A very warm welcome to author E E Montgomery stopping by Love Bytes today

E E stops by on her pride promotion blog tour for new release “Just The Way You Are”

E E provided it us with a fantastic interview answering our questions, shares an excerpt and there is also a giveaway you can participate in!

Welcome E E 🙂

Author Name: E E Montgomery

Book Name: Just The Way You Are

Series: Just Life #4

Can be read as a standalone, but there are elements in the other stories that will add depth to this one

Goodreads Link

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press

Cover Artist: Catt Ford

Release Date: April 17, 2015

Pages or Words: 70,000 words

Blurb:

After ten years in an abusive relationship and a near-fatal knife wound, Jonathan Watson is finally free. Unused to being able to make even the smallest decision and smothered by family and well-meaning neighbors, he’s floundering in the real world. Jonathan is afraid of falling into another relationship too quickly and realizes he needs time to rediscover who he is before he attaches himself to another man. He never counted on meeting Ben Urquhart, though. Ben tempts Jonathan to forget everything and take a leap. For Ben, it’s love at first sight, and he doesn’t want to take it slow. He wants to build a life with Jonathan, free from harm and full of laughter. But before they can take the next step, they must protect Jonathan from his possessive, threatening ex. Jonathan must find the courage to confront him and break the chains of his past before he can be truly free to build a future with Ben.

Categories: Contemporary, Fiction, Gay Fiction, M/M Romance, Romance

Buy Links:

Dreamspinner Press Ebook

Dreamspinner Press Print

Amazon

Tell us about the characters in Just the Way You Are:

Note: I got carried away with this one. I’ve bolded a brief summary for each of the major characters, so if that’s all you really wanted use that.

I thought I’d respond to this by sharing my notes on the characters. These are the notes I started with. Jonathan and Ben had more extensive character profiles written and built on throughout writing the book. You see more of the characters’ personalities in the book.

Jonathan Watson, 29

Jonathan lived with Anthony for ten years, seven of them either terrifying or demoralizing – sometimes both. He’s finally out and trying to work out who he is. Unfortunately, Anthony has other ideas. With Jonathan’s cousin and main support not available, he doesn’t know where to turn for help.

Jonathan is Liam’s cousin (Just in Time #3 Just Life series). Looks a lot like him only his eyes are brown instead of black and his skin isn’t quite as dark. They pass for brothers. Jonathan’s parents and cousin (Liam’s brother) died in a car accident when Jonathan was 10. 29, 6’0”, rangy body but very thin now. He’s lived with Anthony for ten years and been unhappy for seven of those years. He shows classic signs of abuse and is only now accepting that he has been abused for years. Anthony is still in hospital after attempting to kill Jonathan and himself so Jonathan is grabbing this opportunity to move out and try to make a life for himself. He has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He hasn’t worked since the accident that put Anthony in a wheel chair. He was an HR manager but knows he wouldn’t be able to deal with hostile employees anymore. He needs to find something quiet and protected to do for a while until he can deal with the world again.

Jonathan was driving when the accident happened. He’d just told Anthony he was going to leave him, Anthony punched him in the face and he swerved, hitting another car. A child in the other car died. Jonathan was charged but weather was bad so he received a good behaviour bond only. He feels guilty and responsible for Anthony’s condition so has stayed with him and accepted his abuse when all he wanted was to leave. He’s finally left Anthony now, after Anthony stabbed him and tried to kill Liam and Mark too.

Jonathan hates driving but does it when absolutely necessary. He usually takes public transport.

Ben Urquhart, 25

Ben is an ex-miner, ex-pig-shooter, current removalist and textiles student with a massive protective streak. Jonathan, injured, far too thin and scared of unexpected movement rings all Ben’s bells. In his efforts to keep the gentle Jonathan safe, Ben finds himself fighting off the advances of a scary but adorable cougar, dancing with an talented but shy baker, chasing down the street after an Alzheimer’s sufferer and crossing swords with an unstable, violent man.

Hair: dark brown, eyes: hazel. 5’11” stocky build. Oldest of four children. Square jaw but still soft with youth. His lips are precisely shaped and pale but fuller than most expect in a face like his. A miner’s son, Ben grew up in Mt Isa. Shoots and fishes and drives a ute. Worked in the mines for several years, saving money to move to Brisbane and go to uni. He’s studying textiles with a view to becoming a preservationist caring for old clothing and costumes. Ben has always loved fabrics and begged his mother to teach him how to sew as a child. He’s very masculine, very butch but he makes most of his own clothes. He belongs to two rifle clubs (small bore and large bore) and goes shooting at least once a week. Ben is working part-time as a removalist, mainly to ensure he still has savings at the end of his degree. He holds no illusions as to how easy it’s going to be to get a job in preserving textiles once he finishes and knows he’ll need the money.

Anthony Porter, 38

(The ex) rich blue eyes, black hair – black Irish. Anthony is in a wheelchair after a car accident. He’s led Jonathan to believe he’s paraplegic but he’s not. He suffered head and spinal injuries in the accident. The head injuries impact his ability to walk and grasp things and he hasn’t done the physio required to improve his situation. He’s in hospital after stabbing Jonathan and attempting to kill himself. He’ll be under psychiatric care for a while before they release him with a full-time nurse.

Dr Liam Watson, 36

Black diamond eyes, tanzanite blue scrubs, black hair (obsidian), dark chocolate skin (smoky quartz). 6’3”, rangy body. Trauma surgeon at A&E. Jonathan’s older cousin. He’s looked after Jonathan since Jonathan and his sister, Georgia (six years younger) moved in with them after their parents were killed in a car accident. He’s very protective of both of them even though he knows they’re adults now. He has a younger brother, Kelsey, 34 who lives in London. Another brother, Dominic, died in the same car accident as Jonathan’s parents. Dominic was 12; he died after he arrived at A&E. That’s when Liam decided to become a doctor.

Mark Mendelson, 38

pale blue eyes – hot summers day, colour almost bleached out but still riveting. Silver hair, sandy blond underneath at the back. Cole always called him M&M because of his initials. Mark used the M&M as his maker’s mark for jewellery designed, removing the ‘&’ after splitting with Cole. 5’11”, stocky but trim. SILVER ROMEO. Liam’s soul mate.

Neridah Ryder, 55, apartment 1C

Married four times, divorced three times, first husband died in a car accident on their first wedding anniversary. She was driving. Heavy smoker, grey eyes with permanent squint from constant smoke, bleach blonde, skinny, super sun-tanned leathery skin but she uses liquid tan now because she’s been told sun ages (too late). Smoker’s voice, low, husky. Crass and rude, comes onto every man she sees. Heart of gold. Husbands’ names: 1. Neil (the perfect), 2. Lindsay (the lazy), 3. Brian (who is now Brianna), 4. Kevin (the angry drunk man-whore).

Kyle, 28, and Tahlia, 22, Ross, apartment 3C

Married two years, Kyle is controlling and manipulating but not physically violent yet. Sex is rough. Tahlia thinks it’s because Kyle loves her so much he can’t help himself. They met at 17, 23. By 21, Tahlia was beginning to be recognised at her work (fashion supervisor at Myer) and Kyle felt threatened by her success so made her life so uncomfortable at work (calling all the time and visiting unexpectedly) that she had to quit. The violence in their relationship is escalating. Tahlia cooks constantly to cover her unhappiness, and gives it to other people to give her life meaning. Neither of them is happy but they cover it with lots of sex. Kyle is a car salesman. He goes to the gym a lot, has lots of tattoos where his employer won’t see them. Tahlia is curvy and pretty with clouds of dark hair and faded blue eyes but looks lost and nervous most of the time. Flutters her hands and smiles shyly, talks a lot when Kyle isn’t there, partly because it’s the only chance she has and partly because she’s nervous about how other people will treat her—doesn’t want them to know how Kyle treats her. Lets Kyle do all the talking, gazes at him constantly. She cleans and cooks when he’s at the gym so he won’t be disturbed by her moving around the small apartment.

Bruce, 67, and Faye, 64, Watson.

Jonathan’s aunt and uncle, Liam’s parents. Bruce retired a year ago and has taken up photography as a hobby. He’s been asked to do a couple of weddings for the children of ex-work colleagues. He used to manage a watch repair business. Faye is a bookkeeper for a tyre sales company and is planning to retire in a year. They had three sons: Liam, Kelsey and Dominic. Dom died when Jonathan’s and Georgia’s parents died. They poured their grief into them: made Jonathan reliant on others and Georgia got spoiled. Liam and Kelsey, while not forgotten, felt like it. Liam became a doctor. Kelsey dropped out of uni and moved to England. They aren’t quite sure what he does and haven’t seen him in five years. Liam’s afraid he’s into drugs. Bruce and Faye call Kelsey once a month. Sometimes Kelsey answers.

Col Anderson, 63

Removalist who works with Ben. Alzheimer’s. Flighty grey hair, pale blue eyes. Wife Lorraine. True love.

Vaughn Lundgren, 26

5’10” stocky build. Does weightlifting to be strong enough to lift patients. Bulging muscles. Close-cropped light blond hair, blue eyes. His eyebrows are the same colour as his hair but his eyelashes are white. Looks like he dyes his hair and eyebrows darker. Nurse for Anthony. Dealing hospital drugs but knows he’ll be caught soon if he doesn’t get into a different line of supply (too many checks in hospitals). He uses Anthony as a place to hide for a while.

Rebecca, 24

Vaughn’s drug-dealing partner. Amoral, manipulative. Short, slim, blonde, hazel eyes.

What was your inspiration for this book?

The last book, Just in Time. My plotting is rather sporadic so a lot of what I write is a surprise to me. Jonathan was one of those surprises. My original outline was much simpler than the book ended up, and that was because Jonathan grabbed my attention. I was drawn to him from the beginning and almost immediately began wondering why he was in the relationship with Anthony and why he’d stayed there that long.

How does this book relate to the others in the series?

I’ve always viewed the series as a cascade. Each book in the series follows one primary couple and introduces other characters as the plot unfolds. Those introduced characters provide the link to the next story. The first two stories have the same two major characters. Just His Type is a Bittersweet because Rebel and Daron don’t end up together (they don’t belong together, but neither of them realizes it at that point). The second book, Just Like a Date, follows Daron and Rebel again as they each find the man they’re supposed to be with. Just Like a Date introduces Mark, Jeremy’s ex (Jeremy finds love with Rebel). Just in Time gives us Mark’s story of how he met Liam who is Jonathan’s cousin.

This book begins three weeks after Just in Time ended. We first met Jonathan about two-thirds through Just in Time. Jonathan was living with Mark’s ex, Anthony (called Cole in Just in Time because that’s what Mark had always called him). At the end of Just in Time, Anthony stabs Jonathan and Liam and then himself. Anthony is still in hospital at the beginning of Just the Way You Are. Liam and Mark from Just in Time feature in this book as well, but this is Jonathan’s story.

What got you started writing in this genre?

I slipped into this genre for a number of reasons. I’d been reading M/F romances and becoming more and more annoyed at them because the women were always submissive sexually. It didn’t matter how strong the woman was in the rest of her life, once she hit the bed the balance of power shifted away from her. I figured, with two men, they could just be men. There didn’t have to be a dominant or submissive personality. They could be equals. The reason I keep writing in the genre is that there’s an imbalance in available literature. Everyone needs to be able to find and read a book that shows them they’re normal. There was plenty of M/M porn out there but people are about so much more than porn. Just like anyone else, gay men need things to read that validate them.

Do you have any hobbies? Or secret talents?

I often tell people I have a low boredom threshold. I do a lot of things, but only a few of them really well. The rest are stress relievers so I don’t put the effort into mastering them.

I love learning things so I’m always looking for new things to learn. I love certificates too, so anything that has a formal qualification at the end of it is appealing. I have qualifications in education, information technology, library management, creative industries, and business (retail). The next certificate I’m going to do will be in Tourism. I’m also a qualified massage therapist and have a certificate in picture framing, although I haven’t used either of those qualifications for a while.

I love history and dressing up, so I combine those two things and design and create costumes for myself to wear. I’m the only person I know who has three Next Gen Star Trek costumes in their wardrobe. My medieval costume is designed to fit the early 14^th century (1300-1310). The hem is 7 metres around, the fabrics are authentic for the time, but I didn’t hand sew any of it. I used to sew all the time, making most of my own clothes, but these days it’s more an intensive 3-5 day session once or twice a year, depending what costume I want to make.

I can dance. Put me in a nightclub and I look like a robot with an electrical malfunction. The dancing I do is ballroom and latin: waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, jive, cha cha, rumba, tango. Lots of smooth moves and teasing body contact.

I knit too. I’m always knitting something, usually baby clothes because they’re small and can be done quickly before I forget where I’m up to in the pattern. I’m not a very good knitter, primarily because my head is always plotting the next scene of a story, so I lose count and stuff the pattern up. I don’t unpick things and do over – I hate going back with anything. If something I do in life doesn’t work, I work out what I did wrong and move forward. Knitting’s the only thing I repeat my mistakes with.

I play the piano—badly. I have no sense of timing so everything I play sounds mechanical and, often, the same, but I love it. It sounds different in my head.

I love Sudoku. I do one or two puzzles every day.

I’m learning Irish via an app on my phone. I’ve done the beginning three lessons five times now because I forget it all between lessons. I’m looking for an app that will teach me Chinese Mandarin. I’ve found several that go from Chinese to English, but not the other way around.

I cook. I like to bake simple things and I love to preserve produce. I have a pantry full of preserves (lime marmalade, tomato chutney, mango and ginger jam, lilly pilly jam, and loads more) that I don’t eat. I give them as gifts for birthdays and Christmas.

I grow vegetables, managing about three crops a year. I tell everyone I grow organic vegetables because I only use manure as fertilizer and I don’t spray them for bugs. I companion plant, offering certain plants to the bugs so they leave others alone. I like that my food only needs a light rinse under the tap to get the dirt off it before I can eat it. Yes, it’s organic but altruistic motivations come in second to laziness. I’m never going to take the time to spray things every week. I have enough trouble remembering to water the gardens in dry weather.

Care to tell us about what you are working on next?

I’ve always been interested in Australian history and have often wondered what the Aboriginal people really thought when Europeans landed and decided their home was a good place for a penal colony. That’s inspired the novel I’m writing at the moment. It has three different timelines over two planets and two dimensions. Only one timeline is told chronologically so, after about 13000 words, I realised I’d have to plot ahead of writing it to make sure I don’t miss any important things. It’s coming along slowly. I’m enjoying writing out of my comfort zone, but struggling to make sure all the different and varied elements are connected strongly enough to hold the readers’ attention.

Once I started getting involved in that story, I realized I needed something a bit simpler to work on as a break for my brain. I picked two characters from the novel and wrote about when they met, up to when they first appear in the novel. It was fun but you can’t tell it’s SF because it’s written entirely in the contemporary Earth timeline. By the time I finished that, I had another idea, and now I’m writing very different SF story that’s inspired by random elements from American slavery, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, Animal Farm, and an article I read a while ago on the circumstances under which people turn to cannibalism. It’s sort of a dystopian throwback society. Of course with all that swimming around inside my head, what was once a simple 5000 word short story target might end up something else entirely.

Chapter ONE

JONATHAN SHIVERED in the early morning air but not from the chill. He wrapped his arms around himself and groaned as his wound tugged against the movement. He relaxed slowly as the pain eased. From where he stood, he could see between the two apartment blocks to where the sun glinted off the Brisbane River. Five years ago he used to watch the ferries puddle their way up and down the river, dropping passengers here at Hamilton and across the way at Bulimba. He’d missed that view for a long time. He wondered if he’d miss the house now that he was leaving it.

The house was gray—morning gray, Anthony had called it, but it had always looked like unwashed, neglected underwear to him. The lines of the house were precise and symmetrical, unlike the yard. The front lawn bore scars, just like his chest. They were from his Cruiser skidding to a stop the night Anthony had sent him to kill Mark. His eyes burned as he thought how close he’d come to doing what his boyfriend told him to.

At the time, he didn’t think he had any other choice. It was kill or be killed. Literally. By the end of that night, Mark had been the only one left uninjured. Liam’s leg had thankfully healed quickly where Anthony had stabbed him. Anthony was still in hospital with a self-inflicted knife wound to the stomach, and Jonathan… Jonathan was done with that life. Anthony’s knife in his chest—so close to his heart it was clearly intended to be fatal—had cured him of whatever delusions he’d held onto that let him believe he was in love with the man. Even Anthony’s assertions that Jonathan was responsible for him being in a wheelchair since the car accident two years before wouldn’t get him to stay.

He was out of it now, or at least he would be as soon as the removalists came and took his stuff away. Then he could begin to heal. The first step had been to learn to breathe again after his lung collapsed when Anthony stabbed him. The next step… he didn’t know what the next step after this was. He wasn’t going to admit it to anyone, but he was just as terrified now, starting a life of his own—on his own—as he was when he thought he was going to die.

The trembling began again. Dizzy. Couldn’t catch his breath. He leaned beside the front door and forced himself to bring his mind back to the here and now and looked around again. There was a new section of fence now, and the Cruiser had been repaired and sat at the curb, waiting for him. His cousin must have had the damage repaired while Jonathan was in the hospital—learning how to make his lung work again after his boyfriend had tried to kill him. He shook the thoughts from his head. He had to stop thinking like this or he’d go mad.

Sleep last night had been impossible. The house had been cleaned, but nothing was going to completely remove the blood splattered on the white carpet. His blood.

A low rumble burbled through the air, and a truck turned onto the street. Jonathan’s heart raced. “You can do this,” he whispered, although he wasn’t quite sure which part of “this” he was talking about. It could be dealing with strangers on his own, or it could be leaving Anthony—finally. He pressed the heel of his hand over the dressing on his chest. Staying with Anthony was no longer an option.

The truck stopped and turned to reverse into the driveway. The high-pitched beeping made Jonathan jump and, to calm himself, he focused on the two men sitting in the cab. The driver looked young and blond, the passenger older and shriveled, his hair sticking out in unkempt tangles.

“Two people. Not Anthony. You’re outside, everything’s marked. You don’t need to go inside with them at all if you don’t want to. You can do this.” He counted his breaths in and out. The beeping stopped, the engine cut out, and the driver’s door opened.

Long, well-formed legs slipped from the cab, by-passing the step completely as a muscled body slid to the ground. Khaki cargo shorts bunched enticingly around a spectacular package before settling loosely around slim hips as the man’s boot-clad feet landed on the ground and he stood away from the truck. Jonathan moved his gaze up the body. The worn T-shirt did nothing to hide the trim stomach and prominent pecs and the sleeves framed the rounded deltoids perfectly. Jonathan sighed as he lifted his focus higher to see the man’s wide smile.

E E Montgomery wants the world to be a better place, with equality and acceptance for all. Her philosophy is: We can’t change the world but we can change our small part of it and, in that way, influence the whole. Writing stories that show people finding their own ‘better place’ is part of E E Montgomery’s own small contribution.

Thankfully, there’s never a shortage of inspiration for stories that show people growing in their acceptance and love of themselves and others. A dedicated people-watcher, E E finds stories everywhere. In a cafe, a cemetery, a book on space exploration or on the news, there’ll be a story of personal growth, love, and unconditional acceptance there somewhere.

Where to find the author:

You can contact E E Montgomery at [email protected]

on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ewynelaine.montgomery

on Twitter: @EEMontgomery1

or at her web site: http://www.eemontgomery.com/ and blog: http://www.eemontgomery.com/blog.