VBT# Shades of Gray - LM Pruitt

Today's VBT# is author L.M Pruitt sharing with us a synopsis of her new book "Shades of Gray" as part of The Bookis snob Promotions.

Synopsis : Shades of Grey - L.M Pruitt - 2011

Jude Magdalyn Henries lives what many would call an unconventional life.

Orphaned at birth, raised by nuns, a teenage runaway living on the streets… she now earns a living at odd jobs, including one as a fake tarot card reader. Very little about Jude’s life appears normal, by any scale. When she accepts a gig to do a private reading, unconventional takes on an entirely new meaning.

Life as she knows it ends when she’s thrust into a world she never knew existed—one filled with magic, vampires, and her beloved New Orleans on the verge of an underground war. To make matters worse, she's got two men in her life vying for attention, Williams and Theo. Both call to a different part of her, but one scares her just a little bit. Can she step up to the challenges set before her and make the right choices for the greater, which may or not be the greater good?

Chapter Excerpt:

As a reader—and a woman—I love a good kiss. It’s like chocolate. Seriously. And just like chocolate, there are hundreds of kinds of kisses. The first kiss between two childhood friends who are just finding out they may, in fact, be more—sweet, innocent—milk chocolate. The kiss where you feel something spring to life inside you, something a little scary, a little dark—and yet you crave more—creamy Belgian chocolate. And then there’s the kiss that knocks you for a loop, tears everything about you apart even as it puts you back together—chocolate so dark, so unbelievable rich, you wonder how you existed without it, how you can ever go back to any other kind.

Which one this is, well--that's for you to decide.

Williams chuckled and I swallowed at the little spark of pure lust it sent through my body. Just a little one, but sometimes the littlest ones do the most damage. “Jude Magdalyn, my living years were spent amongst the sort of women that gave their favors not for love, but for love of money, and little changed once I was turned until I came into contact with the Covenant. If I were to find such a love, I doubt I would even recognize it as what it was.”

Somehow my hand had found its way to his waist, where it settled, whether for my support or his I don’t know. “So you’re just going to give up, even though you know there’s a possibility it’s out there?”

Williams’ hand dropped from the cabinet door to cup my jaw, and I couldn’t control the shiver it elicited. Sparks, shivers - if I’d heard bells and whistles, I’m not sure what I would have done. His eyes bored into mine. “I wouldn’t have taken you as an incurable romantic, Jude Magdalyn. You would seem to be full of surprises, quite a few of them pleasant.”

I let out a shaky breath, trying to laugh it off. “Must be the air.”

Williams stepped closer, one little half step that brought us up against each other. “Weak excuse, Jude Magdalyn. Try again.”

His hands playing along my jaw and along the nape of my neck made it difficult to breathe, let alone form rational thought. “The house.”

His teeth grazed the lobe of my ear, and my hand clenched in his shirt while my pulse slowed down to a standstill. Hart could have launched the end of the world and I don’t think either one of us would have been able to move to stop him. “Once again, I doubt your veracity, Jude Magdalyn.”

A sound, half groan, half murmur blew across his cheek when I turned my lips to his. “Maybe I just want to jump your bones, and this is my plan to do it.”

His hand fisted suddenly in my hair, and the gasp I let out wasn’t due to pain. My heartbeat was loud in my ears. If Williams had a pulse of his own, I wouldn’t have been able to hear it over mine. I felt his answer on my lips more than heard it.

“Clever girl.”

For some reason, my first thought when they pressed against mine was, his lips should have been cold. They weren’t, a hint of heat grew and spread from his lips to mine, and through the rest of my body until I was a pool of gentle warmth, my muscles loose and yet tight at the same time. My hand lay loosely against his hip, there more to keep contact with him than to hold myself up. Williams was doing that all on his own, one hand twined in my hair while the other pressed against the small of my back, pushing me into him.

I’d seen the past, and I’d seen the future, but I hadn’t seen time stop until then. The steady tick-tock of the unseen clock slowed until it stopped altogether. When I opened my eyes, I could see tiny particles hanging suspended, waiting patiently to continue on their journeys. The air was so thick, so full of the moment, breathing it was like inhaling maple syrup.

Keeping my eyes open was too hard, and I closed them again as Williams’s mouth moved over mine. I hadn’t been wrong when I’d assumed he’d had a few lifetimes of experience and knew how to use each one of them. Gradually, all the tightness went out of my muscles and even though Williams held me in a firm grasp, I felt my knees give way. I let out a little whimper of disappointment when the move pulled my lips from his. His mouth swallowed it up as he shifted us smoothly, as if he’d anticipated such a thing.

I think we could have stayed forever in that moment, in the kiss, as impossible as it seemed, if a few things hadn’t happened.