Love Bytes is very happy to give a warm welcome to  author B.D Roca joining us here today, to talk about her new release “Happy Birthday”.

Don’t forget to check out the great Giveaway at the end of the post !

Welcome B.D 🙂

Dangerous Men, Fractured Pasts, and Redemption

Happy Birthday grew out of a ‘what if?’ As in, what if someone was born into a dark, dangerous environment they’d never asked for and that environment was slowly destroying them?

I love sunshine stories, but I also have a huge love of dark, driven characters and storylines. Life can be tough and often brutal. Surviving it can lead to fractured characters that are interesting to write about and situations that are fun (in a twisted way, I wholly admit) to create and resolve. You want to give those guys a HEA. How is the tricky part.

One of the main characters in Happy Birthday, Nick, is a motorcycle club enforcer. He’s been raised in the life; it’s a family business, so to speak, generation to generation. There were no options offered. Nick is flawed. He’s tough, morally ambiguous, a man with the blood of the guilty on his hands. But even that blood has become too much. The tipping point comes when he’s told to eliminate Jake Rushman, the innocent witness to a club-related murder.

Writing about what happens when the two men meet was a lot of fun. It’s a clash of cultures, of lives. Jake isn’t weak; in his own way he’s as strong as Nick. I think in life, love gives us the power to rescue each other, and Jake rescues Nick just as surely as Nick rescues Jake.

Besides tough, flawed guys I also have a weakness for road trips, action/suspense movies and books and movies featuring assassins. Not to mention shows such as Sons Of Anarchy. No surprises there.

Somehow all of those things got mixed into Happy Birthday, and I must confess to being kind of curious now as to where one of the secondary characters is headed. I know what that character’s past is; it’s his future that could prove interesting. That one though, is something I’ll have to wait and see about 🙂

Here’s an excerpt from Happy Birthday:

…Nick swallowed and shook his head, catching Rushman easing back into that chair. He cut his eyes about them.

No one looking. No one curious.

He knew what this was, but he could not believe it. “You…. You were watching me?” he asked.

Shit, his voice sounded gritty. Dust from the road. Grit from too few conversations that were social and not business, grim business. A lot of his pickups hadn’t even required words.

He’d liked those best.

He had no way with words. They could catch you out.

The hazel eyes, a little bloodshot, blinked as they looked over his face. “Yeah. I was watching you. You seemed—once or twice I thought you were watching me too. Or does that offend you?” He paused, a well-brought-up guy from a different world, the beer glass on the table now, those eyes fixed on the wet lip of the glass as he stroked it with the pad of his thumb. The gesture did things to Nick’s breathing, to Nick’s cock, but the other man wasn’t to know that. Couldn’t know that. A line had formed, sharp, between Rushman’s brows, and this close, Nick could see the exhaustion in what was a truly open, honest face. The photographs and Nick’s binoculars hadn’t lied, but up close there were dark circles bruised beneath Rushman’s wide eyes, and the lines of that good sexy mouth were held thinly. He lifted a hand, ruffled it through his hair, and shifted that stare abruptly to Nick, his chair raking back. “I have offended you, haven’t I? Sorry, I’ll just—”

Somehow one of Nick’s hands had slammed out and caught hold of his arm. He dropped it quickly, ashamed. But something had shifted behind Rushman’s eyes.

“Don’t go.”

Hard to sound cool, but he did.

“My name is Jake,” Rushman said, without expression, settling back. “What would yours be?”

Nick swallowed. He was on the edge of a cliff. And he wasn’t jumping, he was diving, a huge swan dive, like those famous cliff-top divers in some exotic place he’d seen on television once. Only they landed safely, bodies cutting into seawater like knife blades.

And his dive was a killing one.

How do you guys feel about tough guys in books? What would be some of your favorite MC related books/series? Leave a comment below for your chance to go in the draw and win the giveaway!

 

BLURB

Jake Rushman is on the run, but it’s too late. He’s being tracked by an expert.

Motorcycle Club Enforcer Nick is tough, but even he has a conscience. It’s slowly destroying him, together with memories of his parents’ ugly deaths. Nick eliminates the guilty, but Jake Rushman is the innocent witness to a murder. It will be one kill too many.

Determined to find redemption, Nick plans to trade his life for Jake’s. Neither man counts on the fierce, powerful bond that the collision of their opposing worlds brings, and Jake refuses to let Nick sacrifice himself. He offers Nick the one thing he’s never had: hope.

But with a violent past tracking them, Nick might be forced to do the one thing he promised himself he never would—kill again.

Buy links:

Dreamspinner

Amazon

B.D. Roca spent her early years in Brisbane, in a series of crumbling old houses laced with the smell of frangipani and surrounded by the hum of cicadas. Her gran raised her on ghost stories, quirky family history, and told her to beat up anyone who gave her attitude. This was not advice she took, although it does make a certain amount of sense. It may also account for her love of tough characters with a heart of gold. Between the old houses, feral cats, steamy heat, and history lessons, it was pure Australian gothic. She’s traveled a lot since then, but those times are still a powerful influence both on her worldview and writing.

Links:

Website: http://bdroca.wordpress.com

Twitter: @bd_roca

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/BDRoca

 

B.D brought a fantastic Giveaway with her,  A $10 GC for Amazon AND an ecopy of Happy Birthday!

Enter the rafflecopter to have a chance to win 🙂

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