Embarrassing Crushes

By Susan Mallery

With more than 25 million books sold worldwide, New York Times bestselling author Susan Mallery is known for creating characters who feel as real as the folks next door, and for putting them into emotional, often funny situations readers recognize from their own lives. Susan’s books have made Booklist’s Top 10 Romances list in four out of five consecutive years. RT Book Reviews says, “When it comes to heartfelt contemporary romance, Mallery is in a class by herself.” With her popular, ongoing Fool’s Gold series, Susan has reached new heights on the bestsellers lists and has won the hearts of countless new fans.

Susan grew up in southern California, moved so many times that her friends stopped writing her address in pen, and now has settled in Seattle with her husband and the most delightfully spoiled little dog who ever lived. Visit Susan online.

Susan chats about Ford Hendrix of THREE LITTLE WORDS

When I was younger, I had a deep and abiding love for a celebrity who shall remain nameless. I wasn't the kind of girl to hang his picture in my locker or cover my room with his posters – ours was a private love. I grew up in LA, and my dad worked in TV, so I was convinced that my one true love and I would one day meet. And when we did, I didn't want him to think that I was like the millions of silly girls who had a crush on him. They didn't know him. I did. My love was real, and as soon as we met, he would recognize me as his soulmate.

Back then, I didn’t tell anyone how I felt because our love was sacred. Today, I still won’t confess his name because, frankly, I’m embarrassed. What was I thinking?! He wasn’t very smart, only marginally cute, and he ran like a girl. (There’s your one hint – he was on a TV show that required running. And he had dark hair. Two hints, but that’s it.)

In THREE LITTLE WORDS, my latest Fool’s Gold romance, Isabel Beebe knows all about embarrassing crushes, though hers wasn’t on a celebrity. When Isabel was 14, she had a crush on Ford Hendrix, her sister’s then-fiancé. Worse, Ford knew how she felt because when her sister broke up with him, Isabel chased after him, sobbing, begging him not to leave. And when he joined the Navy, she wrote him dozens of long, impassioned letters.

Over the years, her letters became less like teenage love letters and more like a “Dear Diary” kind of thing, but that brings its own special twist of humiliation. Because now Ford is back in Fool’s Gold to open a bodyguard-training facility, and this dangerously sexy ex-Navy SEAL knows all her most embarrassing secrets. He knows about her first kiss. He knows when she lost her virginity and where (*cough* inthebackofatruck *cough*).

All summer, Isabel has been ducking around corners to hide from Ford, but as THREE LITTLE WORDS begins, she’s decided that enough is enough. Fool’s Gold is too small for her to avoid him forever, especially since he just rented the place next door.

 Enter the THREE LITTLE WORDS blog tour contest once a day every day from July 30 through August 11 for a chance to win a $25 Amazon or BN.com gift card! And because this blog was set up by Fool’s Gold Cheerleader Brenda Rumsey, if you win, she’ll win a gift card, too!

Enter the Contest.

SUSAN WANTS TO KNOW: Who was your embarrassing teenage crush? Why are you embarrassed?

FINDING OUR TRIBE

By Susan Mallery

With more than 25 million books sold worldwide, New York Times bestselling author Susan Mallery is known for creating characters who feel as real as the folks next door, and for putting them into emotional, often funny situations readers recognize from their own lives. Susan’s books have made Booklist’s Top 10 Romances list in four out of five consecutive years. RT Book Reviews says, “When it comes to heartfelt contemporary romance, Mallery is in a class by herself.” With her popular, ongoing Fool’s Gold series, Susan has reached new heights on the bestsellers lists and has won the hearts of countless new fans.

Susan grew up in southern California, moved so many times that her friends stopped writing her address in pen, and now has settled in Seattle with her husband and the most delightfully spoiled little dog who ever lived. Visit Susan online.

I think that deep down, everyone wants to belong. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. When we’re alone, truly alone, we feel lost, adrift. We need to know that someone cares about us. We need to care about others, to be connected to the world around us in some way. We need to be part of a tribe.

Almost all of us do it, all our lives. We either join a community or we form one. We have our families, our friends, our clubs, our churches and schools. We’re brought together by blood or shared interest or just a snarky sense of humor. We meet a like-minded soul, and we know immediately, we belong to the same tribe.

Have you ever become instant friends with someone just because she reads romance? Me, too! That’s what I’m talking about. We’re all part of the romance-reading tribe. We bond over our belief in happy endings.

Intellectually, Felicia Swift, heroine of TWO OF A KIND, my latest Fool’s Gold romance, understands that she needs a tribe. And emotionally, she feels it. Deeply. But she doesn’t know how to get there. She’s one of the smartest people in the world, but her intelligence seems to push people away. Even her parents. They gave her up when she was four, intimidated by her freakish smarts. (It didn’t help that she built a bomb.) They allowed Felicia to be raised on a university campus, where she was fed, clothed, challenged, educated… but never loved.

Felicia has moved to Fool’s Gold, typical small-town America, to learn how to interact with normal people so she can become one of them. She longs to fit in. She served as a logistics expert in the Army for years, and found a community there, but it was a life she was in almost by default. What she truly yearns for is to find her tribe, to fall in love, to have a family.

Men tend to be more solitary than women, but underneath, they need a tribe, too. Even if their tribe consists of just one or two other people. Gideon Boylan doesn’t think so. When he was a prisoner of war, he watched his buddies break, one by one, weakened by the families they loved back home. Gideon was the only survivor because, as he saw it, he had no one to miss.

Felicia thinks there’s safety in numbers, and Gideon feels that safety lies in the number one. Bet you can guess who turns out to be right!

Enter the TWO OF A KIND blog tour contest once a day every day from June 25 through July 7 for a chance to win a $25 Amazon or BN.com gift card! And because this blog was set up by Fool’s Gold Cheerleader Brenda Rumsey, if you win, she’ll win a gift card, too!

Click here to enter.

What shared interests or hobbies helps you make close friends?

Long-Lost Loves

By Susan Mallery

With more than 25 million books sold worldwide, New York Times bestselling author Susan Mallery is known for creating characters who feel as real as the folks next door, and for putting them into emotional, often funny situations readers recognize from their own lives. 

Susan’s books have made Booklist’s Top 10 Romances list in four out of five consecutive years. RT Book Reviews says, “When it comes to heartfelt contemporary romance, Mallery is in a class by herself.” With her popular, ongoing Fool’s Gold series, Susan has reached new heights on the bestsellers lists and has won the hearts of countless new fans.

Susan grew up in southern California, moved so many times that her friends stopped writing her address in pen, and now has settled in Seattle with her husband and the most delightfully spoiled little dog who ever lived. Visit Susan online.

JUST ONE KISS Exclusive Video.

Remember that boy from high school, the one who you thought about while listening to romantic songs on the radio, by yourself, in the dark, sobbing because he didn’t return your feelings? Remember how seeing him in the hallways at school made your breath catch in your throat? And if he caught your gaze and smiled at you, your spirits soared.

Remember him?

What if he was your best friend? And what if you went to his house before school one day so you could walk together as you always did… only he was gone?

Gone-gone. The doors were open, the closets were empty, and you never saw him again. He just… disappeared.

That’s what happened to Patience McGraw when she was a teen. As JUST ONE KISS begins 15 years later, Patience is at work in a salon in Fool’s Gold, California when Justice returns.

"Patience?"

She didn't recognize the male voice, but turned anyway. A man stood in the entrance of the shop. He was tall, with dark gold-blond hair and deep blue eyes. His shoulders were broad and he had the kind of face that would be happy up on a movie screen. Nice, but she had no idea who he...

She felt the cape flutter to the floor as she really looked at the man moving toward her. He was a few inches taller, a lot more muscular, but his eyes... They were exactly the same. They even crinkled when he smiled at her.

"Hello, Patience."

She was fourteen again, standing in that empty house, more scared than she'd ever been in her life. There hadn't been any answers. Not then or since. No solution to the mystery. Just questions and a gnawing sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

"Justice?" she asked, her voice more breath than sound. "Justice?"

He gave her a slight shrug. The familiar gesture was enough to send her flying across the shop. She flung herself at him, determined to hang on this time.

He caught her against him and held on to her nearly as tightly as she held on to him. He was warm and solid and real. She pressed her head against his shoulder and inhaled the scent of him. A clean, masculine smell that had nothing to do with the boy she remembered. This wasn't happening, she thought, still dazed. Justice couldn't be back.

Yet he was, and here. But the man was very different from the boy and the moment got awkward quickly.

Justice has returned to Fool’s Gold to open a bodyguard academy with a few of his ex-military buddies. (This is Fool’s Gold, where we go light on danger and heavy on humor, charm, and fun, flirty romance.) Justice leapt at the chance to return to the town that took him in at a very tense point in his life, and he was eager to see Patience again, his sassy, beautiful friend.

She’s just as open-hearted as she was back then, unstained by the darkness in the world, darkness he lives with every day. The moment Justice holds her in his arms, he vows to protect her from himself. Patience is everything good and pure in the world, and he won’t ruin that. She draws him like sunlight on a cold day, but though he can’t resist the need to be near her, to kiss her, he won’t allow himself to fall in love.

Enter the JUST ONE KISS blog tour contest once a day every day from May 28 through June 9 for a chance to win a $25 Amazon or BN.com gift card! And because this blog was set up by Fool’s Gold Cheerleader  Brenda Rumsey, if you win, she’ll win a gift card, too!

Click here to enter.

Are you still in touch with the boy or boys you had a crush on in high school? Did they grow up to be as cute as you thought they would?