A warm welcome to author Belinda Burke visting Love Bytes today on her Blog tour for her new release “UNDONE”.

Welcome Belinda 🙂

If I Said I Loved You…

Love! I write about it, I read about it, you read about it…hell, everyone reads about it, because it’s really quite hard to find a story with no love in it at all. The goriest murder mysteries and grittiest thrillers feature love in some form, because let’s face it – in the end, what moves people (and therefore characters) is their love for someone or something (even if it’s money!). But what is love? Where does it come from?

In the world of the Eight Kingdoms, the rules are that no thing comes from nothing, and that magic can’t create love. But did that mean that no one had ever tried? It was because of that question mark, that maybe, that the gancanagh made their way into the Eight Kingdom’s world.

I first found them when I was researching faoladh for Wolf of the West, and got that little tingle that presages doom (doom meaning I’m going to end up writing something I don’t expect). Gancanagh, it said. Hmm. Love-talkers. Seducers of mortals, all of them male. Sidhe who incite an infatuation in anyone who comes in contact with them – sidhe who want nothing more than true love, despite the difficulty of finding it.

The idea of a being caught between the desire for real love and their own magic’s unconscious creation of something false stuck, and I knew that I was going to end up with one as a character. Then, Bran’s brother, Tighe, told me that this was perfectly fine. His lover was one! (Yes, they talk to me. Probably. It might be a delusion of fiction.)

Once I got past the mental image of a gancanagh as a full-sized naked male Tinkerbell sprinkling golden dust off a very wiggly butt (it was a nice butt, but still), the possibilities exploded, and Faelan was born. What would it be like to be a gancanagh? Everyone you’d meet would want you, but would they want you? Everyone you touched would love you – but you would know that it wasn’t really love. What if someone claimed they really did love you, regardless? Would you believe them? Could you? Probably not – at least not without a lot of convincing – and so from the first moment we ‘met’, Faelan promised to be nothing but trouble.

After all, how do you romance a character who believes his own nature precludes the possibility of real love? Faelan didn’t think he was too dangerous, or unworthy – he wasn’t hung up on a former love, just on the inevitability of whatever he found being fake, magic-infatuation and not love. If it wasn’t that he and all gancanagh seem to want love like air, I don’t think even Tighe’s insistence would have been enough!

In the end, the two of them are really doing what I do every time I write – searching for the meaning behind it all, wondering where love comes from, and if maybe they can find it and keep it for themselves. As to whether or not they can…well. That would be telling.

Excerpt from Undone:

The gancanagh was before him in the water, on one knee, peering at up at him. Tighe felt the pull of his nature more strongly this time. The lie and its promise. “Love you the way you want to be loved.” Then the stranger was speaking, and Tighe had to blink in order to focus on the words and not the low, humming music of his voice.

“I didn’t know you were here, prince. I’d not have disturbed you.”

“You know me?” But Tighe paused, shook his head and sighed. “No, never mind. Of course you know me. You aren’t a bother. I disturbed you, I think.”

When he stood, the stranger was just his height, so Tighe’s gaze met his eyes—snakeskin green and poured honey, sweet enough to drink. His smile was beckoning, a curve full of promises and desires. His lips were pale and parted, and Tighe knew they would be soft. He leaned forward before he could stop then forced himself back.

The gancanagh didn’t move, was too still, as if he knew the hundred thoughts Tighe was trying and failing not to think. Most of them were focused on those lips—to lick them, kiss them, bite them. Tighe wanted to see them kiss-bruised, kiss-swollen, see it and know that he was the one who had done it. He wanted to taste the sweetness of them, a sweetness to match the luscious glistening of his scent. He started back as if stung at a touch on his cheek, warm fingers, warm palm. Then he relaxed against the curve of it, sighed and saw his own dilated pupils reflected in the burnished green of those eyes. The stranger spoke again, voice rich with amusement. “So it is true, prince? What they say about you?”

“What…do they say?” Drugged. Slow. Tighe heard his own voice and it was more of a stranger-sound to him than the stranger’s. “That you’re half mortal, that your father was human.”

“It’s true.”

Laughter. “I knew it was, just by the way you taste.”

“The way I taste?” Tighe licked his lips and thought the air had turned to honey.

 

Blurb for Undone:

The first step on the road to addiction is desire…

Tighe is Summer’s prince, the second son of the Summer Queen. The blindness of his mortal father cursed him with eyes that see too much, and now he wanders the woods of immortal Summer alone. He is an outsider in his own country or at best a curiosity—never someone anyone truly wants.

Faelan is gancanagh, one of dark Summer’s most treacherous beings. Beguiling as he is beautiful, he, like all of his kind, was made to incite lust and longing, even as he seeks true love. For anything mortal, anything unprepared, even to be in his presence is dangerous.

When the two meet by chance, Faelan can’t help but be curious about this half-mortal prince—and the prince is more interested in a companion than questioning what kind.

Tighe has never seen anything but the lie behind love. Faelan is love’s lie and knows it. Is the beginning and end of everything between them inevitable? Which is stronger, need—or nature?

Publisher’s Note: This book is associated with the Eight Kingdoms series by Belinda Burke.

 

Eight Kingdoms series blurb:

Strange alliances are forged among the fae as Macsen Cadoc and his fae allies attempt to defeat the Milesians, Irish huntresses who bear a grudge against the sidhe.

Failure will bring Macsen to his knees; success may do the same, unless he and Bran Fionnan, once a captive of the huntresses, can succeed in sowing seeds of peace.  Yet even while some attempt to find a middle ground and forge a place where tolerance can flower, a new power rises, a threat to them all.

The Church of Rome aims to win the earth from its immortal rivals, even if doing so comes at the price of magic itself.  It will be up to Macsen to make a choice that might save the fae and all that sustains them…but only Bran has the power to convince him to do what is right.

Can mortal and immortal overcome the conflicts that divide them when some must hunt others to survive?  Is love stronger than anything—even a Fae King’s pride?

 

Like the sound of Undone? Buy it here.

 

About Belinda Burke:

Belinda currently lives on the New England coast with her fiancée, their room mate and her cat.  When she’s not writing, she’s working toward degrees in Philosophy and English, embroidering or reading.

Belinda writes in several genres, but a little lust and love always work their way into her stories.

 

www.belindaburke.com

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