Kitsune Enchantment by Margaret L. Carter is a Paranormal and Paranormal Romance Event pick #pnr #paranormalromance #mustread #giveaway
- N. N. Light
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Title:
Kitsune Enchantment
Author:
Margaret L. Carter
Genre:
Paranormal romance
Book Blurb:
On the verge of losing her job, Shannon leaps at the chance to sell her graphic novel series to a major publisher. If only she could trust her reclusive artist partner, Ryo, to show up for editorial meetings at the science fiction convention they’re attending. She’d love to have a closer relationship with Ryo, but how can she count on a man who keeps disappearing with the flimsiest of excuses? Ryo feels the same attraction to Shannon, but he isn’t sure how she’d react to the truth. He’s a kitsune—a fox shapeshifter—prone to transforming at awkward moments. Furthermore, a bungling amateur sorcerer is stalking him. When the wannabe wizard follows him to the convention, Ryo’s secret, liberty, and budding romance with Shannon are all threatened.
Excerpt:
Shannon opened the unfinished file of the latest adventures of her character, Golden Raptor, and Ryo’s, Crimson Vixen. Just as Raptor took the form of either a man or a giant eagle, Vixen alternated shapes between woman and bipedal, human-size fox. Shannon wrote the action and dialogue based on plots the two of them brainstormed together, and Ryo, who had a day job with a game design company, created the art. Now she paused on an image of Raptor in mid-transformation from man to bird of prey. As usual, Ryo portrayed the shift in an ethereal style that made her feel the magic could actually happen. The discreet but sensual glimpses of Raptor’s nudity in human form didn’t hurt. Opening a separate window, she typed the next few pages of dialogue that she’d been mulling over through the afternoon, before Elena’s bad news had overridden thoughts of fantastic quests.
Within a few minutes, the signal for a new instant message dinged. I should’ve remembered to turn off the sound. Shame on me, distraction bad, concentration good. She couldn’t resist checking, though, and was glad she had when the transmission turned out to come from Ryo.
“About the con this weekend,” it started.
Oh, no, he isn’t sick or something like that, is he? I can’t meet, greet, and negotiate all on my own.
“I don’t really have to be there for the whole con, do I?” the message continued. “What if I just drop in on Saturday long enough to meet the editor with you?”
She crumpled a napkin in her left fist, heat flooding her cheeks. Don’t even think about letting me down! She typed simply, “Why can’t you be there the whole weekend?”
“I’m not much for socializing, and I’ve got a project for work I should be catching up on. I trust you to speak for both of us.”
“Not good enough,” she tapped out with furious speed. “We can’t predict how often or how long Wright will expect to talk with us. How do you think he’d react if you bail? Anyway, you’re not leaving me to cover our dealers’ room table alone without a better reason than that.” This is all I need, right after I hear I’m about to lose my job. She considered adding that complaint to her message but decided she didn’t want to sound as whiny as she felt.
“You feel that strongly about having me there the whole time?”
“You think?!?!” She let her anger boil over in an eruption of punctuation.
After a long pause, he answered, “Okay, if it means that much to you, I’m in. I’ll show up as scheduled on Friday and stay the weekend. Word of honor.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” Did that mean she was important to him as more than a collaborator? Despite all their virtual conversations over many months, she still couldn’t be sure.
After that heated exchange, she lost all motivation for composing a heroic scenario. She typed a few more sentences, then closed the word processor. She sighed over Ryo’s illustrations for a minute longer before closing that file, too. What’s with him constantly trying to get out of social obligations? Is meeting people that awkward for him? She could understand if he suffered from agoraphobia, but she’d seen no evidence of such a condition, and surely he could trust her enough to say so instead of inventing excuses.
They’d met at a convention in Washington two and a half years earlier, and he hadn’t shown any signs of distress about being there. The video game company he worked for as a graphic artist had assigned him to take a shift staffing a sale table. At the adjacent table in the dealers’ room, Shannon had been helping a friend sell fanzines, some of which included her own stories about Golden Raptor. Ryo had bought one to read during lulls in customer traffic. To her surprised satisfaction, he mentioned that he’d already read some of her fiction online and become fascinated with Raptor, an eagle shapeshifter who’d accidentally crossed over to Earth from an alternate world after a magical cataclysm.
Casual conversation had led to a late dinner after the dealers’ room closed, followed by hours of brainstorming about future adventures. At first Shannon had wondered about ulterior motives on Ryo’s part, but he hadn’t tried to hit on her at any point during the conversation. He proved himself genuinely excited by the story they’d concocted on the spot, giving Raptor a companion Ryo insisted the character needed. Thus they’d generated Crimson Vixen, a female fox shapeshifter who’d fallen through the same dimensional rift. Although the two characters hadn’t known each other in their original world, they’d become first reluctant allies and then friends. The next logical step, according to Ryo, had been a website dedicated to a graphic novel series about the pair. By the time they’d parted at the end of the con, not only had Shannon committed to the plan for Raptor and Vixen, she wouldn’t have minded a more-than-friendly gesture from Ryo after all. No more than a couple of years older than Shannon’s late twenties, he stood only a few inches taller than her own five feet six, just the proper height for the hugs and kisses she caught herself fantasizing about all too often. She also imagined stroking his wavy, short-cropped, sable hair, so like a wild animal’s pelt. Most alluring was the unusual color of his eyes, a golden brown that looked amber in certain lights.
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What makes your featured book a must-read?
A shapeshifter, friends-to-lovers story for fans of romance between human and not-quite-human—plus a scene at a science-fiction con.
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Author Biography:
Reading Dracula at the age of twelve ignited Margaret L. Carter’s interest in a wide range of speculative fiction and inspired her to become a writer. Vampires, however, have always remained close to her heart. Her first published book was an anthology of vampire stories she edited, Curse of the Undead. Her work on vampirism in literature includes Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, The Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography, and Different Blood: The Vampire as Alien. She holds a PhD in English, and her dissertation contained a chapter on Dracula. In fiction, she has written horror, fantasy, and paranormal romance on vampires, werewolves, Lovecraftian entities, and other “monsters.” Her stories have appeared in various webzines and anthologies, including several of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover and Sword and Sorceress volumes. Her vampire novels include Dark Changeling and its sequel, Child of Twilight, now available in an omnibus edition, Twilight’s Changelings, as well as several vampire romances. With her husband, Leslie Roy Carter, a retired naval officer, she co-authored a fantasy series beginning with Wild Sorceress. Her recent novellas include a Christmas paranormal romance, Chocolate Chip Charm, and a spring-themed contemporary fantasy, Bunny Hunt. Her most recent novel, Against the Dark Devourer, is a dark paranormal romance with Lovecraftian elements. She and Les, who live in Maryland, have four children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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