Hi guys! We have two authors from NineStar Press popping in today to celebrate their new holiday stories, first we have Mark Lesner with A Very Vampire Christmas, we then have Kevin Klehr with Midnight Angel, we have great excerpts from both books and there’s also a brilliant $10 NineStar GC giveaway, so check out the post and enter the giveaway! ❤ ~Pixie~
A Very Vampire Christmas
Mark Lesner
Stuck for ideas on what to get his wealthy, blind, vampire lover for Christmas, Kevin comes up with the idea of recovering Danton’s long-lost but much-favored glass eyes from their home in a Wild West museum. But one touch of the eyes and Kevin is swept by his developing clairvoyant powers into a psychic nightmare of the old Wild West the eyes ‘witnessed’ while still in Danton’s head. The journey reveals a gunslinger Sheriff Danton, brings to light the lingering threat of Danton’s violent vampire ex-lover, and ultimately seals a new bond between Kevin and Danton in a Christmas to remember.
Warning: graphic violence
.•.•.**❣️ NineStar | Amazon US | Amazon UK | Smashwords | B&N | Kobo ❣️**.•.•.
Midnight Vampire
Kevin Klehr
Dinner is overcooked. The guests haven’t arrived.
Luke is sitting alone at his dining table on New Year’s Eve. He was hoping to romance Nathan, one of the people he invited for this intimate evening meal.
As midnight draws closer, it seems an angel, who has magically appeared in Luke’s apartment, is the only person to drink champagne and watch the fireworks with.
But this angel has other ideas. He’s about to grant Luke the New Year’s Eve party he thought he wanted.
A Very Vampire Christmas Excerpt!
A Very Vampire Christmas, Mark Lesney © 2018, All Rights Reserved
Christmas shopping for your boss, who’s very, very rich, when you are comparatively poor, can make for a difficult start. Throw in the fact he’s your lover of less than two months, and it complicates matters even more. Add in that he’s a 1200-year-old vampire and also blind, and you maximize the difficulty a hundredfold.
So, I wasn’t exactly eavesdropping on his phone conversation as I stood outside his office door in the residential Georgetown townhouse—more like mansion—we now shared—so much as I was trying to get ideas before I felt compelled to ask him what he wanted. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than taking away the surprise of Christmas gifting by filling out requests. But I was getting desperate.
I was also trying to be polite rather than bursting in. Because one of the few things I’d already learned on my own, without any coaching from Diana—Danton’s literary agent and the woman who had actually hired me—was how my vampire boss hated to be interrupted when he was on the phone. It wasn’t hard to listen, as the call was on speaker phone, something Danton seemed to prefer.
“So, how’s the Kevin working out? It’s about time you took up with some human toy again. We all worry about you, you know.” A gruff voice I didn’t recognize reverberated in an accent I had never heard before.
“I don’t think he’d appreciate being called ‘the Kevin,’ as if he were something I picked up from an online catalog,” Danton replied.
Hearing my name being talked about by my relatively new employer and some unknown caller was also more than enough to pause my knock on the wide oak door to Danton’s office slash writer’s retreat. I didn’t recognize the voice on the phone, but I certainly recognized the hint of humor in Danton’s reply. Of course, he knew I was out here listening. You couldn’t eavesdrop on a thousand-plus-year-old vampire—who, even though blind, could probably sense a hummingbird fluttering in the Georgetown townhouse garden next door if he really set his mind to it.
“Kevin, Kyle, the Fonz, even a Brad…what difference does it make? Human males are all interchangeable, I should think—especially for you, after all these years. You are blind, anyway… Surely all cocks and arseholes in your endless dark are pretty much the same, aren’t they? I would imagine. I presume he bathes. Or do human males still stink? I know human females are tasty little things and tend to smell all right. I used to find the Barbies nice when I was a few years younger…then there were the Mariettas and the Griseldas of my prime…”
I hoped the caller was being metaphorical about the taste issue. Given the fact Danton was a vampire, one couldn’t necessarily be sure. He’d told me he hadn’t seen or heard of many other vampires in the past few centuries, and the only one he was willing to talk about was one he stumbled upon in 1787 in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention, when he had managed to keep Ben Franklin from succumbing to the bloodthirsty charms of a woman whose lustiness was due to far more than just a life of ill repute.
The encounter had proved sadly fatal for that bloodthirsty lady, and Danton once said he had run into only one other vampire since then, with or without a makeshift wooden stake made of a convenient table leg. And it was someone he refused to talk about. So who—or what—was he talking to?
“How do you know about Kevin anyway? I can’t believe Diana filled you in,” Danton said.
“No, your tight-lipped little human slave—or agent as you prefer to call her—kept her pretty lips shut when I tried to ask questions. But she had to email me the salary checks to sign. And the other vouchers. Though how you expect me to deduct soiled Halloween costumes from your taxes as a business expense is something I will have to give my son to deal with. He’s the most creative cheat I know.” Filial pride shined in the words almost beaming from the phone.
“Like father, like son,” Danton muttered, but loud enough even I could hear beyond the door.
“You’re lucky my family readily took to business, as so few of my kind do. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone else you could trust across four centuries. Haven’t I made us all rich, even enough for your hobbies and peccadilloes?”
“Yes, indeed you have. And I am grateful you took up being an enforcer for a loan shark back in the Renaissance. But I have to say goodbye now, or “the Kevin,” as you call him, will start wearing out the Persian carpet in the hall. He’s fidgeting outside my door, like a bona fide employee waiting for the boss.”
“Good. Treat your lovers like servants and your servants like lovers, and you’ll never a teary day.” The words rolled off the strangely gruff voice with ease. As if it were a motto or a cliché. But from what sort of culture? Hopefully not one Danton put much stock in.
“If I did that, I’d have to buy you dinner, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes, but I could get it deducted from your taxes as a business expense.”
“Goodbye, Karlan,” Danton said firmly. And the other voice laughed but said nothing more before hanging up. “Come in, Kevin.”
Having spent a bizarre two weeks of my aborted college career in a student production of The Importance of Being Earnest, I knew enough to take my cue and hurried in. It was not an inapt comparison. Because Danton’s study was like something a stage designer would have come up with to portray the inner mind of an old moneyed aristocrat whose sense of comfort was tied closely to expensive furniture and wooden wall paneling, sculptures, and dainty bric-a-brac—all of which were priceless antiques.
In the theater production, they would have been fakes. But these were very, very real, and every time I went into the office, I was terrified of scratching a priceless wooden chair or breaking some fine porcelain creation. There were no paintings on the walls, only carved and pounded masks—of every time and culture: ancient, old, and modern, in every form of media from bronze to wood to clay, to papier-mâché harlequins from New Orleans or 17th Century France; I forgot which was which. Who could tell? The mantle over the fireplace was covered with porcelain figurines—dainty shepherdesses, nimble fauns, and posing unicorns with virgin damsels hanging on.
Every item in his sanctuary was a wonder of tactile complexity and almost begged to be touched. Even if I didn’t dare, since a certain clumsiness was one of my more endearing traits.
But I presume Danton enjoyed exploring their complexity with his long, delicate, pale fingers. Fingers with considerable expertise in a number of areas, as I had learned to my delight when we first met on Halloween not so very long ago.
There weren’t any paintings in Danton’s private office. Which made sense for a blind man, even one who could detect the subtlest changes in infrared and the faintest air currents around him through his skin, and echo locate from every slight noise in the room.
But none of that could help him look at the flat surface of a book or a painting. Or a computer screen or smartphone, for that matter. Such things were lost to him, even when he went full out, subvocally clicking his tongue to create sonar-like sounds usually only he could hear, unless he became desperate or excited and needed to “see” in a finer detail than normal ambient sounds of movement could give him.
That’s why the phone he’d been talking to was not the latest smartphone, but more like some telegrapher’s relay, with dozens of buttons marked with braille tying him to the relatively few people, and I use the term liberally, he knew and talked to in the outside world.
Midnight Angel Excerpt!
Midnight Angel, Kevin Klehr © 2018, All Rights Reserved
It was almost nine p.m. and none of my guests had arrived.
My place smelt of roast chicken. It had gone dry, yet I let it sit in the oven once I accepted no one was coming. Even with the oven turned off, the potatoes would have turned into little black rocks inside the trapped heat. I considered going down to the creek and chucking them as far as they’d go to quell my frustration.
I sat at my dinner table, eyes closed, trying to find my peace. As time ticked by, melancholy was my only companion.
Why would I think this plan would work? I had many invitations this New Year’s Eve, but my search for love kept me blind.
Three guests were supposed to be here tonight. If I was honest with myself, I’d have known one would have been here for sure. He invited himself. But he wasn’t here either, and I couldn’t blame him. He was Tim. Someone more interested in me than I in him.
For a while, Tim was dropping hints. “Here, take my jacket,” followed by “You really need someone to look after you.” “I’ve never been kissed by a man, well, not with love.” That one was followed with a longing look, waiting for my response. So I kissed him on the cheek.
And then there were the small gifts. A record of a band I once mentioned. I had to buy a turntable just to be nice. A chilli plant. Not the best present as I have a black thumb. It lasted two months. And just the week before, a letter. I never opened the envelope. I meant to throw it out several times, but something stopped me.
When Tim found out I invited Nathan and Lucy for dinner, he stuttered while telling me he had no plans. I still don’t know why I caved in and told him to come.
But Nathan was who I really wanted to see, and if I were to win his affections, it would be his best friend Lucy I’d have to win over. She’s one of those gal pals who cherishes her gay mates. I met them both at a party, and even though I’m too embarrassed to say it, I was captivated by him. His candid nature made me feel at ease. The three of us shared one-night-stand horror stories until Lucy left us alone. But she still checked on Nathan from time to time.
Nathan told me he liked to be called Nate. He talked a lot about their friend Ben who didn’t believe in romance and then asked me for my thoughts on the whole Mr Right thing. I played it cool, yet inside I wanted to break the world record for the longest kiss; his lips against mine.
Nate longed to travel, so I looked for cheap deals to Thailand, just in case I found the courage to suggest a holiday as a New Year experience for both of us. I printed details about the Full Moon Party while imagining his soft caress in the midst of techno rhythms and disco lights.
But he wasn’t here. No one was here except my tragic self.
I felt that shudder you feel when you’re at risk of breaking down. I held the table to steady myself in my seat. I was determined not to cry.
A little later, when I wanted to, no tears were shed.
“Love isn’t worth it,” I said to myself. “It’s the worst of all the four-letter words.” I longed for alcohol, but drinking alone would verify my loser status. “I promise to never fall in love.”
“I don’t think that’s a promise you can keep.”
I jumped in my seat. My knees hit the underside of the table, causing the cutlery to clatter. Then I was cemented to my chair, too scared to investigate whose voice was coming from my kitchen. I heard a flutter, like a bird getting excited that the door to its cage was open and maybe an escape was possible.
That’s it! A bird had flown into my kitchen while my mind was giving me audible hallucinations. Those two things happen all the time, right? Now I needed that drink.
A tall man strolled into my dining room, holding a bottle of rosé.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Someone who’s here to stop you making stupid promises to yourself.”
“Are you a friend of Tim’s? A friend of Nate’s?”
“I’m your friend.”
I screamed. Not because there was a stranger in my home who may have been planning to wallop me with a bottle of wine. I screamed because wings expanded from his back.
About Mark & Kevin!
Mark Lesney is a single gay man of a certain age, living with the obligatory cat. His only fiction credential before “Interview with the Kevin” is a semi-comic steampunk M/M romance novelette, “The Golden Goose,” published in the “Steamed Up” anthology, sadly now out of print.
His non-fiction writing credits, however, are extensive. Currently, he is the managing editor of two medical newspapers, for which he also writes routinely. For over 6 years, his science and history articles appeared monthly in two newsmagazines, for which he was a writer/editor at the American Chemical Society. His credits also include science articles published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. He has a PhD in plant pathology and a second PhD in the history of science.
He has worked as a research scientist and university professor. But his love has always been reading and writing fiction— with science fiction/fantasy, mystery, paranormal romance, and historicals all grappling for his affections. He is now determined to pursue that dream intensely.
Kevin lives with his long-term partner, Warren, in their humble apartment (affectionately named Sabrina), in Australia’s own ‘Emerald City,’ Sydney.
From an early age, Kevin had a passion for writing, jotting down stories and plays until it came time to confront puberty. After dealing with pimple creams and facial hair, Kevin didn’t pick up a pen again until he was in his thirties. His handwritten manuscript was being committed to paper when his work commitments changed, giving him no time to write. Concerned, his partner, Warren, secretly passed the notebook to a friend who in turn came back and demanded Kevin finish his story. It wasn’t long before Kevin’s active imagination was let loose again.
His first novel spawned a secondary character named Guy, an insecure gay angel, but many readers argue that he is the star of the Actors and Angels book series. Guy’s popularity surprised the author.
So with his fictional guardian angel guiding him, Kevin hopes to bring more whimsical tales of love, life and friendship to his readers.
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Giveaway!
One lucky winner will receive a $10.00 NineStar Press Gift Code!
