A warm welcome to author Dev Bentham joining us today to share some tought on her new release ” Buyout – A Love Story”.

Living out of a suitcase

My new book, Buyout – A Love Story, takes place mostly at a tourist hotel in Lisbon, Portugal and that has me thinking about the whole concept of staying in hotels.

We all need somewhere to sleep when we’re not at home. Inns have been around since the Middle Ages and even before that the Romans built houses especially for travelers. In modern times, before Airbnb, if we wanted to avoid sleeping outside, we were pretty much limited to hotel/motels, hostels and friends’ couches. And even though there’s often a mind-numbing sameness to most hotel rooms, it can still be difficult to settle in for a good night’s sleep. No one sleeps well their first night in a new place, probably something in our genes that’s left over from the days when we huddled around campfires taking turns with the first watch.

In general, I’m a pretty good sleeper, even in a hotel room. But I can get very disoriented when I wake up somewhere strange (no jokes about the walk of shame please, I meant somewhere, not with someone strange – although that can be disorienting, too). My weirdest story about waking up in a hotel room happened years ago, when I was just a kid.

I was traveling with my parents and my younger brother. Usually we’d all stay in the same room, but that night my parents must have wanted some privacy so they got a separate room for my brother and me. I was very tired and fell asleep as soon as I climbed into bed.

When I woke up, I was alone. Not only that, but the room had somehow flipped, like I’d walked through the mirror. The bathroom was on the opposite side of the room from where it had been when I went to bed. The same with the door, the closet, the furniture – everything was completely reversed. No sign of my brother anywhere.

I was terrified.

I bolted into the hallway, ran down to my folks room and pounded on their door. After a long time, my dad came to the door. I tried to make him understand that something awful had happened, the room had spun around and my brother had disappeared. My father wasn’t a big believer in the paranormal and my mother was pretty appalled I was wandering the hallways in my PJs. They walked me back to the room.

There was my brother, fast asleep. The bathroom, closet and furniture were all in the right place.

I have no idea what happened. Hotel rooms that are side by side are sometimes set up as mirror images and it’s possible that I was sleepwalking, meandered into the room next door and crawled in bed. Or I might have been in my bed all along and dreamed the whole thing. Or maybe, for just a few minutes, the veil between this world and its mirror opposite lifted and I stumbled through. Tell you what, though. It was a long time before I slept comfortably in a hotel room again.

How about you? Do you sleep easily in a hotel room? And what’s your best (relatively clean) hotel room story?

 

 

Blurb:

Everyone deserves a second chance. Or do they? Sean and Martim fell in love at Harvard. Things broke apart when Martim fell into a downward spiral of addiction after his father died. Sean kicked him out but has regretted it ever since. He’s never gotten over losing Martim. But then, not many aspects of his life have lived up to his collegiate dreams.

When he’s sent to evaluate Martim’s family hotel for foreclosure, Sean is once again in the position to put Martim out on the street. In the time since they parted, Martim has pulled himself together, although both health and financial problems linger as a result of his years as an addict. Can the two men bridge the gap of distance and time to rekindle their relationship, or will they fall apart again under the burdens of guilt and disease?

Set in Lisbon, Portugal, this is the story of lovers reunited after more than a decade apart, and their second chance at romance.

Here’s a taste:

 

Martim slid into the seat across from me. I smelled his shampoo and imagined that I could detect the fresh soapy scent of his skin. I had to quit thinking like this. I tried to picture him as I’d last seen him, strung out and naked with another man, but the emotional energy of that betrayal was gone. All I remembered was want.

Cover Artist: Catt Ford

Buy Links

Dreamspinner Press

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

 

Dev Bentham has lived in way too many places and had far too many jobs. She’s finally settled in frozen northern Wisconsin where she teaches online and draws on her former lives to write love stories about mature men searching for true love. Her restless feet take her globetrotting whenever she gets the chance, but most of the time she’s tucked up in her office in the woods dreaming about romance and adventure.

She’s the author of many gay romances, including a DABWAHA finalist, a Rainbow Award Honorable Mention and a Rainbow Awards Finalist.

 

Website: www.devbentham.com

Twitter @DevBentham

Facebook: www.facebook.com/dev.bentham

E-mail: DevBentham@yahoo.com

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