Description:
When Meisha comes home and finds a strange man in her kitchen, she does what any sensible person would do. She beats the crap out of him first, then asks questions after. When he explains her best friend is in mortal danger, Meisha knows the whole mess—including a recent murder and the threats on her friend’s life—may be her fault, and she’s determined to get to the bottom of it. And no sexy stranger is going to stop her.
Lajos Farkas isn’t expecting to meet a spitfire, martial artist when he’s on a mission to figure out who’s stealing from Dark Wolf Enterprises, and he certainly doesn’t expect her to insist on butting in on his investigation. But getting rid of Meisha is seemingly impossible, and when his wolf decides she’s his life-mate, suddenly he realizes he’ll do anything to keep her close and grow old with her.
If they can just stay alive long enough to make that possible.
AUTHOR's INTERVIEW
Who is A. M. Griffin?
I consider myself a jack of all trades. I’m a career student, meaning that I love to learn and always find myself enrolled in someone’s university. I’m a professional and a business woman, which transfers well into my writing career. I’m a daughter (to hear my mom tell it I’m not a very good one because I don’t call enough), a sister, both big and little, auntie (favorite to some), wife, mother and friend. I’m a day dreamer and hopeless romantic who believes in love at first sight. I also believe in the unbelievable and the strange and unexplainable. I’ve painted myself on both ends of the spectrum; sane and insane, but hey, I think that just makes me a well-rounded person.
Who is your favorite author?
Just one? LOL. I have many! I love anything that Dean Koontz puts out. I don’t care. I think he could put out his grocery list and I’d download it to my Kindle and yell at my kids for interrupting my reading time. I love Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark series, Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark hunter Series, Joey W. Hill’s Vampire Queen series, Gena Showalter’s Angels of the Dark and Lords of the Underworld series and Nalini Singh’s Archangel series. So yeah, I read a lot. I also like discovering indie authors too. I’m a serial girl, so a special day is one where I find a brand new author who has a series going. Heaven *sigh*
Do you listen to music while you write?
No. It’ll just distract me from the voices in my head. When I write my characters are acting out scenes in my head. Music doesn’t mesh well with that. Sounds crazy—I know.
What do you do to relax?
Read and vacation. I love a good book and good vacation destination. Throw in a cabana boy and free drinks and I’ll call it paradise.
Tell us about your book...
Lover Claimed is the second book in the Dark Wolf Enterprises series. The first book in the series is also titled Dark Wolf Enterprises. Dark Wolf Enterprises is a multi-million dollar investment company owned and operated by a family of wolf shifters, the Farkas. Unfortunately for the brothers and owners; Andras, Kristof and Lajos Farkas, someone is embezzling millions of dollars from their company.
In Lover Claimed, Lajos is in Jacksonville, Florida with his older brother Kristof. Kristof is about to fire Trudy Hollander, the human who he contracted to audit the files of Dark Wolf Enterprises. While Kristof and Trudy’s story is told in Dark Wolf Enterprises, Lover Claimed picks up where Lajos has separated from Kristof at Trudy’s house. Lajos has a simple task, to take Trudy’s dog to her best friend Meisha’s house and then to go to Trudy’s business to look for any clues left behind by the other shifters who attacked her.
The problem?
Meisha Komano doesn’t take kindly to coming home to find a stranger in her kitchen. The stranger could be one of the drug fiends from her neighborhood, a cop or a member of the Yaruzi, a Japanese gang who is after her and her family. Either way, Meisha’s first impulse is to kick ass and ask questions later.
The other problem?
Lajos needs to shake Meisha so that he can properly conduct an investigation and gather as much information about the other shifters as he can before his security team arrives. But the bigger problem is that he doesn’t really want to shake her—he’d rather keep her at his side for the rest of his life.
EXCERPT
Piper came back down the hall and made a
beeline for the kitchen. The nails on her paws scraped against the linoleum
floor as she walked around and then came back out to sit in front of him.
“I guess this is it then.”
Piper looked up at him.
He stared down at her, unsure if it was
safe to leave her here, especially when he wasn’t sure when the human would
return.
“Maybe I should leave a note explaining
what you’re doing here?”
Piper broke eye contact with him and
looked back at the kitchen.
“And I guess I can give you some water.
Crap. I forgot to get some dog food for you.”
Piper barked.
“Right.” He walked to the kitchen with
Piper leading the way, prancing in front of him. “Note, food and water. Or
maybe you’d rather it be food, water and then note.” He turned on the kitchen
light and noticed the yellow walls and counter tops filled with gadgets he’d
seen mostly on infomercials. There seemed not to be enough room on the counters
to even make a sandwich.
He opened the refrigerator. The contents inside
were meager. He’d forgotten to ask Trudy if there was someone else living here
with this Meisha person, but by the looks of this refrigerator not only did she
live alone, but she probably wasn’t home much. That or she was on a diet. He
didn’t know much about human women except that they loved to diet. He looked
over the couple of containers of strawberry Greek yogurt, the carton of milk, a
bag of shredded cheese and the bottles of mustard and ketchup. He opened one of
the sliding doors and found ham and hotdogs.
“Jackpot.” He brought out the sliced ham
and Piper turned in circles while wagging her tail. “You like this don’t you?”
He chuckled as he pulled out a handful of the thick slices.
Wham!
Pain shot through the side of his body.
The refrigerator creaked and rocked as he fell back against it, hitting the
back of his head on the freezer and his back on the shelves. The contents
inside clanged as they fell over.
“Shit.”
The refrigerator door swung away from him.
He put his hand out, feeling discombobulated.
Wham!
The door came back and slammed against him
again, this time jarring his fingers.
I’m being attacked.
With all his strength he pushed against
the door, sending it flying open and slamming against the counter next to it.
He quickly scanned the room looking for his assailant.
Empty.
His breath came out hard. His eyes
narrowed in a deadly glare. Someone was here, but where?
Wham!
His nose erupted in pain that radiated to
his skull. He stumbled against the refrigerator again. He wanted to hold his nose,
but that would have to wait. Ignoring the metallic liquid that dripped down the
back of his throat, he focused on his surroundings.
The air changed by his head. He reached
out with fast reflexes and caught a foot. Holding tight he turned and stepped toward
it. Whoever was kicking at him was in all black and standing on the kitchen
counter by the refrigerator. The assailant tried to pull out of his grasp but,
with a yank, he pulled at the foot he held, trying to drag the person from the
counter top. Whoever this was, Lajos needed him on the ground where he could
stomp and pummel him.
To his surprise, the assailant came down
but, instead of falling to the ground, he used Lajos’ hold as leverage and came
straight at him, wrapping his legs around Lajos’ waist. The force from the
assailant’s body sent Lajos back two steps and, while he was trying to regain
his footing, fingernails dug into the skin behind Lajos’ ears, piercing him.
Lajos used both hands to reach between the
assailants arms and thrust them out and away. He was going to kill this…
He focused on light-brown, exotic-looking
eyes.
A girl. A
girl whose head was getting dangerously close to his.
Wham!
********
She looked down at the dog, dead at her
feet, and frowned.
What kind of dog is this?
He was black and big…no, huge. He was some
kind of Husky for sure. A big Husky. She and Lajos were going to have a hard
time trying to move this thing’s body. Leaving it in the hall wasn’t an option.
She couldn’t risk someone spotting a dead dog in an office building. That would
be enough to start another investigation and she really didn’t need the cops
coming back to dust for prints again. While she was smart enough to wear
gloves, Lajos was not. His prints would be all over the place.
She cursed him under her breath.
She peered at the dog again.
Something was different. Was it changing?
She swore it had longer and thicker hair. Now she could see the skin
underneath. And the face. The snout wasn’t long anymore. It looked…almost
human.
She stood and watched, dumbfounded, as the
dog…changed. Her mouth went dry. Her heart slammed against her ribs and her
breaths became uncontrolled.
The dog turned into a human.
The guy who’d been chasing her lay on his
side, naked. It was Fedir. His throat gaped and he had a hole in his chest.
“Wh-what are you?” she whispered.
Her hands began to shake. The knives
almost slipped from her grip. Heat swept across her body.
“Meisha!”
Lajos’ voice was distant and urgent, but
she couldn’t pull her eyes from the anomaly at her feet.
How is this possible?
In the back of her mind she could hear
Lajos walking toward her.
“I-I killed a dog,” she kept repeating,
trying to convince her mind that the dead man at her feet was some kind of
trick.
“You killed a wolf.”
She looked up to find Lajos next to her.
He put a hand on hers, pushing the knife that she held down to her side. She
let him do the same to the other.
“A wolf?” she asked, confusion overtaking
her brain. She looked back down at the man. “But…”
Lajos took a deep breath. “He was a wolf
shifter.”
Wolf shifter?
Her head began to swim, making her dizzy.
This type of thing doesn’t happen in real life.
“We need to get rid of the body,” he said.
“I-I don’t believe you.” She looked up at
him. “W-Where is his friend?”
“He jumped from the office window. I
wanted to go after him, but I couldn’t leave you here with Fedir. I didn’t want
you to get hurt.”
She indicated with her hand at Fedir. “Is
his friend one of these too?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my God, the Yaruzi sent freaks after us,”
she whispered.
He brushed past her. “They aren’t freaks.”
He stepped over the dead man and crouched behind him.
She stared down at Fedir. Her and her
family could get away from the Yaruzi—she’d trained most of her life in tactics
geared toward escaping them—but this… She shook her head in disbelief. How
would they escape from people like Fedir?
“He changed from a man to a wolf and back
to a man again,” Meisha said, her voice sounded distant. “H-How was he—it able
to do that?”
“He isn’t a freak and he’s not an ‘it’.
He’s a shifter, particularly a wolf shifter.”
“I d-don’t believe you. W-why would I
believe something as crazy at that?”
He leaned over and sniffed the guy’s hair.
“Because I’m one too.”
Goodreads ** Smashwords ** Amazon ** AllRomance
Dark Wolf Enterprises, #1 can be found in the Brought To His Knees boxed set.
Murder, mayhem and imprinting with a hot wolf shifter… And they say being an accountant is boring.
The big break Trudi Hollander’s small accounting firm needs has finally arrived, but unfortunately it comes with murder, mayhem and Kristof Farkas, a man she just can’t seem to resist. Even worse, Kristof is the CFO of Dark Wolf Enterprises—the one person who can pull the plug on the job that will take her company to the next level.
And then there are the assassins who can jump from three stories up and still be able to run away…
Kristof has no intention of giving in to his inner wolf and claiming Trudi. She’s human. Too fragile to withstand being a shifter’s mate. But the need to protect her is stronger than his resolve, and his desire is more powerful yet. He’ll fight with everything he has to keep her safe, both from those who would hurt her, and from himself.
Goodreads ** Facebook ** Smashwords ** Amazon ** Barnes&Noble ** Kobo **AllRomance ** iTunes
About the author:
A. M. Griffin is a wife who rarely cooks, mother of three, dog owner (and sometimes dog owned), a daughter, sister, aunt and friend. She’s a hard worker whose two favorite outlets are reading and writing. She enjoys reading everything from mystery novels to historical romances and of course fantasy romance. She is a believer in the unbelievable, open to all possibilities from mermaids in our oceans and seas, angels in the skies and intelligent life forms in distant galaxies.
1 comment:
Thanks for having me!
Post a Comment