If Only . . . she wasn't pretending to be someone else! The If Only romance line continues in this fun rags-to-riches romance.Holly
Mathews' mom is the new manager of a ritzy retirement home, and they
just moved in. But having super-rich retirees as her only neighbors
isn't a total bust, because the gorgeous, notorious Malik Buchannan is
the grandson of a resident. Just one problem: when they meet, Malik
assumes Holly is there to visit her own rich relative. She doesn't
correct him, and it probably doesn't matter, because their flirtation
could never turn into more than a superficial fling . . . right? But the
longer she lives in his privileged world, the deeper Holly falls for
Malik, and the harder it is to tell the truth . . . because coming clean
might mean losing him.
For anyone who has dreamed of their own
Cinderella story, this romance shows that when it comes to true love,
the best person to be is yourself!
A new series complete with full-color illustrations that celebrates amazing women, from acclaimed author Kathleen Krull!
In
the vein of the popular Who Was? series and Jean Fritz's much-beloved
biographies, Women Who Broke the Rules celebrates the bold and brave
women who have forged their own paths - breaking rules along the way -
to help shape our country's past, present, and future.
Judy Blume
wrote her way through controversy and censorship to become a pioneer
who helped make it okay for kids and teens to discuss their everyday
concerns, including the kinds of things people don't always like to talk
about. Now more than forty years into her career of writing frank and
funny books, Judy still has the amazing ability to connect with young
readers and adults.
Penelope Landlow has
grown up with the knowledge that almost anything can be bought or
sold—including body parts. She’s the daughter of one of the three crime
families that control the black market for organ transplants.
Penelope’s
surrounded by all the suffocating privilege and protection her family
can provide, but they can't protect her from the autoimmune disorder
that causes her to bruise so easily.
And in her family's line of work no one can be safe forever.
All
Penelope has ever wanted is freedom and independence. But when she’s
caught in the crossfire as rival families scramble for prominence, she
learns that her wishes come with casualties, that betrayal hurts worse
than bruises, that love is a risk worth taking . . . and maybe she’s not
as fragile as everyone thinks.
Book Trailer
Excerpt
There was always a moment as I rolled
down the long driveway toward the high fence surrounding the estate when my breath
caught in my chest and I doubted my decision to leave. Anything could
happen to me outside the perimeter of our property.
Carter interrupted my thoughts. “I told
Mother we’re going to see a musical. You know what’s playing and can pick one, right?”
Of course I did. I spent hours on NYC
websites, blogs, and forums. Someday I’d go into a long remission. Someday I’d
live there and walk the streets of promise, freedom, and opportunity they sang
about in Annie, a play I’d seen with Father on Broadway right before my
life turned purple and red.
“Really?” It made sense that Mother
would agree to a play. It would be safe, a seated activity. The chairs would
mark out defined personal space, and I’d be perfectly cocooned between my
brother and his best friend/guard, Garrett Ward. It made a whole lot less sense
that Carter would voluntarily attend the theater.
He lowered his window and called a greeting
to Ian, the guard on gate duty. Once his window was closed and the gate was
shutting behind us, he snorted. “No, not really. That’s just what I said to buy
you some extra time.”
“You should at least listen to the
score then,” I countered. “You know she’s going to want to discuss it. Or, if
she doesn’t, Father will. He’ll probably perform it if I ask.”
“Then don’t ask,” said Carter. “Fine.
Pick a show and Garrett can download the soundtrack. We’ll listen to it once,
then I get the radio for the rest of the drive—no complaints.”
It was more than I’d expected; he truly
felt guilty about being so MIA. “There’s a revival of Once Upon a Mattress that’s
getting great reviews.”
They snickered.
“Once Upon a Mattress? That
sounds like—”
I cut my brother off. “Don’t go there!
It’s a fairy tale, gutterbrain.”
“Of course it is,” laughed Garrett.
I’m pretty sure the subtext of that
laugh was you’re such a child. I swallowed a retort. Freedom was too
rare a thing towaste arguing. And I’d never had Korean barbecue. I’d
nevereven heard of it. There were so many things I’d never seen,tasted,
experienced . . . Tension melted into giddy anticipation,bubbling in my
stomach like giggles waiting to escape.
“So, how’d your super-secret errand
go?” I asked. “Was it something exciting? Something illegal?”
Garrett met my gaze in the rearview
mirror and shook his head.
But it was too late. Carter’s
expression darkened. “Everything we do is illegal. It’s not a game where
you get to pick and choosewhich crimes you’re okay with.”
“So it didn’t go well,” I muttered
under my breath.
I knew it wasn’t a game, and I knew the
Family Business was against the law. I’d known it for so long it was easy to
forget. Or remember only in a vague way, like knowing the sky is blue without paying
any attention to its blueness.
Only in those moments when things went
wrong—when lazy clouds were replaced by threats and storms, when someone got
hurt or killed—only then did I stare down the reality of the Business through a
haze of grief and funeral black. My fingers tensed on the edge of the seat.
“Ignore him,” said Garrett. “He’s just
pissy because the people we were supposed to meet with stood us up.”
“Someone dared to no-show for a
meeting with the mighty Carter Landlow?” I teased, hoping to break the gloom
settling in the car like an unwelcome passenger. “I assumed it was a Business errand,
but if someone stood you up, it must be a girl.”
“No offense, Pen, but you don’t have a
clue what’s going on in the Business.”
“No offense, Carter, but you’re
being a—”
“Who wants to hear some songs about
mattresses?” interrupted Garrett. He reached for the stereo, but Carter swatted
his hand away.
“I’m not an idiot,” I said. And wishing
for things that had been denied for so long was idiotic. No less so than
repeatedly bashing your head against a wall or touching a hot iron. I knew the
answer was no, was always going to be no, so asking to be included
in Family matters was like volunteering to be a punch line for one of the Ward
brothers’ jokes.
But I knew the basics. It wouldn’t be
possible to live on the estate, spend so much time in the clinic, and not know.
The first person to explain it to me had been my grandfather; fitting, since he
was the man who’d reacted to the formation of FOTA—the Federal Organ and Tissue
Association—by founding our Family.
The same day I’d demanded a kidney for
Kelly Forman, he’d sat me down and demonstrated using a plate of crackers and cheese.
“When donation regulation was moved from the FDA to FOTA, they added more
restrictions and testing.” He ate a few of the Ritz-brand “organs” on his plate,
shuffled the empty cheese slices that represented humans who needed
transplants. “This, combined with a population that’s living longer than ever
before”—he plunked down several more slices of
cheese—“created a smaller, slower supply and greater demand.” He built me an inside-out
cheese-cracker-cheese sandwich. “It was a moment of opportunity, and when you
see those in life, you take them.”
This felt
like a moment of opportunity. And not to prove that I wasn’t an idiot by
listing all the facts I knew—about how the Families provided illegal
transplants for the many, many people rejected from or buried at the bottom of
the government lists. How more than two-thirds of those who made it through all
the protocols to qualify for a spot on the official transplant list died before
receiving an organ. Or to recite the unofficial Family motto: Landlows help
people who can’t afford to wait, but can afford to pay.
“Fine, tell me what I don’t know,” I
said. “Tell me what’s going on, why you and Father are fighting, and what’s
keeping you so busy. Tell me everything.”
Garrett muttered something that sounded
suspiciously like “Don’t do this,” but since my brother ignored him, I did too.
Carter’s eyes met mine in the rearview
mirror. “None of this leaves the car, Pen. I’m trusting you.”
“I understand.” I sat a little
straighter. “And I promise.”
A phone beeped with a text alert,
almost immediately followed by a ringtone that made them jump. Carter picked up
his cell, swore, showed the screen to Garrett, then swore again. All the
buoyancy of freedom seemed to evaporate from the car.
“Now? They blow us off earlier and
expect us to answer now?” said Garrett.
“Well, it’s not like these things can
be scheduled,” replied Carter, jabbing the screen of his cell. “Hello?”
He muttered low and furious into the
phone, then hung up, still cursing. “We have to do the pickup.”
Garrett’s frowned. “No one else can do
it?”
He shook his head.
“Pick up what?” I asked.
Carter opened his mouth, but Garrett
put a hand on his arm. “She’s seventeen. Let her be seventeen. There’s
plenty of time to get her involved later.”
“When we were seventeen we were
already sitting on council, visiting the clinics, meeting with patients. She
can’t even tell a kidney scar from a skin graft—she needs to catch up.”
“She can make her own decisions,
she is sitting right here, and she is coming along to what ever
this mysterious pickup is, so she’s already involved,” I snapped.
“You are not coming,” said
Garrett.
“We don’t have a choice, unless you
want me to leave her on the side of the highway. This is our exit.” Carter was
clutching his cell phone, shaking it as if that could erase what ever the text instructed
him to do.
Garrett groaned. “You’re staying in the
car.”
I hid my smile by looking out the
window. It had gotten dark while we were driving, the dusky purple of summer
evenings. On the estate these nights buzzed with a soundtrack of cicadas and
crickets, but there was no nature outside the car. Nothing but concrete and
pavement and cinder-block industrial construction. We pulled into a parking
lot. A poorly lit, empty parking lot.
“Where are we? What are we picking up?”
I examined Garrett’s stiff posture and the bright gleam in my brother’s eyes. “Does
Father know about this Business errand?”
“No, and you’re not going to tell him,”
Carter answered.
“Oh, really? So what am I going to do?”
“Stay in the car. Lock the doors. Keep
the windows up.” Carter turned around to look me in the eye. “This isn’t a
joke, Pen. If I’d known this was going to come up, I would’ve left you at
home.”
“Please, princess,” added Garrett in a
soft voice, but his eyes didn’t leave the windshield, didn’t stop their scan of
the parking lot.
“Fine, but when you’re done, you’re filling
me in. Then I can decide if I want to be part of it or not.” It was all
false bravado. Each one of Carter’s statements tied another knot in my stomach;
Garrett’s plea pulled them tighter.
Carter dumped a half dozen mints from
the plastic container in his cup holder into his mouth—like his breath
mattered, like this was a date not a disaster. He waved the container at us,
but we shook our heads. He crunched the candies and said, “Gare,
you’re hot, right?”
I blurted out, “You can turn on the
A/C, I’m not cold,” before I caught on: Garrett pulled a gun from a holster
below the back of his shirt.
They laughed, but it wasn’t funny to
me. I’d been to too many funerals—they’d been to more. I wanted to ask how long
he’d been “hot.” If he always had a gun on him. Had he when we went mini golfing
at Easter? Or the time last summer when I slipped on the pool deck and he’d
carried me to the clinic? No. He couldn’t have then. He’d been wearing a
swimsuit too—there’s no way he could’ve hidden a gun.
So what had happened in the past year,
and why was he carrying one now?
Garrett was Family, he was a Ward, but
he wasn’t supposed to follow his brothers’ footsteps. Or his father’s. They
were enforcers, but he didn’t belong in their grim-faced, split knuckles ranks.
That was why he was in college with Carter—Garrett was going to be his right-hand
man when my brother took over the Business.
Not a thug with a gun.
“Stay here, Pen,” Carter said again,
then slipped out into the night. His keys still dangled from the ignition, the
engine still hummed.
Garrett lingered an extra moment. “This
shouldn’t take long. And everything’s okay. I don’t want you to worry.”
“I’m not.” I would’ve sounded
believable if my voice wasn’t quivering. If I weren’t clutching fistfuls of my
dress.
“You’re cute when you’re worried.”
Garrett winked, and then he too was out in the darkness and humidity and I was alone.
I tried to lower my window—just a
crack, enough to let in voices but not even mosquitoes—except Carter must’ve
engaged some sort of child lock. I stared out the tinted glass, watched as their
shadows grew gigantic on the wall as they approached the
ware house, then disappeared around its corner.
No matter how hard I concentrated, my
eyes couldn’t adjust enough to make sense of the dark. Maybe it was the
placement of the parking lot lights—how I had to peer through them to see the
warehouse beyond.
After they’d left this afternoon, I’d
rushed to the clinic to model different outfits for Caroline. She’d teased. We’d
laughed. I’d blushed and daydreamed about the lovely combination of me, Garrett,
and NYC.
But in my daydreams, Garrett hadn’t
been wearing a gun.
And now we were parked somewhere made
of shadows and secrets and fear that sat on my tongue like a bitter hard candy that
wouldn’t dissolve.
The car still smelled like them. Their
seats were still warm when I leaned forward and pressed my hands against the
leather. But I couldn’t see them. What if the dark decided never to spit them
back out again?
This wasn’t the Business as I knew it:
secret transplant surgeries that took place at our six “Bed and Breakfasts” and
“Spas” in Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, and South
Carolina, where we saved people like Kelly Forman. She’d been ten when she
needed a kidney transplant, but her chromosomal mutation—unrelated to her renal
impairment—earned her a rejection from the Federal Organ and Tissue Agency’s
lists. According to them, Down syndrome made her a “poor medical investment.”
FOTA wrote her a death warrant. We saved her life.
She graduated from high school a few
weeks ago. The past nine years since we’d met—she wouldn’t have had those
without the Family Business.
That was enough. That was all I needed
to know. Illegal or not, that was good.
I heard something. A crack so sharp it
echoed and seemed to fill the spaces between my bones, making me shiver. I
prayed it was a car backfiring.
Then
it happened again.
About Tiffany Schmidt
Tiffany Schmidt lives in Pennsylvania
with her saintly husband, impish twin boys, and a pair of mischievous
puggles. She's not at all superstitious... at least that's what she
tells herself every Friday the thirteenth.
SEND ME A SIGN is her first novel. BRIGHT BEFORE SUNRISE will follow in
Winter, 2014. The ONCE UPON A CRIME FAMILY series begins with HOLD ME
LIKE A BREATH in 2015. You can find out more about her and her books at:
TiffanySchmidt.com, TiffanySchmidtWrites.Tumblr.com or by following her
on Twitter @TiffanySchmidt.
This spring, Bloomsbury is sending four amazing authors — Trish Doller, A.C. Gaughen, Emery Lord, and Tiffany Schmidt — to bookstores together for our Boldly Bookish tour. To celebrate it, they are giving away some goodies! All you have to do is buy one of the following books: The Devil You Know, Lion Heart, The Start of Me and You and/or Hold Me Like A Breath and email your receipt to teensusa@bloomsbury.com, in order to receive one of the following prizes:
Preorder one of the books pictured above, and get a Boldly Bookish logo sticker.
Preorder two of the books pictured above, and get a Boldly Bookish sticker and bookmark.
Preorder three of the books pictured above, and get a Boldly Bookish sticker, bookmark, and button.
Preorder all four books pictured above, and get a Boldly Bookish sticker, bookmark, button, and magnet.
Remember - the more books you preorder, the more Boldly Bookish swag you get!
Giveaway
Enter to win a finished copy of Hold Me Like a Breath by Tiffany Schmidt
Enjoy Wild Hearts and the other standalone titles in Bloomsbury's contemporary If Only romance line centered around an impossible problem: you always want what you can't have! Brie Carter's father's land development business has taken her family all over the world, but
as soon as they arrive at their new home in Lost Springs, Wyoming, the
town turns out to protest. They don't want a new hotel if the resident
mustang population will be displaced or hurt as part of the deal. Then
Brie meets Logan, a gorgeous local who has a special connection to the
mustangs, and she is immediately drawn to him . . . and the horses.
However, with Logan's father leading the protests and Brie's father
refusing to budge, it's clear that their parents are heading towards an
all-out war. Can Brie and Logan find a way to save the mustangs and be
together? Or is their love doomed from the start?
This new title in the If Only line is the perfect summer read and proves that love flourishes in the wildest places!
My Review
Wild Hearts is a standalone novel in the If Only . . . series, a series of novels about forbidden love. The cool thing about the series is that all of the titles are standalone novels, so they can be read in any order (or you could skip the ones that don't interest you). Wild Hearts by Jessica Burkhart is the first title that I've read in the series (and my first Jessica Burkhart book), and I'm sure it probably won't be the last as many of the released and upcoming titles look entertaining and adorable. Unfortunately, Wild Hearts wasn't a huge hit for me, but I did find some aspects of the book to be cute.
Wild Hearts is about Brie Carter and Logan McCoy's Romeo and Juliet romance. They are immediately attracted to one another, but their fathers hate each other. Their romance is pretty much instantaneous, and if I had to, I'd label it as instalove. It just seemed a bit unrealistic for the new girl in town to fall for the most gorgeous guy in town so quickly. Their romance is sickly sweet, and to be honest, it was a bit too much for me to handle. Sometimes I thought parts were outstanding and adorable, but other times, I was scratching my head because it was just so weird.
Brie is one of those characters that I could take or leave, and for me, it's kind of a problem if I don't connect with the protagonist. Here she is, a girl who is forced to move pretty much every year, and she's just kind of bland. She has a lot of stories, but they really don't make her as interesting as one would think they would. She complains a lot about not having "a thing" of her own. It was nice to see that she wanted to find something that made her unique in the world, but the complaining got annoying. By the middle of the book, she finds something that makes her happy, and I loved that part, but it was kind of upsetting that she just dropped her "no boyfriend until college" rule to find the thing that she wanted. Even so, I was proud of her by the end of the novel for all that she and Logan accomplished in such a short amount of time.
If you're looking for a YA romance that's set in the country, then Wild Hearts is definitely for you. I can see many readers devouring this book during a summer camping trip or at the beach. Burkhart does a great job at setting the scene and tone of life in Lost Springs, and her imagery is fantastic, even if some aspects of the book are a little corny. She writes about horses in a way that felt very realistic, and those parts held my interest, even if I didn't agree with some of the things that the characters do. I felt like I was able to picture the entire town of Lost Springs, and it was a fairly enjoyable ride.
