Rare by Garrett Leigh Audiobook Tour, Excerpt, Review & Giveaway!

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Hi guys, we have Garrett Leigh stopping by today to show off her audiobook of Rare, we have a great excerpt from the Rare ecopy, we have a fantastic giveaway and we have Tams review of both Slide & Rare and she was blown away with the audiobooks! So enjoy the post and then click that Rafflecopter link <3 ~Pixie~

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Rare

(Roads 02)
by

Garrett Leigh

Paramedic Pete Adams lived through the year from hell watching his lover, Ash, fall apart, and the precarious balance between work and home is becoming more strained. His heart is always home, with Ash, but the dark side to his job is weighing him down.

Tattoo artist Ash Fagin is recovering from a nervous breakdown triggered by revelations about his traumatic childhood. His battle with mental illness is far from over, but with Pete by his side, he’s feeling good again, so good he doesn’t notice something missing until it walks right into his living room.

Ash believes he’s had enough coincidence in his life, but when a voice from the past comes looking for him, it takes the devastating injuries of the one he loves most to convince him to let a ghost become the family he never knew he wanted.

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Excerpt

PETE HAD been busy while I’d been gone. I stood in front of the shiny new door to his apartment and wondered for a moment if I’d come home to the right place. Then I remembered the coarse message he’d sent me a few days ago, telling me in no uncertain terms what a bitch the new door had been to fit. A separate message—perhaps an afterthought—told me he’d left a key on top of the frame.

I reached for it and turned it over in my hand. It was silver and shiny. The old one was battered brass, bruised and familiar. It felt heavy in my pocket as I slid the new key into the lock. I considered the fate of the old key now that the door it belonged to was no longer there. Pete said I pondered the strangest things.

The new door swung open with a whisper. It felt odd after two years with a door that crunched like a gearbox. The new door was like a ghost, all shimmery and silent. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

A wry grin crept over my face. Really? Four days without Pete and you’re worried about a door? I took a tentative step forward. The door closed with a quiet click, and this time, I paid it no heed.

I glanced around the apartment. It was quiet and still. No TV, stereo, or signs of life. That was no surprise. I was a few hours early. Despite hating every moment of the flight between Chicago and Philadelphia, I’d caught an earlier plane home. Pete wasn’t expecting me, but I could feel in my bones that he was home. The invisible cord between us pulled me along, and a minute later, I found him passed out in our bed. He was asleep on his stomach, something he only did when he was alone or too tired to notice. It used to make me uneasy—sometimes it still did—but not today. Today his bare back was exactly what I needed to see. I sat down by his head and brushed my fingers over his stubbly jaw. He didn’t stir, even when I leaned down and breathed in the clean smell of his skin.

About Garrett

Rainbow Award winner Garrett Leigh is a British writer and book designer, currently working for Dreamspinner Press, Loose Id, Riptide Publishing, and Black Jazz Press. Her protagonists will always always be tortured, crippled, broken, and deeply flawed. Throw in a tale of enduring true love, some stubbly facial hair, and a bunch of tattoos, and you’ve got yourself a Garrett special.

When not writing, Garrett can generally be found procrastinating on Twitter, cooking up a storm, or sitting on her behind doing as little as possible. That, and dreaming up new ways to torture her characters. Garrett believes in happy endings; she just likes to make her boys work for it.

Garrett also works as a freelance cover artist for various publishing houses and independent authors under the pseudonym G.D. Leigh. For cover art info, please visit blackjazzpress.com

Where to Find the Author:

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Giveaway!

Win an audiobook of ‘Rare’
(Just click the link below)

Garrett Leigh Rafflecopter giveaway!

(Ends 26th February 2015)

Review

Garrett Leigh - Slide Audio 300x300Title: Slide & Rare (Roads series audio reviews)

Author: Garrett Leigh

Narrator: Michael Lesley

Series: Roads books 1 & 2

Garrett Leigh - Rare Audio 300x300Genre: Contemporary Gay Romance

Length: Slide (8 hours and 21 minutes) Rare (7 hours and 49 minutes)

Publisher: Dreamspinner Press (Slide 10-8-14) Rare (11-10-14)

Heat Level: Explicit

Heart Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥ 5 Hearts for the audio of both Slide & Rare

Blurb Slide: Don’t look back. Don’t you ever look back…

Shy tattoo artist Ash has a troubled past. Years of neglect, drug abuse, and life on the streets have taken their toll, and sometimes it seems the deep, unspoken bond with his lover is the only balm for wounds he doesn’t quite understand.

Chicago paramedic Pete is warmth, love, and strength – things Ash never knew he could have, and never even knew he wanted until Pete showed him. But fate is a cruel, cruel mistress, and when nightmares collide with the present, their tentatively built world comes crashing down.

Traumatic events in Pete’s work life distance him from home, and he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that Ash has slipped away. Betrayal, secrets, and lies unfold, and when a devastating coincidence takes hold, Pete must fight with all he has to save the love of his life.

Product Link: Slide (http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Slide-Audiobook/B00O9FOHKQ)

Blurb Rare: Paramedic Pete Adams lived through the year from hell watching his lover, Ash, fall apart, and the precarious balance between work and home is becoming more strained. His heart is always home, with Ash, but the dark side to his job is weighing him down.

Tattoo artist Ash Fagin is recovering from a nervous breakdown triggered by revelations about his traumatic childhood. His battle with mental illness is far from over, but with Pete by his side, he’s feeling good again, so good he doesn’t notice something missing until it walks right into his living room.

Ash believes he’s had enough coincidence in his life, but when a voice from the past comes looking for him, it takes the devastating injuries of the one he loves most to convince him to let a ghost become the family he never knew he wanted.

Product Link: Rare (http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Rare-Audiobook/B00PCSJE4S)

Reviewer: Tams

Link to Tams review for the e-book version of Slide: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/741288296?book_show_action=false

Link to Tams review for the e-book version of Rare: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/825536352?book_show_action=false

Review:  It’s been just over a year since I initially read the story of Ash and Pete. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t blown away with the written version of their story, I didn’t feel a strong connection to the characters at that time. But now, after listening to their story and being introduced to the always chaotic and slightly psychotic lives they lead through the voices they’ve been given, now I’m blown away.

Ashley Fagin, Ash, could give Christian Grey a run for his money in the fucked up department. His mother died when he was still a toddler and for the next dozen or so years Ash was tossed from foster home to foster home, until he finally had enough and ran away. Just a teenager and Ash was homeless and living on the streets. The one thing that brought him solace and quieted the voice of doubt that was stuck on repeat in his head was his art.

That is how he found his best friend Ellie, like souls drawn together by Ash’s street art, Ellie and her family sort of took responsibility for Ash. They moved him into the apartment of a trust worthy and friendly paramedic, got him insurance and helped him get a job at a tattoo parlor to showcase his fantastic Artwork.

Pete Adams loves his job as a paramedic, he loves helping people, but the stress of the job is weighing heavier on his soul with each passing day. Having to keep his sexuality a secret from his co-workers doesn’t help. He is enamored with his new roommate the minute he lays eyes on him, the blonde haired, blue eyed troubled soul, Ash. Pete doesn’t know what misfortune has followed Ash, the guy is as jumpy as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. And yet, Pete falls in love with every awkward, jittery, insane and beautiful aspect of Ash.

While Leigh did an amazing job of conveying the intense and diverse array of emotions in both stories, there was always a disconnection with the characters, the words I was reading and the way I interpreted them in my mind. Now revisiting this story through the narration of Michael Lesley has given me an entirely new perspective to the story. I was completely engrossed within the first five minutes. Lesley quickly found the appropriate tones and nuances for both Pete and Ash and I was swept into their world, their lives for the several days it took me to listen to both novels.

What Lesley did with these stories was chronicled the lives of Pete and Ash as they navigate their often volatile relationship through mental illness, discovering past abuse, feelings of loss, hopelessness and abandonment, and then finally, learning to love and trust in each other, developing a connection and a friendship that allows them to slide past Ash’s fucked up psyche and Pete’s recovery after the accident that almost killed him.

The thing that stood out most to me through these two books and these two characters was the way Ash was standoffish and skiddish about certain types of touch, ways Pete could and couldn’t hold him, things like that. At the start in Slide, Pete couldn’t come up behind Ash, ever! He would freak out to the point of a panic attack. And then slowly as the stories progressed along with their relationship, the love and trust grew, Pete could wrap his arms around Ash from behind and still feel the tension in his shoulders, but Ash learned how to not freak out and pull away. And then the last sentence of Rare, Pete wraps his arms around Ash from behind and kisses his neck. Ash doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t move to pull away, he melts into Pete’s embrace. It is truly a thing of beauty and shows a constant tether throughout the journey these two take together that just gets stronger until it’s to the point, it could never be broken.

This is one of those books/series I’ve mentioned in the past where a great narrator can take a book you may not have liked so much, and turn it into something spectacular. I highly recommend this series, but I’d grab them on audible if you have the opportunity. The writing is intense and descriptive, I’ll give Leigh that, I just think that Leigh’s writing coupled with Lesley’s narration was the perfect marriage of words written then brought to life.

Be warned though, if you have triggers such as abuse, forced sexual acts, mental disease, then you might want to take the synopsis of these stories into account before reading. I will say that the issues are portrayed as best as they can be given the circumstance, but it is still dark and intense.

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