What is a Dark Angel?

 

The blog  title asks a question. What is a dark angel? Well, in this book, it's not a supernatural being, but rather what the heroine has come to call the hero. Dark for what he seems like he might be, dangerous, a life on the edge, but angel for what he looks like and what she believes is under the cover of the dark side.

The story begins in Reno, when a young, wealthy, widow, Katy Brown, has come to help her uncle, while her small daughters are at a summer camp. She can organize his business's books, which appear in disarray. She also wants to clean up the office, as clutter bothers her. When her dark angel comes in, Dill Delaney is not pleased at all to see her there, which adds to her suspicions about Uncle John's business partner or is he?

While Katy has no interest in the Reno night life, it's where Dill lives, in a tiny apartment with his adopted feral cat, McGee. What makes Dill's life
even more dicey is he's been forced into working undercover for the federal government to nail a crime boss. Dill hates every part of what he has to do to accomplish this, but he's trapped in it as a way to protect John O'Brian, who he has come to love. 

Worried about Katy getting caught in what is about to go down, Dill does all he can to get her and Johnny out of Reno. He didn't need the warning of his errant father, Finn Delaney. He knows danger is ahead with no real help from the government.

Thus, begins the book when Dill and Katy come together with a strong attraction, which both know they should ignore. I don't want to tell more about what's coming, which could ruin the suspense, but due to the violence, Dill's near death experience, Katy gets her father's private jet to take them to Portland (along with McGee and Dill's motorcycle), where waits a specialist, her home where Leah and Jesse will soon return.

When Dill finally realizes what's happened to him, it's more than just ending up in Portland. There is a lot involving family (a totally

disapproving mother-in-law), friends, unknown enemies, and some black swans. 

If people love each other, they can overcome so much that will end up making them even closer. I could say would they overcome it, but this is, after all, a romance. It's how it all comes together where the fun of writing and reading Her Dark Angel will be found.

Dill has to fit into a wealthy family, where he has known nothing like it. There is that and a hidden enemy.  Fitting in with the wealthy set is challenging to him as much as the world he's been more used to with danger outside his door.

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Available exclusively at Amazon as this will be the first of my contemporary 7 books in KU, which means for readers having subscribed. You can though read the blurb, free sample, or buy the book also at that link:

Her Dark Angel

Desert Inferno -- contemporary romance

image we took in 2011 on one of our desert hikes. The rattler is not in the book, but it is a symbol of the danger that is.

 

Next in my series, Romances with an Edge, is a contemporary romance where I wrote the first draft in the 1990's for the sheer satisfaction of creating it. I didn't think whether it was salable as back then, I wrote a lot of my contemporaries because I had read others; then wondered what would I write if I did them.

Desert Inferno broke one cardinal rule I had seen in most romance novels of that time. The hero was not handsome, not in his eyes or in those of many he arrested. Jake Donovan was a border patrolman and worked the desert along the rugged land between Arizona and Mexico to arrest those committing crimes and turn back those with no right to enter the United States. 

Even then, it was not popular with many people, but he had come from a difficult upbringing and chose this as his way to contribute. As backstory, his brother was in prison when this story begins. He chose the other way, and Jake had helped put him there for his crimes.

Back to writing, when the option to be an indie writer arose, the books took some changes to fit the time (communicating had changed a lot in those years. I brought out the first in 2012, it was Desert Inferno, which opens with the heroine, Rachel O'Brian, a successful artist with a career painting Southwest landscapes, many of her works in prestigious galleries.

The reader meets her when she has gone out from her family's ranch on the border, to do a plein air painting-- alone on the desert with her paints and her faithful truck, who she has named Matilda, (I by the way, never have named a vehicle, but I knew some did).

Action begins when she sees movement, believes it might be a person in trouble. She grabs a canteen, her gun, and walks out to see if help is needed.  She does know the dangers of this land. Assistance might have been earlier, but now the man is dying and soon dead. The desert can be deadly for the unaware.

Back at her ranch, she notifies the police that she needs someone to come out. The one who gets the notice is already on the border and shows up to assess what happened. It is Jake Donovan. This is the beginning of a beauty and the beast type story, though she does not see her beast as he sees himself or even as others see him.

Click on the link to get the free sample of how this begins and the flavor or the book.

The problem with this book, once I wanted to bring it out, was a cover. There were simply no male models that fit what I saw Jake as. Easy to get the beauty of the story in an image, but not the kind of man without perfect features and yet who has charisma, power, and the kind of energy that was attractive to many others, especially women.

I finally solved the cover problem with this image that does not show his face, but does that body she admires so much. It hints at the violence with the lightning.

Desert Inferno at Amazon

 With their very different upbringings, figuring out what would work for a relationship, where only one wants it, takes some time. Meanwhile, Jake has an enemy out to destroy him-- an enemy not safe for Rachel either. The ranch she has been raised on with her single father was in earlier historic romances in Winds of Change.

There is a lot of the desert in the book because of my love of it, not ignoring the dangers it can present, especially in wilderness. I also called Border office in Nogales, Arizona, to make sure I was keeping that part accurate for its time 2000. Being a painter myself, Rachel's part was easy to write. 

With twists and turns in the story, it kept the book interesting for me to see all this couple went through to get a happily ever after (you know, with romances, that's part of the deal for readers-- unlike how life too often works out...). 

Because I enjoy writing more than a couple, other characters crop up, including family, but always the romance is central-- again part of the deal with this genre. 

Acquiring a Webpage.

 One thing that has worked out amazingly well, was the offer we saw from a company that creates websites; something I have never had out of not knowing how to do it. Well, PI Webworks knows how and did a fantastic job. Some of what they did, I did not realize would be so important. Well, I believe it now. 

The link for this website is alongside here, but I wanted to say more about what has pleased  me so much with their work. At this point, it's not finished but that's not due to them. It's because I wanted new covers for my contemporary romances, which are based in the West of today. When I first brought these books out, they'd been written from the 1970s, up into the 2000s. To make the earliest ones fit modern times , took a year, 2011 to bring them up to date. You only realize how much things had changed during those years, when you edit the way we communicated.

 

I thought it'd be fun to put one of those books, written in the 1970s, here as a demonstration of how books evolve. When I first wrote this story of a rodeo romance set in Pendleton, Oregon, I typed it out with the usual corrections made with white-out. I stuffed it into a box from which paper had come, and never submitted it anywhere.

It was set in 1974, about when I wrote it, because I knew a lot about rodeo then, but practically nothing about it today. Resetting books works with many as it doesn't matter about the main stories. Where it comes to rodeo, rules change, and it changes the stories. It's the only one, aside from historicals where resetting the time would have mattered.

When I got interested in the option of being an independent writer, I dug it out from under the bed. It was all there except the last three or four pages, the climax lol. How could I have lost them? Well, I had to think long and hard what I had originally written. That was just the beginning of writing it all again, this time on a computer, and editing it multiple times in the future. 

As I said, communications have changed so much and maybe will even more. With more edits, the essence of this book stayed the same regarding young love and its pitfalls especially with the drama of rodeo, and two people coming from very different backgrounds. The last time I edited, it, I added an epilogue for how it worked out for those two and where they ended up. Were their dreams fulfilled or lost? That's the fun of writing. 

How to buy it will be in the website if I can get the contemporaries added. For now, it's on Amazon: Luck of the Draw.

Because the contemporaries came out, most of them in 2012, I had no clue how to help readers find them. They have since fallen into Amazon's black hole, to disappear to an average search. I believe in them for their characters and the reason each was written. As I have said, I don't follow popular themes for romances, which might be a mistake in terms of marketing, but I believe in it where it comes to increasing my own creativity.

So, hopefully we can get Romances with an Edge added to the webpage, leaving only the three Diablo Canyon novellas not there. And, of course, the books I have yet to write, the ones churning around in my head.

 Here is the URL for the webpage: Rain Trueax Books to see the creative collaboration that led to a place for potential readers to find the books and maybe increase their own creativity.

 And for those needing a website for many kinds of businesses, check out what  PI Webworks offers. I totally trusted them as Period Images is where I've gotten many of the images for heroes and heroines.  To me, they have always seemed honorable and trying to do a good job for writers.