Blog Tour Stop: Blog Post by Morgan Kelly & Contest Midnight in Your Arms

Today is one of the most exciting days of the year for me, and not just because it’s nearly my favourite holiday—Halloween! The other thing that makes today exciting is that my brand new book Midnight In Your Arms, my first ever historical romance, comes out today with Avon Impulse/Harper Collins! I still can’t quite believe the day is actually here. I’m sure I’ll keep pinching myself all day long, in between bouts of pumpkin carving and doing the Monster Mash.

The thing that makes Midnight In Your Arms a little bit unique is that it’s a time travel romance that takes place both in the 1860s and the 1920s, and that the love story wouldn’t even be possible if it wasn’t for All Hallows—the one night of the year on which the living and the dead are able to pass into each other’s realms.

Time travel is a tricky, as-yet-unproved science, but it can be terribly romantic! If you think about it, the living are like ghosts to the people who lived before us, just like the people who haven’t been born yet are spirits to us. Straying outside of our own time, even if we’re not really dead, is a little like haunting another time and place. Imagine meeting a heartthrob from the past or future that you just can’t keep out of your mind, and like my heroine Laura Dearborn finds out, you discover that sometimes a ghost can fall in love! Would you do whatever it took to make your relationship work? Maybe when a ghost and a psychic get together, with a little Halloween magic, sometimes impossible love really can become reality.


Title: Midnight in Your Arms by Morgan Kelly
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Imprint: Avon
Genre: Time Travel, Romance
Length: 240 pages

Summary:

For fans of Downton Abbey and readers of Jude Deveraux and Teresa Medeiros comes a brand-new tale of a love that dares to defy time itself . . .

When psychic Laura Dearborn inherits Stonecross Hall in 1926, she has no idea she’s inheriting a love story too—one that she’s lived again and again. But as Alaric Storm III, the handsome owner of the mansion from sixty years earlier, starts to haunt her waking dreams, Laura discovers her heart’s true home has always been within Stonecross’s walls.

Tormented by memories of war, Alaric Storm III is used to spirits—just not ones from the future. Set on fire by Laura’s ghostly affections, Alaric is forced to choose: follow his heart and grasp Laura’s hand through time, or surrender to the call of duty and live without love.

As All Hallows’ Eve draws near, Alaric and Laura must find a way to hold on to each other forever—or risk repeating their tragic romance until the end of time.

“Kelly’s thoughtful debut novella sensitively evokes the horrors of war and the emotional difficulties facing veterans in peacetime, and the atmospheric descriptions of 1920s London and Victorian high society illuminate the temporal and social differences separating the lovers.” (Publishers Weekly )

“A lush Gothic romance nested within a time-traveling ghost story, Midnight in Your Arms is the very best kind of fairytale, an inventive tapestry of the nostalgic and the new that begs to be read into the early hours of the morning. A marvelous debut!” (Michael Boccacino, author of Charlotte Markham and the House of Darkling)


Excerpt:

This is a scene in the book when Laura, the heroine who is living in 1926, plays a game that will show her future husband to her in the mirror. Only the trance she falls into affects more than Laura alone. Alaric, the hero, experiences the same vision in reverse in 1866:

It only happened because he was tired, had too much to drink at dinner, and couldn’t stop thinking about the woman he had seen at the door. The woman he thought he had seen, that was. No one else saw her. She was clearly a figment of his imagination. And as such, it was only natural that he would imagine her again.

He was sitting at the mirror, combing the snarls out of his own hair after having waved Jeffries off to bed. And he was thinking about her. The woman in the strange dress, with the hairstyle that was stranger still. And those eyes. She had eyes that had seen too much, more than a human being should. Alaric knew the signs all too well—he was looking at them, in his own face. The candlelight flickered over his features, and he seemed both infinitely old and impossibly young all at once, as if every version of himself through every stage of his life were all present at once. And that was when it happened.

He looked into his own eyes, mesmerised by the way the light reflected there seemed to eat them up, obscuring his face so that he began to look like quite another person entirely. Alaric squinted, pushing the illusion further. It was the strangest impression, born entirely of light and shadow. Or so he thought—until the hair he saw in the mirror began to change. It grew shorter, fuller, curling just beneath earlobes that were far too delicate to be his own—and they were pierced with tiny pearls!

His eyes widened.

He was not looking at himself at all.

This was no trick of the candlelight.

He was seeing some other person entirely. It looked very much like the same woman he had imagined earlier, only now he could see her so much more clearly. And she was barely dressed. She wore only an unusual sort of lacy shift, which displayed the soft swell of her breasts to rather fine effect. Her eyes were large and black, fringed with thick lashes, and her mouth was full and ripe, like early cherries drooping from a stem. Was that lip-rouge she was wearing? Scandalous. He had always rather liked the effect of lip-rouge, though no lady he knew would ever wear it. Clearly, she wasn’t a lady.

“Who are you?” he said to the woman in the mirror, indulging the fancy as far as it would take him. To his astonishment, her lips mouthed the same words back to him, perfectly synchronized. “What do you want?”

What on earth was he doing? He must have had far more wine with his dinner than he realized. He was hallucinating. Clearly this was a hallucination. Alaric shook his head briskly, as though to shake the image from his mind’s eye—and the woman in the mirror did the same. He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them, blinking, she was gone.

She was gone, but he could smell her perfume. It clung to the darkness like wet silk, and suddenly he was aware that he was hard—painfully erect beneath his dressing gown.

He wanted her, badly—and she didn’t even exist.


I am a romance writer living on the outskirts of Vancouver, BC with my own personal romance hero, my husband Neil, our three ridiculous cats, and a very silly little dog indeed. Books outnumber people in our household by about 2,500 to one, at my last rough estimate. I cower in nightly fear that an avalanche of them will cover us completely in our sleep, as there is always a precarious pile teetering on the edge of my nightside table. There are quite a few of them in bed with me as well, come morning–but don’t tell anyone! It’s a little embarrassing, admitting to sleeping with books when you’ve got a perfectly cuddlesome man in bed with you like I have every night. I’m about to have my first novella published with Avon Impulse in October 2012 called Midnight In Your Arms. It’s a haunting Halloween story about time travelling lovers living in separate eras (1926 and 1866!) and a creepy old house called Stonecross Hall that clings ominously to the Devon coastline. Doesn’t that sound delicious? I am personally very fond of creepy old houses clinging to coastlines, be they in Devon, or elsewhere. Keep your eye on my blog, or Facebook, or Twitter, for the announcement of the exact date of publication. See my first blog post in which I talk about getting “the call” from Avon, one of the most exciting days in the life of every romance writer.

Find Ms. Morgan on the Web: Website * Facebook * Twitter * HarperCollins Author Page * Goodreads


In celebration of Midnight In Your Arms coming out today, Ms. Kelly is giving away one digital copy to one lucky commenter.

To enter today’s contest:

You must Do TWO of the Following:

1. Sign up for e-mail updates (upper left corner). One email daily with the day’s posts.

OR:

2. Be or become a fan of Book Reviews & More by Kathy Facebook page

OR:

3. Follow me on Twitter (@BookReviewsMore)

OR:

4. Friend Book Reviews & More by Kathy on Goodreads

Make sure you have filled out the contest entry form:

5. To be eligible to enter contests on Book Reviews and More by Kathy you MUST fill out the contest entry form (found HERE). This form only needs to be filled out ONCE. Your privacy is important to me, and I will not share your information.

And don’t forget to:

6. Leave a comment on this post by 5 PM Mountain Time Friday afternoon.

It’s that easy! The winner will be selected using random.org. The winner will be announced on Saturday.

10 Comments

Filed under Blog Tour, Guest Blog, Midnight in Your Arms, Morgan Kelly

10 Responses to Blog Tour Stop: Blog Post by Morgan Kelly & Contest Midnight in Your Arms

  1. Eileen

    Congrats on your new book. You must be very excited. Thanks for the chance.

  2. Angie M

    I love time travel romance! The fact that this is historical time travel makes it sound more interesting to me. Thanks for the giveaway!

    • I’m so glad it looks interesting to you! I’m a sucker for time travel, myself–a HUGE Doctor Who nerd, heh heh! Thanks so much for taking the time to comment, it’s really nice. Good luck on the giveaway, and have a wonderful Halloween :o)

  3. Suzanne

    Congrats on the release, I am sure it will do well. I enjoy a good times travel story. Definitely a TBB then TBR, with review after.

  4. Cec

    Congratulations on the release of your new book. Will be adding it to my tbr pile.
    Thank you for the giveaway!!

    • Cec,thanks so much for participating! I understand you are the winner of the free copy! For some reason, I don’t seem to have your contact info–perhaps the internet ate it O.o Can you please email me at morgan.kelly.romance AT gmail.com so I can send you your prize? Thanks so much! –Morgan.

  5. Timitra

    Congrats on the new release…love the sound of Midnight In Your Arms!

  6. Annette

    Congratulations on the new book. It sounds like a really good read. I look forward to it.