Hello Clever Readers!
Today I am going to share an excerpt from my newish novel
Kiss of Tragedy. Before we begin I would like to take a moment to talk about the dark romance and its progression. To set the stage I want to frame a dark romance with the borders of novels like
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Phantom of the Opera, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and
Frankenstein. Those are classic novels everyone is familiar with and they don't spook anyone, even when they start stitching corpses together at midnight. Think of the pleasurable parameters of those books and then start to consider what I would do with similar material.
For my own part, I want to write different kinds of novels. I can't stand reading when an author picks one thing and does different variants of it until the genre is a husk. A dark romance has always been on my radar, like something I wanted to voice in my own words and string along like a necklace made of black beads with the occasional pearl as a spot of light. This means that a dark romance is not always my genre of choice. The next book I release will belong to a different genre, and the book I release after that will be from yet another genre. I want to explore everything.
With that in mind, let's get dark and romantic with this excerpt from
Kiss of Tragedy.
“Choose me,” Seth said, finally sounding sincere.
“What?” Juliet muttered, quite out of breath.
“If that’s how you feel, then I want you. If you’re just going to run out and let some monster like Rylan ruin you, then I want you.”
“Be real,” she said, closing her eyes and trying to brush past him.
“I am being real,” he said, clasping her elbow.
Her shoulders fell. “Are you saying you want to be my boyfriend?”
“Sure. If that’s how you want to classify the love you want, then sure, I’ll be your boyfriend. I’ll be whatever you want.”
“Weren’t you going to ruin me?”
“Better me than anybody else,” he said persuasively.
“What if I don’t want you?” she asked, a small part of herself barring Seth from convincing her. Her mind was unraveling, but she still had one idea to hold onto. “What if I don’t want anyone, except a vampire?”
He faced her. “It’s true that I’m not a vampire, but I kiss like one.”
He warned her, so she should have been ready, but absolutely nothing could have prepared her for his lips. The fragrance from before, the spicy blend of leather and Paris, was gone and instead the taste of his saliva and the smell of his aftershave were like copper. Darkness enveloped her. It was as if her lips and nose had been lowered into a puddle of blood rather than been captured by the man she dreamed of. Her mind was flashing with images.
There was an image of the man she loved and his body was bleeding and dying at her feet. Falling to her knees, she was embracing him—encompassing him with the greatest love she had ever felt. His face was hidden from her, but it didn’t matter. She knew him by sense if not by sight. She was bending over him and kissing him for the last time as she had kissed him thousands of times. This was to be the last kiss and her heart was overflowing with the intensity of the moment. Her mouth felt full with blood and she was choking, like someone choking on tears. She swallowed and with each swallow, she was safeguarding and sealing each one of their sacred memories.
Then she was kissing Seth. He was the one from her vision, the one she crushed to her chest and ached to be near. Nothing made sense except that she loved him and she wanted him. She tangled her fingers in his hair and drew him even closer, but the smell of blood was strong and she began feeling faint.
She slipped from his arms and half fell to the floor. Seth cradled her and lowered her gently until she sat upright on the tile flooring.
“What happened?” she asked, putting her fingers to her face. It felt like there was blood dripping from the tip of her nose and dribbling down her chin.
“I kissed you,” he explained.
Juliet pulled her hand away, expecting to see her fingers stained with red, but they weren’t. They were white. In fact, her face wasn’t even wet.
“I…?” Juliet began.
“Kissed me back,” he finished for her. “You’re a phenomenal kisser, Juliet. I think I even saw stars. And I thought you were going to resist me. Now you’ll never be able to get rid of me.”
“I don’t want to get rid of you,” she mumbled, still confused about what happened. She had been positive that she tasted blood in her mouth. She felt around with her tongue, but she couldn’t feel any cuts. She even put her fingers directly into her mouth and touched her gums and cheeks, but there was only saliva.
“What are you doing?” Seth asked, laughing at her.
“I tasted blood in that kiss. Are you bleeding?”
He examined her with amusement. “No.”
“Then...?”
“Just think of me as your vampire, if that’s the only kind of man you’ll take,” he said as he put his arms around her and lifted her onto her feet. “I’ll take you back to your room now, but I want to see you tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.”
See what I mean by dark romance? I hope you enjoyed that and that you'll give
Kiss of Tragedy a try. Here are the links.
Here's where you order the paperback in Canada.
http://www.amazon.ca/Kiss-Tragedy-Stephanie-Van-Orman/dp/1689418877/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Stephanie+Van+Orman&qid=1567637141&s=digital-text&sr=1-2-catcorr
Here's where you order the paperback in the USA.
https://www.amazon.com/Kiss-Tragedy-Stephanie-Van-Orman/dp/1689418877/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=stephanie+Van+Orman&qid=1567637009&s=gateway&sr=8-3
And here's where you get your free ebook everywhere.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/956670
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