Today I'm so pleased to welcome(back) Ginger Jamison who has visited the blog as her alter ego Sugar Jamison and chatted with me about her Perfect Fit Series. She's here now as Ginger to talk about the debut novel Liberty, in her Harlequin Kimani Press Redemption series. This is a novel that is on my TBR pile and I can't wait to have me time to read it.
So take it away Ginger!
- ISBN-13: 9780373091652
- Publisher: Harlequin
- Publication date: 2/25/2014
- Series: A Redemption Series , #1
- Pages: 304
Overview
A man she thought she knew. A passion beyond her wildest fantasies…When Ryan Beecher returns home after a long deployment overseas, Lexy barely recognizes her husband. The man who left Texas for Afghanistan was cruel and abusive. The man who comes back to her is a badly injured stranger with amnesia—and no memory of their life together.
Lexy can't believe how much Ryan has changed. The wounded marine is now gentle, caring and tender. And his touch awakens yearnings she's never felt before. As he takes them both to the point of no return, can Lexy trust this lover who seems to live only for her pleasure…as he seeks his salvation in her healing embrace?
It almost awed him. Almost. And only because awe was not the proper way to describe what he was feeling. He knew something big was going to happen. Something huge. Something that was going to rock his world, that was going to change the course of his life. And that made him restless.
All week he had been on alert, the tiny hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention, almost as if they were on the lookout for the same unknown element. It was a part of his job to be on alert. Awareness seemed to be his constant companion for the past year.
He signed up for this.
Willingly.
And just maybe that deep, empty feeling came with the territory, along with the sand and the oppressive heat.
"What you thinkin' 'bout?" Terrell Ramon asked him as he switched his assault rifle from one shoulder to the other. Terrell was the youngest man in their squad. He had dark brown skin and big doe eyes that made him look like one of those Precious Moments figurines. He was a baby compared to most of them but he was there because he was smart, a whiz with his hands and all things technical. Terrell could dismember a computer in thirty seconds and put it back together in twenty-five.
"Looks like you thinkin' about a woman? Goo-wee!" The kid slapped his thigh. "I love thinkin' 'bout women," he drawled in his thick Mississippi accent. "My woman's waiting for me at home and she's bangin'-thick booty, pouty lips and the prettiest damn smile you've ever seen." He grew wistful. "She wants to get married. I think I might have to."
He smiled. Terrell couldn't have been more than twenty-two. "You don't sound too sure. Do you want to get married so young?" Normally they wouldn't be having this type of conversation while on duty, or at all, but they had been stuck on this detail for too long and he needed something to take his mind from the constant niggling feeling in the back of his mind. "What's she like?"
"Sandra?" Terrell grinned widely for a moment as if remembering something funny. His eyes softened, taking on a look not often seen in this place. "She's always on my ass, since we were babies. But she's good for me, you know? Don't take none of my bullshit. Funny as hell." He sobered a bit. "I guess I love her. Being here makes me realize that."
He nodded. This conversation had taken a more serious turn than he had intended, but he knew how the kid felt. It was hard being in a foreign country, thousands of miles from your homeland, your comforts, the people who made life bearable.
But they'd signed up for this. They fought this war even if they didn't understand the politics behind it.
"What about you, T-dog? You got a girl waiting for you?"
He shrugged. "I've got a girl but I don't know if she's still waiting."
"She's cheating?" Terrell raised a brow. "Fuck her. You're here busting your balls while she's banging some other dude. Forget about her. Women love a war hero. Once we get home you'll be swimming in panties."
He let out a rusty chuckle. "It's not like that, Terrell. She just wasn't happy with me when I left. I don't blame her. I wasn't the best man when I was with her."
Terrell nodded sympathetically as if he knew the complexities of an adult relationship. "What's her name?"
He shook his head remembering the beautiful woman he'd left behind. "Her name is-" Then it happened.
It.
He heard it first-a blast, an explosion-that momentarily caused him to lose his precious hearing and then he felt it. Heat, blistering heat, that burned and twisted and melted his skin. And then he saw it in slow motion, like some scene from a movie, like he was some actor playing a role. But he wasn't. This wasn't a movie. This is what he had been waiting for. He was flying through the air for what seemed like hours but must have only been seconds. When he landed, the air rushed out of him. Everything went black. And when he opened his eyes again things weren't in the vivid color he was used to, but sepia-muted colors of tan and beige, of sand.
Reality came rushing back to him all too quickly. There was yelling behind him. No. Screaming. Screams of pain. Of terror. Of disorientation. Someone was yelling orders. Someone else was yelling names. There was all of this noise around him, deafening him. He looked around, sending a silent prayer of thanks that he was able to look around, and saw images that would reduce a normal man to tears.
His unit had been hit hard. It must have been a rocket attack. Only something powerful could reduce the men he had known as brothers to shreds. He could no longer tell who was who, the dust was too thick. The men were covered with sand, with blood. Their cries of pain were indistinguishable from one another. This was almost too much to bear, and even though he had seen a lot in his time in the service, the sight of his fallen men made him want to cry. "Tex!" somebody called.
Get up, he told himself. It's time for you to take action. You are a marine. You were trained for this. Your life was leading up to this moment. Attempting to stand, he put one leg in front of him but it didn't want to hold his weight. Sharp, breath-snatching pain shot up his leg and into his body. It was like somebody was grinding broken shards of sharp glass into his muscles. He couldn't walk, so he crawled on his hands and knees, scraping them, causing the skin on them to grow raw and red and bloody. There was a man down not far from him who he didn't know. No. That wasn't right. There were only sixteen of them. He had to know who the man was. But he couldn't tell.
The soldier was unrecognizable. Dirt. Blood. Open flesh. That was all he saw, along with the dark grit that decorated his face.
"I'm dying, man," the unrecognizable soldier told him. There was a slight twang to his voice. He knew him.
"Try not to," he said sincerely. "You owe me fifty bucks."
"It's my time, brother." He grinned, but the smile was mixed with blood, dirt and pain. "At least I can say I died for my country."
"Don't say corny shit like that right now. I'm going to help you."
"You can't help this-" He motioned to his torso, which was no longer covered with skin. "You look like shit, brother. Go help yourself."
"I'm fine," he said, even though his vision started to blur and his head began to throb with a pain that was almost indescribable.
"Do me a favor…" His voice started to fade. "Tell my wife-"
"Tell her yourself," he barked.
"Tell Lexy I'm sorry, and give these to my mother." The dying soldier began to hand over his dog tags. No. He shook his head. He didn't want to honor anybody's last wishes. But he would. He had to. He'd signed up for this.
And so he grasped the man's hand, the dog tags between them, and felt the life drain away. He felt his own life about to go with it. The spinning in his head grew out of control, his body began to seize and he slumped over in the sand as he succumbed to a world of foggy pain and darkness.
Chapter Two
"M rs. Beecher, he's right in here."
When Lexy Beecher learned her husband was in a rocket attack and survived…she sighed. That probably wasn't the usual response of the wife of a marine who hadn't seen her husband in almost two years. But then again she wasn't the usual wife.
When the officer phoned to tell her the news, she couldn't bring herself to cry or laugh or even breathe a sigh of relief. She didn't like her husband and while she hadn't wished him dead she never wanted to lay eyes on him again. Her husband was a horrible man. An awful man. "A piece of no good, low-down stinky shit," as her best friend and Ryan's cousin, Di, called him. It wasn't a harsh description.
It was truth.
"He was hurt very badly."
She nodded slowly, trying to take in all the information that was being thrown at her. The doctor thought she was in shock, but she wasn't in shock. She was numb. She didn't love him. She was going to leave him. The divorce papers sat in her nightstand just waiting for him to come home. She should have served them to him years ago but she wasn't able to. She had been stuck. Everybody, including Ryan, thought they had her pegged. They thought she was weak, that she lacked the backbone, the confidence to make it in the world without him. They were wrong.
Ryan's mother was the only one who got it right. She thought Lexy stayed for love. Lexy had stayed in a marriage to a man she felt nothing for because she did love somebody. However, that person was not her husband.
Her husband had gone out of his way to make it impossible to leave him, to keep her down, to keep her bonded to him. Hell, he had almost succeeded once, but she wouldn't ever be stuck again. It took her two years to rebuild, but she regained everything-including her self-respect.
"He wasn't stable enough to move until this week," the doctor continued, but Lexy barely heard him.
After he had left for Iraq, Lexy had taken steps to reclaim her life. She began to once again save every penny she could spare. She had researched different towns and the services they had to offer. She found a cute little place where she could live for cheap, and some jobs that would pay the bills. She wouldn't need anything from him. Nothing except what she prized most.
Her freedom.
And all he had to do was sign. All she had to do was get him to sign. That task would be difficult, almost Herculean, because the one thing her husband took pride in was his power over her. He wanted to keep her shackled to him like a dog and it wasn't out of love or friendship or simple companionship. He did it because he thought he could, because once upon a time she had been stupid enough to let it happen. To him she was his property, and when he was drunk she turned into his punching bag. How could she be so blind to not realize that he never loved her? She never loved him, either; for ten years they had existed on sick codependence.
Lexy had married Ryan when she was just seventeen years old-when she had been beautiful and naive and filled with hope. Ryan had been twenty-two, devastatingly handsome and deceptively sweet. He was everything an innocent girl thought she wanted in a husband.
"You may not recognize him," the doctor continued, pulling her out of her deep thoughts. "He has a lot of contusions, a broken leg, rib fractures, burns over twenty percent of his body and a broken nose. In addition to that he took a nasty blow to the head. He's been in and out of consciousness for over a month."
She took it all in. He had been through all of that and didn't even have the decency to die. "Has he said anything?"
"I'm sorry, Lexy."
She looked up at the handsome military doctor. "Why are you sorry, Doctor? He couldn't have said anything he hasn't said before."
"No, Mrs. Beecher-" The doctor shook his head. "He said, 'I'm sorry Lexy.' Those are the only words he has spoken since he's been here."
Lexy suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Of course Ryan would wait until he was half blown-up to repent for his years of bad behavior. But that was Ryan. He always had a knack for apologizing. She had spent the first half of their marriage forgiving him, too. But now she was too smart to ever believe those words again. She wasn't a teenager anymore and she was all out of forgiveness.
"I know this is a lot for you, Mrs. Beecher." Dr. Andreas placed his hand on her arm. "You need time to absorb it."
She nodded once, still numb to it all.
Lexy had met Ryan the year her grandmother, the woman who raised her, died. He promised her all the things she craved. A family. A support system. He promised to take care of her. She never had that. She had come into this world an orphan. Her mother was a free spirit who died in childbirth. Her father didn't bother to stick around. She had never known them. Not the way they looked or smelled or smiled. She didn't know where her slanted dark eyes came from or the kink of her unruly hair or even the color of her skin.
She was neither white nor black but some sort of indistinguishable brown that made her ethnic identity a mystery. Rumors swirled that she was Native American, some people told her that she was interracial-part black, part white and a bit Hispanic. She was her own version of the Small World ride.
Ryan didn't see it that way. He called her half-breed or mutt or whatever derogatory name rolled off his tongue.
"He was found lying unconscious next to another soldier. His dog tags were in his hand. It was a good thing they weren't lost. We would have had a hard time identifying him. His condition was more critical than the soldier found lying next to him and yet your husband was the one to survive. This was a miracle."
Miracle.
Ha! Lexy scoffed at the idea. God didn't save Ryan. The God she knew didn't save anyone-not her parents, not her grandmother and certainly not her. Why would he start with Ryan?
She thought about her grandmother, Maybell, who wasn't really her grandmother at all, just some woman who had loved and cared for her since she was an infant. The people of her small town rejoiced in telling her that Maybell had just showed up one day with a squirmy wild-haired baby. When asked where she had gotten the child, she'd replied with a succinct, "None of your damn business."
Lexy loved that cranky old woman dearly but she was as old as an oak tree when Lexy was a child and her love of deep-fried, gravy-covered, barbecue-smothered delicacies didn't help her diabetes or high cholesterol. She died when Lexy was sixteen, leaving her devastated and a little more than brokenhearted.
"You should prepare yourself, Mrs. Beecher. He's stable now but that can change at any moment."
"Please call me Lexy," she said, attending to the man. "Ryan won't die. He's not the type of man to let go."
It almost awed him. Almost. And only because awe was not the proper way to describe what he was feeling. He knew something big was going to happen. Something huge. Something that was going to rock his world, that was going to change the course of his life. And that made him restless.
All week he had been on alert, the tiny hairs on the back of his neck standing at attention, almost as if they were on the lookout for the same unknown element. It was a part of his job to be on alert. Awareness seemed to be his constant companion for the past year.
He signed up for this.
Willingly.
And just maybe that deep, empty feeling came with the territory, along with the sand and the oppressive heat.
"What you thinkin' 'bout?" Terrell Ramon asked him as he switched his assault rifle from one shoulder to the other. Terrell was the youngest man in their squad. He had dark brown skin and big doe eyes that made him look like one of those Precious Moments figurines. He was a baby compared to most of them but he was there because he was smart, a whiz with his hands and all things technical. Terrell could dismember a computer in thirty seconds and put it back together in twenty-five.
"Looks like you thinkin' about a woman? Goo-wee!" The kid slapped his thigh. "I love thinkin' 'bout women," he drawled in his thick Mississippi accent. "My woman's waiting for me at home and she's bangin'-thick booty, pouty lips and the prettiest damn smile you've ever seen." He grew wistful. "She wants to get married. I think I might have to."
He smiled. Terrell couldn't have been more than twenty-two. "You don't sound too sure. Do you want to get married so young?" Normally they wouldn't be having this type of conversation while on duty, or at all, but they had been stuck on this detail for too long and he needed something to take his mind from the constant niggling feeling in the back of his mind. "What's she like?"
"Sandra?" Terrell grinned widely for a moment as if remembering something funny. His eyes softened, taking on a look not often seen in this place. "She's always on my ass, since we were babies. But she's good for me, you know? Don't take none of my bullshit. Funny as hell." He sobered a bit. "I guess I love her. Being here makes me realize that."
He nodded. This conversation had taken a more serious turn than he had intended, but he knew how the kid felt. It was hard being in a foreign country, thousands of miles from your homeland, your comforts, the people who made life bearable.
But they'd signed up for this. They fought this war even if they didn't understand the politics behind it.
"What about you, T-dog? You got a girl waiting for you?"
He shrugged. "I've got a girl but I don't know if she's still waiting."
"She's cheating?" Terrell raised a brow. "Fuck her. You're here busting your balls while she's banging some other dude. Forget about her. Women love a war hero. Once we get home you'll be swimming in panties."
He let out a rusty chuckle. "It's not like that, Terrell. She just wasn't happy with me when I left. I don't blame her. I wasn't the best man when I was with her."
Terrell nodded sympathetically as if he knew the complexities of an adult relationship. "What's her name?"
He shook his head remembering the beautiful woman he'd left behind. "Her name is-" Then it happened.
It.
He heard it first-a blast, an explosion-that momentarily caused him to lose his precious hearing and then he felt it. Heat, blistering heat, that burned and twisted and melted his skin. And then he saw it in slow motion, like some scene from a movie, like he was some actor playing a role. But he wasn't. This wasn't a movie. This is what he had been waiting for. He was flying through the air for what seemed like hours but must have only been seconds. When he landed, the air rushed out of him. Everything went black. And when he opened his eyes again things weren't in the vivid color he was used to, but sepia-muted colors of tan and beige, of sand.
Reality came rushing back to him all too quickly. There was yelling behind him. No. Screaming. Screams of pain. Of terror. Of disorientation. Someone was yelling orders. Someone else was yelling names. There was all of this noise around him, deafening him. He looked around, sending a silent prayer of thanks that he was able to look around, and saw images that would reduce a normal man to tears.
His unit had been hit hard. It must have been a rocket attack. Only something powerful could reduce the men he had known as brothers to shreds. He could no longer tell who was who, the dust was too thick. The men were covered with sand, with blood. Their cries of pain were indistinguishable from one another. This was almost too much to bear, and even though he had seen a lot in his time in the service, the sight of his fallen men made him want to cry. "Tex!" somebody called.
Get up, he told himself. It's time for you to take action. You are a marine. You were trained for this. Your life was leading up to this moment. Attempting to stand, he put one leg in front of him but it didn't want to hold his weight. Sharp, breath-snatching pain shot up his leg and into his body. It was like somebody was grinding broken shards of sharp glass into his muscles. He couldn't walk, so he crawled on his hands and knees, scraping them, causing the skin on them to grow raw and red and bloody. There was a man down not far from him who he didn't know. No. That wasn't right. There were only sixteen of them. He had to know who the man was. But he couldn't tell.
The soldier was unrecognizable. Dirt. Blood. Open flesh. That was all he saw, along with the dark grit that decorated his face.
"I'm dying, man," the unrecognizable soldier told him. There was a slight twang to his voice. He knew him.
"Try not to," he said sincerely. "You owe me fifty bucks."
"It's my time, brother." He grinned, but the smile was mixed with blood, dirt and pain. "At least I can say I died for my country."
"Don't say corny shit like that right now. I'm going to help you."
"You can't help this-" He motioned to his torso, which was no longer covered with skin. "You look like shit, brother. Go help yourself."
"I'm fine," he said, even though his vision started to blur and his head began to throb with a pain that was almost indescribable.
"Do me a favor…" His voice started to fade. "Tell my wife-"
"Tell her yourself," he barked.
"Tell Lexy I'm sorry, and give these to my mother." The dying soldier began to hand over his dog tags. No. He shook his head. He didn't want to honor anybody's last wishes. But he would. He had to. He'd signed up for this.
And so he grasped the man's hand, the dog tags between them, and felt the life drain away. He felt his own life about to go with it. The spinning in his head grew out of control, his body began to seize and he slumped over in the sand as he succumbed to a world of foggy pain and darkness.
Chapter Two
"M rs. Beecher, he's right in here."
When Lexy Beecher learned her husband was in a rocket attack and survived…she sighed. That probably wasn't the usual response of the wife of a marine who hadn't seen her husband in almost two years. But then again she wasn't the usual wife.
When the officer phoned to tell her the news, she couldn't bring herself to cry or laugh or even breathe a sigh of relief. She didn't like her husband and while she hadn't wished him dead she never wanted to lay eyes on him again. Her husband was a horrible man. An awful man. "A piece of no good, low-down stinky shit," as her best friend and Ryan's cousin, Di, called him. It wasn't a harsh description.
It was truth.
"He was hurt very badly."
She nodded slowly, trying to take in all the information that was being thrown at her. The doctor thought she was in shock, but she wasn't in shock. She was numb. She didn't love him. She was going to leave him. The divorce papers sat in her nightstand just waiting for him to come home. She should have served them to him years ago but she wasn't able to. She had been stuck. Everybody, including Ryan, thought they had her pegged. They thought she was weak, that she lacked the backbone, the confidence to make it in the world without him. They were wrong.
Ryan's mother was the only one who got it right. She thought Lexy stayed for love. Lexy had stayed in a marriage to a man she felt nothing for because she did love somebody. However, that person was not her husband.
Her husband had gone out of his way to make it impossible to leave him, to keep her down, to keep her bonded to him. Hell, he had almost succeeded once, but she wouldn't ever be stuck again. It took her two years to rebuild, but she regained everything-including her self-respect.
"He wasn't stable enough to move until this week," the doctor continued, but Lexy barely heard him.
After he had left for Iraq, Lexy had taken steps to reclaim her life. She began to once again save every penny she could spare. She had researched different towns and the services they had to offer. She found a cute little place where she could live for cheap, and some jobs that would pay the bills. She wouldn't need anything from him. Nothing except what she prized most.
Her freedom.
And all he had to do was sign. All she had to do was get him to sign. That task would be difficult, almost Herculean, because the one thing her husband took pride in was his power over her. He wanted to keep her shackled to him like a dog and it wasn't out of love or friendship or simple companionship. He did it because he thought he could, because once upon a time she had been stupid enough to let it happen. To him she was his property, and when he was drunk she turned into his punching bag. How could she be so blind to not realize that he never loved her? She never loved him, either; for ten years they had existed on sick codependence.
Lexy had married Ryan when she was just seventeen years old-when she had been beautiful and naive and filled with hope. Ryan had been twenty-two, devastatingly handsome and deceptively sweet. He was everything an innocent girl thought she wanted in a husband.
"You may not recognize him," the doctor continued, pulling her out of her deep thoughts. "He has a lot of contusions, a broken leg, rib fractures, burns over twenty percent of his body and a broken nose. In addition to that he took a nasty blow to the head. He's been in and out of consciousness for over a month."
She took it all in. He had been through all of that and didn't even have the decency to die. "Has he said anything?"
"I'm sorry, Lexy."
She looked up at the handsome military doctor. "Why are you sorry, Doctor? He couldn't have said anything he hasn't said before."
"No, Mrs. Beecher-" The doctor shook his head. "He said, 'I'm sorry Lexy.' Those are the only words he has spoken since he's been here."
Lexy suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Of course Ryan would wait until he was half blown-up to repent for his years of bad behavior. But that was Ryan. He always had a knack for apologizing. She had spent the first half of their marriage forgiving him, too. But now she was too smart to ever believe those words again. She wasn't a teenager anymore and she was all out of forgiveness.
"I know this is a lot for you, Mrs. Beecher." Dr. Andreas placed his hand on her arm. "You need time to absorb it."
She nodded once, still numb to it all.
Lexy had met Ryan the year her grandmother, the woman who raised her, died. He promised her all the things she craved. A family. A support system. He promised to take care of her. She never had that. She had come into this world an orphan. Her mother was a free spirit who died in childbirth. Her father didn't bother to stick around. She had never known them. Not the way they looked or smelled or smiled. She didn't know where her slanted dark eyes came from or the kink of her unruly hair or even the color of her skin.
She was neither white nor black but some sort of indistinguishable brown that made her ethnic identity a mystery. Rumors swirled that she was Native American, some people told her that she was interracial-part black, part white and a bit Hispanic. She was her own version of the Small World ride.
Ryan didn't see it that way. He called her half-breed or mutt or whatever derogatory name rolled off his tongue.
"He was found lying unconscious next to another soldier. His dog tags were in his hand. It was a good thing they weren't lost. We would have had a hard time identifying him. His condition was more critical than the soldier found lying next to him and yet your husband was the one to survive. This was a miracle."
Miracle.
Ha! Lexy scoffed at the idea. God didn't save Ryan. The God she knew didn't save anyone-not her parents, not her grandmother and certainly not her. Why would he start with Ryan?
She thought about her grandmother, Maybell, who wasn't really her grandmother at all, just some woman who had loved and cared for her since she was an infant. The people of her small town rejoiced in telling her that Maybell had just showed up one day with a squirmy wild-haired baby. When asked where she had gotten the child, she'd replied with a succinct, "None of your damn business."
Lexy loved that cranky old woman dearly but she was as old as an oak tree when Lexy was a child and her love of deep-fried, gravy-covered, barbecue-smothered delicacies didn't help her diabetes or high cholesterol. She died when Lexy was sixteen, leaving her devastated and a little more than brokenhearted.
"You should prepare yourself, Mrs. Beecher. He's stable now but that can change at any moment."
"Please call me Lexy," she said, attending to the man. "Ryan won't die. He's not the type of man to let go."
Hi Ginger, welcome or I should say welcome back to The
Reading Frenzy. (I’ve also interviewed Sugar Jamison, Ginger’s alter ego)
Tell my readers about Liberty.
Seeing servicemen reunite with their families
on the news always made me so emotional.
Their families were so happy to see them, to have them home again. And
that’s how the idea for Liberty came to me. I thought about what it might be
like for a serviceman to not be so welcomed when he came home. For a man to
return to a town where no one thinks he’s a hero despite his heroic actions in
Iraq.
Here’s the official description of the book.
When Ryan Beecher returns home after a long
deployment overseas, Lexy barely recognizes her husband. The man who left Texas
for Afghanistan was cruel and abusive. The man who comes back to her is a badly
injured stranger with amnesia—and no memory of their life together.
Lexy
can't believe how much Ryan has changed. The wounded marine is now gentle,
caring and tender. And his touch awakens yearnings she's never felt before. As
he takes them both to the point of no return, can Lexy trust this lover who
seems to live only for her pleasure…as he seeks his salvation in her healing
embrace?
What will the Redemption novels have in common?
All of my heroes are Marines who were in the
same unit when it was attacked by a rocket. Each book tells the story of their
homecomings and how they heal after the attacks.
There is a lot of deep emotion and serious issues you deal
with in the novel.
It pulls a great deal of emotion from me as I read about abuse and these emotionally charged issues.
How does it affect you as the author as you’re writing it?
It pulls a great deal of emotion from me as I read about abuse and these emotionally charged issues.
How does it affect you as the author as you’re writing it?
Surprisingly it doesn’t. When I write I try not
to think because I overthink things. I just let the words flow and try to make
sense of it later.
It’s odd
because I could never watch a movie or a TV show where someone is being abused
or hurt. It’s painful for me to watch, but writing this story was easy. I know
a woman who was horribly abused by her first husband and even though I met her
after her I wrote this book it helped me understand Lexy more. So many people have a hard time
imagining why abused women stay. There are a lot of reasons and I wanted to
give readers a little glimpse into that.
Ginger this is your first Harlequin Kimani novel, people may
not know that you also write under the pseudonym of Sugar Jamison. (click the
link here
for a previous blog post featuring Sugar.)
Why did Ginger choose to write for Harlequin?
Why did Ginger choose to write for Harlequin?
Harlequin was just the best fit for this book.
Plus it’s Harlequin! I grew up with them. They are a romance writer’s dream.
How important are Happy Ever After’s to you?
For me a book is not a book unless there is a
Happily Ever After.
Ginger your bio
states that you grew up with four brothers.
Did they give you a good research beginning to write about men?
Did they give you a good research beginning to write about men?
Nope! My older brother has Autism and that has given me a whole other perspective on what it means to love and sibling relationships and family. And my other brothers are younger than I am. I don’t consider them men yet LOL. I always fall in love with the men I write about. Most of the time it’s easier for me to write about them then my heroines.
It also says that it’s your mother who placed the first
novel in your hands.
What do you think you’d be doing now if your muse hadn’t shown up?
What do you think you’d be doing now if your muse hadn’t shown up?
I still work full time in the same job that I’ve had since I graduated from college. It’s the job I always knew I was going to have when I grew up. But even before my mother put that book in my hands I knew I was going to be a writer in some form or fashion.
Ginger you’re a pretty connected author.
Do you love Social Media or is it a necessary evil?
Do you love Social Media or is it a necessary evil?
I love Facebook because I like to interact with
my readers on a more personal level. I
love when they comment on posts or share little pieces of their lives with
me. Social media is just a part of my
life. I don’t know how I would know what was going on in pop culture without
it.
Okay let’s get a little personal now. It’s okay you can
trust us with your secrets :)
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
Shoes.
And cheap shoes too! I won’t spend more than twenty bucks on a pair
which is probably why I have dozens I shoes I haven’t worn more than once. I
also have a large collection of boots. I LOVE BOOTS. I really don’t think I
could live happily without them.
Ginger, thanks so much for letting us get to know you a bit
better.
Will there be any signings/author events where fans could meet you in person?
Will there be any signings/author events where fans could meet you in person?
Thanks for having me!!!! I will be at the PLA
conference March 14th in
Indianapolis. At the BOOK EXPO of America May 29th in New York City and at RWA in San
Antonio July 23rd –July 26th.
MEET THE AUTHOR:Growing up with four rowdy brothers and a cop father added to the spice in Ginger Jamison's life. It was her mother who placed a novel in her hands and turned up the heat for her love of romance.Spicy or sweet,Ginger learned that a good romance can take you completely away from the world. She now writes contemporary romances,filled with real people, real life,and true love.When she's not lost in a book,you'll find her shoe shopping or writing sassy romances under the name of Sugar Jamison.
Look for the next novel in the Redemption series soon from Harlequin
I should come out of the shell more often, so many authors I've never heard of from before, sounds like an emotional read, sometimes I'm in the mood just for this kind a book.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing
Hi Loupe, yes there are sooo many great authors that we'll never be able to read. The publisher gave me a copy of Liberty and it's one I'm definitely reading. I Love heartwarming stories of returning vets
DeleteHey thanks for stopping by :)
::snort:: omg "I don't consider them men yet". That totally made me bust out laughing. And this one sounds like it would have me going all girly and teary eyed. Just reading about it here got me a little misty. I do wonder about that as well. I volunteer for the USO and we have homecomings for military just getting home and always hope they have someone there to see them.
ReplyDeleteMy (little) brother (who is almost 60) is not a man yet either. In fact I can't be in the same room with him for more than a few minutes before he reverts to his imbecile ways of teasing and I want to get out the rat poison to season his dinner LOL
DeleteAnd Yeah me too I'm definitely reading this one, now I just need more time to do it :)
That's just too funny Debbie. I'm an only child so never had that so always tickles me when people say things like that. lol
DeleteOh Anna The Joys of siblinghood I could tell you stories girlfriend and I'm the oldest of 4. One time when I was supposed to be "babysitting for free" for my parents to make them behave I chased them through the house with a butter knife :)
DeleteWell you had me at Marines from the same unit. LOL
ReplyDeleteKim, I know. Right? And well who knows romance better than HQN?
DeleteThis excerpt really caught my attention. Thanks for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteHi Step, thanks for stopping by :)
DeleteThanks for having me!
ReplyDeleteGinger HI!!! (waving madly)
DeleteI can't thank you enough to taking the time out of your busy scheduled to chat w/us :)
and I can't wait to open this book
deb