At Your Service by Ariel Tachna Guest Post & Giveaway!

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Hi peeps, we have the extremely talented Ariel Tachna stopping by with her upcoming release At Your Service, we have a fantastic guest post and an awesome giveaway so enjoy the post and leave a comment to enter the giveaway! <3 ~Pixie~ 

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At Your Service

by

Ariel Tachna

When Anthony Mercer walked into Au cœur du terroir, he was looking for good food and a pleasant evening spent with a friend. He never expected to meet—and sleep with—Paul Delescluse, a waiter at the restaurant. After spending a magical week together in Paris, Anthony must return to his life in North Carolina, while Paul remains in France.

Despite the distance and the lack of promises between them—Paul wants sex, not a relationship—Paul and Anthony forge a solid friendship. Then Anthony’s job takes him back to Paris, this time to stay. Paul is thrilled to have him back, but Anthony has a harder choice: be another of Paul’s conquests or fight for the relationship he knows they could have, if only Paul would believe it.

Release date:14th March 2016

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Ariel Tachna

I travel a lot for work. For some people that probably wouldn’t be a good thing, but I love it, in part because I love the people I travel with, but also because I love the opportunity to eat different kinds of food in restaurants all over the country and sometimes all over the world. Even more, I love the chance those restaurants afford me to meet people, specifically waiters. You see, we have incredible luck where waiters are concerned. We talk to them and they answer us, and often by the end of a meal, we’ve gotten to know them. Oh, not their whole life story, but enough.

There was James, who was raised in a single-parent family, but whose mother had seven sisters.  He didn’t have one mama. He had eight. His voice was so incredible that we tried to recruit him to narrate our audiobooks.

There was C.J., who came to apply for the job in his ROTC uniform because he didn’t own a suit. Once he learned our drink preferences, he convinced the bartender to make custom drinks for us (on the third night we ate there. Yes, we liked him that much).

Or Kyle, who worked in a small-town diner in central Florida and knew all our preferences by the end of the week.

Because when we find a waiter who gives great service at a restaurant with good food, we don’t just eat there once. We go back, and when we do, we ask for the waiter by name. The result is an experience far beyond just good service. We even ended up hiring a waiter from one restaurant to work for the company!

The first time this happened—or the first time it happened clearly enough to stay with me—we were in Montréal on a cold, rainy night in April, and we chose a restaurant based on the free shuttle that would pick us up at the hotel so we didn’t have to walk. Then we met Pascal. Pascal had two smiles, we learned. The professional one he gives everyone, and then this gorgeous smirk we got the second night when we went back and asked to sit in his section. If he was fun and attentive the first night, he was outrageously over the top the second night. We loved every minute of it. If we lived in the city, we’d eat dinner there once a month, just to visit with him.

That comment—and the people I was with because Elizabeth North, Anne Regan, and Connie Bailey are the worst enablers in the world—led to the idea of a series of books with waiters as the main characters, specifically waiters inspired by our trips.

At Your Service is the first of those books, inspired by a lovely restaurant with lovely staff in Paris, where the owner knew us by name and remembered us a year later, where the staff joked with us because one night we came in with girls and the next night we came in with boys (publishing partners in both cases). Where we left a box of chocolates and a thank-you note because we’d eaten there every night we were in town and couldn’t imagine what our trip would have been like without them.

I already have almost 45k written on Service with a Smirk, inspired by Pascal, of course, and set in Montréal. James and C.J. will end up in a book together in New Orleans, the way it’s currently planned, and Kyle is being shy, although that might change when he sees everyone else getting their happy endings. Or until we meet another sweet, hot waiter to pair him up with. 😉

To thank MM Good Book Reviews for hosting me and all of you for taking the time to read my ramblings, I’m offering winner’s choice of any ebook in my backlist to one commenter who shares a favorite waiter story.

~Ariel~

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About Ariel

When Ariel Tachna was twelve years old, she discovered two things: the French language and romance novels. Those two loves have defined her ever since. By the time she finished high school, she’d written four novels, none of which anyone would want to read now, featuring a young woman who was—you guessed it—bilingual. That girl was everything Ariel wanted to be at age twelve and wasn’t.

She now lives on the outskirts of Houston with her husband (who also speaks French), her kids (who understand French even when they’re too lazy to speak it back), and their two dogs (who steadfastly refuse to answer any French commands). 

Visit Ariel:

Website | Facebook | E-mail: arieltachna@gmail.com

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Giveaway!

Win an ebook from Ariel’s backlist!

(Just leave a comment sharing your favorite waiter story!)
(Ends 14th March 2016)
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8 thoughts on “At Your Service by Ariel Tachna Guest Post & Giveaway!

  1. One of my favorite waiter stories was not necessarily about service but what he said. I was out for brunch with my mom and brother and apparently I don’t look enough like either of them since he asked if I were my brother’s wife. 🙂

  2. We were on our honeymoon in Paris and we found this great little Bistro close to our hotel that had a great menu. We had a great waiter there that was funny. We ended up back at that same Bistro the next night, and he was our waiter again. He gave us our menus, then stopped and took them back. He said he would order our dinner for us. He did a fantastic job, picked a great wine, dinner, and dessert for us.

  3. This sounds like such fun. My best waitstaff story is really not so much funny as thoughtful. I have several serious food allergies (due to this I have a tendency to interrogate the waitstaff about the menu items for things that may not be listed). Recently I was out at a restaurant with some co-workers and we had ordered some appetisers that came with various sauces and our waitress came over and advised me not to eat a particular sauce because it was made with pine nuts. I thought it was very thoughtful of her to mention that because a lot of people wouldn’t have thought of it.

  4. I do not have many anecdotes related to waiters… Just once, in Porto (Portugal) a very nice young waiter realised my friend and I were completely lost after watching us walk in circles for an hour…. He saw us walk past his bar once and again, and at last he came out and asked us where we wanted to go… he was really nice and walked us to the very place. We were so thankful!

  5. I did the waitperson thing in college. There was an older couple that came in once a week. Very set in their old fashion ways, they were a bit hard to handle for most of the staff. I didn’t have that problem. So they were always sat at my station. Well, I smiled and treated them like my grandparents. I got my reward. For Christmas that year, I got a small bottle of Chanel No 5 perfume. Yep, the real stuff, which was a heady thing for an 19 year old to get.

  6. Not sure I have any great stories. But I remember when my best friend and I used to go to a restaurant, the waitress always called us Dweedle de Dee and Dweedle de Dum

  7. I don’t usually eat out enough to be waited on. I remember a wedding event in which my family and I attended. The waiter complimented us on being the best table he waited.

  8. There is a Korean BBQ restaurant in Brisbane that is managed by the most attentive man. He greets us personally, goes above and beyond the standard expectations of wait staff and promotes his staff to do the same. Although the food is good, it is his service and attention that brings my whole extended family back there time after time for many years. He is now our friend on facebook and has asked to cook for us on his days off.

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