Hi, wonderful readers!  And a special thanks to BOOK LOVIN’ MAMAS for having me here today!

I’ve been a writer for longer than I ever want to announce publicly, lol!  But it’s been a couple of decades and I LOVE it!  I wrote Regency romance as Valerie King for 19 years, having published with Kensington under the Zebra imprint.  I had a wonderful time living in my Regency world and in one of the novellas, many moons ago, I added an entire vampire family for one of their Halloween collections.

So you could say that I’ve been connected to the paranormal world long before it became an entirely new, exciting genre.  When writers like Sherrilyn Kenyon, JR Ward and Lara Adrian established the genre, I fell in love with the vampire warrior model and built my Guardians of Ascension around big, hunky, oversized, and super-sexy warrior-types! 

I built my very epic series around ascending dimensional earths and set it here in the Sonoran Desert where I live.  Though I grew up in California, I’ve lived in the Phoenix area for over two decades now.  My favorite thing about the desert is the light, how much sunlight you get day in and day out.  And our dusty air makes for a fabulous sunset as well!

My latest novella, THE DARKENING, is based on my Guardians of Ascension.  I took a Militia Warrior, Samuel, and saddled him with a terrible ‘dark’ power that threatens everyone around him.  Then I added his woman, Vela, to the mix with her own emerging power called, you guessed it, ‘the darkening’, in which she can travel between dimensional earths on a secret super-highway, trafficked unfortunately by really bad guys with sawed-off shotguns!  Neither Vela nor Samuel want a relationship, so it’s ‘game on’ once a good friend of theirs gets kidnapped and only Vela knows how to track him in the darkening.

The following excerpt comes from the first chapter of  THE DARKENING.  We’ve just met Vela and she’s trying hard to leave her job without meeting any more hunky Militia Warriors.  She’s just about to escape that terrible fate, when her friends arrive with a new, last-day plan for her! 

Chapter One

Vela folded to the HQ landing platforms, on time as usual, and went to work, sitting in her office and processing purchase orders for all kinds of weaponry, uniforms, and electronic equipment. Over the past several weeks, the latter had become an almost constant stream of acquisitions for Warrior Thorne, the Supreme High Commander of the Allied Ascender Forces. He’d set up a working HQ, a Command Center, at Madame Endelle’s palace during the time preceding the battle at White Lake that saw Greaves’s defeat, and he’d continued building up his operations since.

Now, apparently, he had a new set of problems.

Vela always got a headache thinking about the turn in the war. What had begun as a great victory and celebrated throughout the world as a resounding defeat had already taken on the shape of a nightmare. Three of Greaves’s generals, as a contingency plan to his failure to win his mano-a-mano battle against Madame Endelle, had essentially taken their master’s army, hiding over three-hundred-thousand troops each, which added up to almost a million warriors, and had subsequently begun launching guerilla-like attacks against Thorne’s AAF.

The body count among the Thunder God Warriors had hit numbers that forced her to avoid certain websites and newsfeeds.

She couldn’t get away from all of this chaos soon enough.

She glanced at her computer and saw that it was now ten-after-five. She was officially done and could say adios to HQ forever.

Yes, a new life awaited her and she chomped at the bit to get started.

Of course, she only had three purchase orders left to process, and since she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the task undone, she kept working. What was twenty more minutes?

But as she prepared to print-out a hard copy of a particularly troublesome document, she heard a familiar group-giggling sound and she smiled.

Her time was up.

“Shut it down, Ascender Vela. You no longer work here.”

She looked up and saw her three closest friends, looking young and chic, grouped in her doorway. She loved her world that at least two of her friends were over a hundred but didn’t look a day past thirty. Sweet.

As she did a double-take, she realized each wore a silly grin.

Suspicion set in.

“All right, what’s going on?” she called out. She closed the last file and signed off. Despite that her friends were clearly up to something, a deep sigh of relief left her. Her tour of duty at Militia Warrior HQ was officially over.

She stood up and grabbed her purse.

“Well, we’re definitely taking you out for drinks,” Donna said. “But first, have we got a surprise for you.”

* * *   * * *   * * *

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from THE DARKENING.  To learn more about Warrior Samuel go to:  http://www.carisroane.com/the-darkening/

THE DARKENING, by Caris Roane

A novella of the Guardians of Ascension

49,800 words plus Ascension Terminology

A tortured warrior and a peace-loving counselor battle to protect Second Earth against a powerful dark force…

He thwarted connection of any kind…

Fearing that his newly emerged grayle power will kill innocent ascenders, Samuel Daman struggles to keep his distance from beautiful Vela Stillwell.  But the breh-hedden has struck and her light floral scent tears at his restraint.  When the enemy draws them both into the darkening, a place of secret travel for Third ascenders, will Samuel learn to control his power, or will he destroy what he desires most?

She hid from grief…

Vela Stillwell wanted a new life, away from Militia Headquarters, away from the reminder of all she’d lost when her husband died five years earlier.  Seeking a more reclusive occupation, she finishes her last day of work only to have Samuel Daman and the infamous breh-hedden sweep through her life.  Though trying to disconnect from her new emerging power and from Samuel, the call of the darkening pulls Vela into an adventure that both terrifies her, yet reveals the truth about her deepest desires.  Will she succumb to the breh-hedden, or will her fears prevent her from living life to the fullest?

Purchase from:

AMAZON / BARNES & NOBLE

BIO:  Caris Roane has published nine paranormal novels and novellas and writing as Valerie King, fifty Regency works.  In 2005, Romantic Times gave her a Career Achievement award in Regency Romance.  As Caris Roane, she currently writes paranormal romance for St. Martin’s Press and also self-publishes the continuing stories for her Guardians of Ascension series as well as stories set in other worlds. 

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 Caris Roane's

THE DARKENING

Blog Tour Schedule

02/24 - 03/11

02/24 - I Smell Sheep

02/25 - Mad Hatter Reads

02/26 - Riverina Romantics

02/27 -

02/28 - Close Encounters with the Night Kind

03/01 - Beach Bum Reads

03/02 - All The Fun Starts After Dark

03/03 - Book Lovin' Mamas

03/04 - Reading Between the Wines

03/05 - Bookin' It Reviews

03/06 - United by Books

03/07 - Phantasmic Reads

03/08 - Seductive Musings

03/09 - The Jeep Diva

03/11 - Book Monster Reviews

Caris is giving away an eBook of THE DARKENING at every tour stop. To enter please fill out the rafflecopter below and also check out the grand prize info and enter that one too! 

Caris Roane Grand Prize Giveaway: