SPOTLIGHT TOUR AND GIVEAWAY: TELLING TALES by CHARLOTTE STEIN

I am happy to participate in the spotlight tour for Telling Tales by Charlotte Stein.

This was a very sexy and interesting story. My glowing review posts on 3/8. This event includes an excerpt from Telling Tales, along with a giveaway.

Allie has held a brightly burning torch for Wade since college. They were part of a writing group together, and everything about those days with him and their friends Kitty and Cameron fills her with longing. When their former Professor leaves them his rambling mansion in his will, it's a chance for them to reunite. But there's more than friendship bubbling beneath the surface. As secrets are revealed and relationships rekindled, the stories get dirtier and the stakes get higher. And now Allie's realized that she isn't quite sure who she wants...fun-loving Wade, or quiet, restrained Cameron. Neither have been honest about their feelings, and now they have the chance to act on all of the tales that ignite their most primal desires.

  

EXCERPT

The house is exactly as I remember it. More so, in fact. The driveway seems longer, the surrounding grounds bigger. Nothing has encroached on it—-when I’m standing on the neatly shaped gravel semicircle in front of the entranceway, all I can see is a grassy veld that slopes downward into trees, and then more trees, and then nothing but farmland and quaint little villages and the mist of the morning rising up over everything like a veil.

It’s beautiful. The house itself is beautiful. There’s even more ivy all over the front and it’s the same squat, deceptively large gray building it always was, with the thickly varnished blue front door and the actual bell instead of a buzzer.

I almost don’t want to go in. What if it’s not the same inside? The letter said it needed some work, so naturally my head is full of images of walls that have fallen down and squatters living in fireplaces and God knows what else.

But when I get in—-the key the solicitor gave me unneeded, because it’s open, creepily—-everything looks so…familiar. The great staircase standing between the kitchen on the left and the living room on the right. The living room still stuffed with those leather wingbacks and the big red sofas and the painting over the fireplace of the stag with the terrifying stare.

They still follow you around the room, those eyes. And the colors are still a mess of vivid and impossible greens and reds, as though any second the whole thing is going to come alive and chase you into another dimension.

That was what this house was like. Another dimension. Everything else about university—-the mundane classes, the mundane people, the sense of being alone even when actually in a room full of people—-was a great swathe of nothingness, apart from this. Apart from the Candy Club and Professor Warren and the weekends we spent, talking until 2:00 a.m. under the watchful gaze of the Evil Stag.

Most of the time Warren just left us to it. It was like our house anyway, in those days—-but I think of him now, even so. I think of him in one of these great old chairs, falling asleep thinking about the students he must have loved, and then just one day never waking up.

I wish we’d known. I wish I’d known. I miss him, standing in this plush room, with everything about him all around me and the best memories I’ve got swamping my mind. He gave me those memories, after all. He made me come to this place, and he made me write, and he was the one who said to me: Don’t ever give up.

Real sorry about that, Professor.

I swipe at my eyes and shake myself, suddenly bristling with a new kind of discomfort because is that another set of bags, by the bureau? Those are definitely someone else’s bags, and if the unlocked door wasn’t enough of a clue to my ridiculous brain, this sure is.

There’s another person here already. And judging by the assortment of sports bags and rucksacks, it isn’t Kitty. Kitty works as a model now, I know she does, and she was always one for the finer things anyway. She’ll be carrying Louis Vuitton, and if I’ve got my Kitty right, she’ll have bagged a room already. No dumping her stuff in the living room for her.

So that just leaves Wade or Cameron. And odds on it’s Wade. Wade was always the sloppiest one, the one who never packed properly and wound up having to borrow some socks from Cameron that resolutely would not fit him because Cameron’s feet were the size of boats.

Which means that any second I’m going to bump into him. I’m just going to turn a corner and see him, and then the bottom of my stomach is going to drop out of me and find the floor. Hell, I

wouldn’t be surprised if it found the basement. I feel sick just thinking about him awkwardly hugging me or even worse—-what if he goes for the equally awkward handshake? What if I’m not worth a hug?

What if I throw up on his shoes?

It’s then that I know why it was Cameron’s voice that persuaded me to come. It’s because Cameron is calming, his very being is calming, and I’m never scared of what he’s going to do next because he’s as steady as a rock. He doesn’t do wild, unexpected things. He’s insular and strange and silent, where as Wade is big and funny and never without a wisecrack. I can’t predict him, and that’s a hard thing to realize when most of me was sure I knew him so well.

GIVEAWAY

Allie and her friends have the chance to get away from the world and reconnect when their professor bequeaths his mansion to them. To enter the giveaway, tell us your fantasy getaway location and the person/persons you would like share it with for a chance to win a copy of TELLING TALES.

Must be 18+ years of age to enter; open to US and Canada only.

The winner is Ellen!