Agents
Release Date: October 14, 2015
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
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Kiss of the Virgin Queen Excerpt:
“We’re trying to keep the crime scene intact as long as we can. At least until Mayor Schaeffer shows up.” She shook her head. “Then we’re screwed. Shifty Schaeffer loves to grandstand. I expect he’ll be here with a reporter any time now.”
Eliana took a deep breath, preparing for the worst while the other woman pulled back the blue tarp. Her boots-on-the-ground stint as a weapons expert in Iraq should have numbed her to the sight of bodies and the ravages of war. Still, tears stung her eyes. The girl was so young and beautiful—before her throat was ripped open.
Naked, except for the light fur on her body, it appeared whatever killed her attacked the girl while she attempted to shift into her wolf form. Bite marks and puncture wounds covered her body. A slash of scarlet replaced her throat. Eliana forced herself to crouch next to the remains. The smell of burnt matches singed her nostrils. Jinni stink. She stood and turned to the chief.
The victim was someone’s daughter. “Does the family know?”
“Not yet.” Jane’s eyebrow quirked. “Well? Is it—” “Jinnis?” Eliana shook her head. “Can’t say. I need more evidence.”
Jane gave her an incredulous look. “She’s a werewolf. We’re near an abandoned mine. You’re the jinni hunter. I do my homework, too. It’s like the case in Kentucky.”
“What more do you need?”
“My own team of experts.” She pulled out her cell. The woman dropped the tarp back over the girl/wolf. “You might as well try sending up smoke signals. There’s no service out here.”
“Fabulous.” She pocketed the useless phone. “Anything else I need to know?”
Static flared on Jane’s radio, and a voice crackled. “Shaeffer’s on his way down.”
Novak bit her bottom lip and frowned. “Let me keep this short and to the point. The Adalwolf family runs this town.” She signaled to the techs to put the body in a waiting bag. “Lowell Adalwolf likes to keep his paws in everything. Rich, influential, protective of the pack. Some people—” she nodded at her techs “— are saying it may even be a rogue werewolf.”
Just what she needed. An obstructive powerbroker. “Can’t wait to meet him.”
“Control freak, your regular, big, bad alpha wolf. Tight with the mayor. He’ll insist on telling you the history of the pack and showing you his wine cellar. I’d go with you, because I want to see him squirm, but I need to notify the victim’s parents.” She sighed. “Some days, I hate my job.”
Eliana knew just how she felt.
After a brief meeting with the mayor, who, as Novak predicted, spent more time grandstanding than speaking with her, she now stood in the chilly wine cellar and tugged at her jacket sleeves—wishing for a pair of warm gloves. Despite the cavern’s bright fluorescent lighting and a giant wall hanging of workers harvesting grapes, her chest tightened. Werewolf politics, the scent of a jinni, and a subterranean vault sure to trigger her claustrophobia. Could this day get much worse? At least the elevator and emergency stairway were just a few steps away.
You can do this. Focus on the case.
“What can you tell me about the girls?”
The gray haired CEO, Lowell Adalwolf, raised his shaggy eyebrows and favored her with a piercing, green-eyed gaze as if sizing her up, searching for deficiencies.
Okay, two can play at this game. She stared back at him. Yes, she was tall for a woman. Yes, her Ethiopian and Moroccan heritage gave her a permanent tan, and her thick black hair pulled back into an unruly ponytail needed a cut. He needed a good barber to trim those caterpillars over his eyes. But then again, he was a werewolf.
“You need to understand who we are and where we come from before you can start grilling people. When we decided to leave Livonia in the early 1600s, we settled in these hills. They reminded us of home. The pristine land and waterways were filled with wildlife, perfect for our people. We became model citizens, even fought in the Revolutionary War. The coal mining industry took off in West Virginia. Our pack owned the land and the coal beneath it, and we prospered. Over the centuries, however, we noticed the wildlife disappearing, and our hunts became sparse.”
He shook his head, and Eliana had a sudden image of him in wolf form, large, proud, and gray. She blinked and the vision disappeared. She shivered and looked at the glowing red exit sign for the tenth time. “And?”
“There was a falling out in our pack. I’ll spare you the gory details of our civil war. The death toll was high. Too high.” He sighed and passed a hand over his creased face. “My faction won the money and the property. We followed the guidelines for closing mines and land reclamation, stopped up the deeper coring tunnels, and kept this one to remind us of where we’ve been and what we sacrificed.”
A fresh crop of goosebumps erupted at the thought of a full-scale intra-pack war with werewolves tearing at each other’s necks. And at the thought of the young woman lying in the woods with her throat torn out. She opened her mouth to ask him about the girl, but he talked over her. This guy was all about him, his pack, his business.
“The vineyard was my mate’s idea. We brought in a highly regarded wine master from Livonia. Old Thiess is one of us.”
Enough with the history lesson.
She had to get the conversation back on track. The murder would be treated as a separate case from the abductions, but the two cases were connected. “How well did you know the kids who went out to the park?”
“One way or another, we’re all related. They’re my great-nephew’s pups. I usually see them at our family gatherings.”
What was the relationship between the kids’ disappearance and the winery?
A smart kidnapper would have dropped the boys off at some non-descript location like the outlet mall just a few miles down the road. If it were an angry vineyard employee, it would be like painting a target on the company.
“Any disgruntled former employees? Someone you fired?”
He shook his craggy head. “No. Everyone is happy here, been here forever. They’re all part of the pack.”
“Any unusual behavior among the members of your pack lately?”
He cocked his head and looked puzzled. “How do you mean?”
“We have to rule out all possibilities, even distasteful ones. It is possible the kidnapper or killer could be one of your pack mates.”
He growled, “Absolutely not. There are no rogue wolves in our pack.”
“Sorry to upset you, sir, but under the circumstances, everyone is under suspicion. We need your maps, design plans, specs, engineers’ notes, everything you have on your cellars, the surrounding areas, and the old tunnel sites.”
“The mine was sealed. We followed all the rules, did everything according to the state’s requirements. We planted thousands of trees and reforested the area, too.” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I oversaw the operation myself.”
Good grief. Why did everyone take these investigations so personally? On the other hand, why was he being so defensive? She needed to throw him a bone, so to speak, to get his cooperation.
“Mr. Adalwolf, this isn’t about investigating you.” She locked eyes with the older man. “There are still two girls out there. Don’t you want to find them?”
His mouth opened, and his hand flew to his chest. “Of course, I do. What kind of animal do you take me for?”
The shocked response was either well-rehearsed or sincere. For the moment, she’d go with the latter. “This is about finding out where the two other girls might be held captive. We need to know if there are other routes in and out of these old mining shafts.”
He passed a hand over his creased face again, and appeared to age before her eyes. “Tell me it’s not like the Carter pack.” He lowered his voice. “Please tell me it’s not a jinni.”
How had he heard about that case? Werewolf grapevine?
The mission of Project Aladdin was to find jinnis, the portals where they came from a parallel dimension, and to shut them down. The assignment in Eden, Kentucky was a groundbreaking one for Eliana and Homeland Security. An applied physicist specializing in weapons, she theorized that, in the wrong hands, a jinni could become a weapon of mass destruction. She’d captured a battle between a werewolf and a jinni with low light internet protocol based surveillance cameras with high definition encoders she had placed in the woods around the abandoned mine. Specifically created by Homeland Security to assist in recording criminal activities under poor lighting conditions, the equipment live streamed real time and tamper-proof videos directly to Homeland Security. This documentation of the werewolf and jinni fight proved the existence of the supernatural creatures.
The werewolf won the battle, but the war between the wolves and jinnis still raged. Before she left Kentucky, the old alpha wolf of the Carter clan had revealed the source of the grievances between the two shape shifters, a blood feud dating back to biblical times.
The problem, however, was the jinnis weren’t necessarily interested in keeping their attacks focused solely on werewolves. Contrary to popular TV images of a pretty girl in a bottle, the jinnis, or genies, were powerful shape shifters, who, like humans, could choose between good and evil. If a terrorist ever found a way to conjure and command an evil jinni, or ‘Ifrit, the world would never know what hit it. Although they’d been able to seal up that particular portal, shafts of working and non-working mines honeycombed the entire Appalachian region of the United States. Jinnis could be anywhere, even beneath her feet in the sealed up mine turned winery. She rubbed the large signet ring now loose on her cold hand.
~~~~~~
Kiss of the Virgin Queen Purchase links:
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Deception |
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2015 |
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