Interview/Giveaway: April Vine, Author of Unbound

Please welcome romance author April Vine! Her new release from Ellora’s Cave, Unbound, is funny and sexy and full of magic. She’s graciously offered to give a free copy to one lucky commenter.

Staid and straitlaced Michelle Stein has two thoughts fueling her mind…

1. Floor the first man to walk into her antique shop.
2. Throttle her three witchcraft-practicing aunts.

They promised her a tiny spell to fix her ridiculous inhibitions, but instead mischievously delivered a full-blown, sanity-squashing lust spell. The temporary curse apparently has no boundaries either…since the first man who walks through her door is the same man who broke her heart ten years ago. Despite Michelle’s vociferous resistance, Sebastian becomes the only man who can appease her unending physical hunger.

Thirty, heirless and restless, Sebastian Gray is drawn back home to Cape Town to claim the only girl he ever loved. What he finds in her place is a hotly bewitched erotic seductress. Now with the reparation spell her aunts cast gone awry, Sebastian might be on the losing end of a futile battle against a strength-ascending hex, no matter how hard he tries to keep Michelle satiated, alive…or even just human.

April, can you tell us a little bit more about Unbound?

It’s a sometimes funny, sometimes dark love story that unfolds when my highly reserved heroine is cast with a lust spell but in all that finds true love and accepts who she really is.

Would you mind introducing us to Michelle and Sebastian?

Michelle is staid and straitlaced. She wants nothing but rigid order to her life, something that is hard to achieve because the three aunts she lives with and takes care of practice real-life witchery. They’re constantly messing with her ordered existence but more so when they cast a lust spell on her and turned her world upside down.

Sebastian is at an age in his life where he wants to settle down. He spent time in special forces, then took over his father’s company and now needs heirs to leave his legacy to. Of course only one girl ever owned his heart and that’s Michelle, so he comes back home to Cape Town, to claim her. Only to find in her place a hotly bewitched seductress.

What’s your favorite moment in this story?

The ending. I felt Michelle and Sebastian did get their happily ever after after all so my work was done!

Will there be a sequel to Unbound?

There are two more books I plan to write featuring the three matchmaking-witch-practicing aunts. The next two will feature each of Sebastian’s friends, Zach and Nick.

How did you get started as an author, and how long have you been writing?

I can’t pinpoint a time when I started actually writing, I feel as if there was never a time I wasn’t writing. But of course marriage and babies took priority and now that my youngest is in school, I decided to write full-time. So seriously for about four years now.

I submitted a contemporary romance to a publisher and somehow it landed on the wrong editor’s desk. That editor was an erotic romance editor. She liked my voice and wanted to work with me and then recommended I read a few erotic romances to see what she was looking for. Once I picked my jaw up from the floor, I blindly dived in to writing my first erotic romance and realized I enjoyed it thoroughly.

What was the very first story you ever wrote? What was it about?

The first true story I ever wrote was an historical romance of mammoth proportions and an editor’s nightmare. I threw in everything I knew into that book and it showed in a bad way.

What are the key elements of an April Vine story?

Humor, emotion, conflict and definitely a happily ever after at the end.

How do you balance the erotic and the romantic in your stories? How do you see those two aspects conflicting or enhancing each other in fiction?

I don’t see erotic and romantic aspects as separate factors, but rather that the erotic is a bonus of the romance. There must be romance first in my opinion, for the erotic to be meaningful. So definitely erotic descriptions of a sex scene should wholly enhance the romance itself or the scene will leave me disinterested. The other way I look at it is the romance brings the emotional conflicts and the eroticism makes those conflicts hotter. 🙂

How does your family feel about the fact that you write sexy romances? Do they know?

What they don’t know won’t hurt them. 😉 No one knows what I write except hubby, who is my reason and my sanity and my pillar and even my research partner!

What do you like to do when you’re not writing?

I read! It’s the safest hobby I could come up with. When I’m feeling brave, I bake or cook. Shoes, the beach, chocolate and lounging around are other stuff I like and do from time to time.

Who are your favorite authors?

I have met so many wonderful authors since becoming published and have read their books and enjoyed them so much, that I couldn’t name all of them. One that comes to mind immediately is you, Ms. Drake, love your books. 🙂 Others include Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Dostoevsky, Ayn Rand, Austen, Hemmingway, Coetzee to name a few.

*blushes* Thanks, April. For those readers who are just discovering your work, what other April Vine books are in print?

I have three short erotic romance ebooks out with The Wild Rose Press. Details are on my website.

What are you working on now? What can your fans expect from you in the near future?

I just finished the second book to follow Unbound and I will start working on the third one soon.

Would you mind sharing an excerpt from Unbound with us?

I’d be happy to.

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Chapter One

Michelle leaped from the floral-embossed Victorian chair, gripped the edge of the walnut desk and dropped her chin to her chest. Labored breaths somersaulted from her mouth. Her heart beat with swift speed. Her skin screamed under a raging fire.

She was having an attack.

Not a panic attack.

A sex attack.

Oh how she vowed to strangle her aunts, wring their collective witches’ necks and put them on a diet of cabbage for as long as they lived. She thought they’d agreed with her terms and stipulations.

Obviously not, since they’d turned her into a raging sex fiend who without any hesitation would attack the first man who walked through the door of her antiquities shop. Not by her own doing, because how could she, twenty-six-year-old, staid, even-headed and collected Michelle Stein, sign up for such reckless sexual abandonment? Not ever.

She resisted the urge to squeeze her scorching nipples and the temptation to bunch up her cotton panties and pull them taut against her clit. She couldn’t give in. Not while her door remained opened for business.

She wobbled out of her office to the entrance of the store. Pressing her legs together, she chewed her lip in agony as the slightest movement ricocheted spasms of pleasure through her body. Her eyes fixed on the gold-plated sign hanging on the inside of the glass door meters away from her. Her mission to flip it around and keep out any possible victims until the crazy her aunts bestowed upon her evaporated.

Too late.

The door swung open. Eighteenth-century chimes hanging from the paneled ceiling danced in the afternoon breeze. Their former melodious jingle a sex-alert siren in her ear now.

She zeroed in on a musky scent mingled with the clean, self-assured aroma of pure red-blooded male. Her senses hummed. She licked her lips then swerved to a dead halt.

Bedeviled with the worst kind of heat known to any man, woman or animal for that matter, and who chose to walk into her ordinarily sedate but presently doggoned world?

Sebastian Gray.

He who broke her heart in two.

“Glitterbug.” His gravel-and-silk voice spiked and inebriated her nerves. She tore her gaze away from his killer smile and stared into his wicked green-tinged blue eyes, which teased her the same way they did ten years ago.

Only one thought shot through her mind.

Oh dear, I’m going to molest Sebastian Gray.

She stepped back—her restless hands crossed over her breasts, curled around her neck and intertwined behind her in a clammy mess. She squelched the incoherent reverberations tickling against her closed lips, afraid she’d growl at him instead.

She backtracked into her office. He followed her, his stride unhurried, lazy, unaware of the red-hot danger he seemed intent on pursuing. She held up her hand. Cease! her palm screamed at him. He closed in, his eyes narrowing at her fidgety silence.

“Glitterbug?”

The part of her wanting to keep him out of her office died in distress. The other part, the part her aunts had concocted wicked mischief with, purred with glee. She’d managed to lure her prey into the confined space of her office.

No, he is not your prey.

She grew up with him, fell in love with him then realized she missed his league by a mile and a half—a gap he had no intention of closing when he left without saying goodbye. She’d beat the potion dragging her hormones on a no-recourse sex fest. She’d resist him, really she would.

She opened her mouth to speak.

The will to resist him crashed and vanished. She charged, grabbed his jacket and pulled him down to her level. Her lips assailed his gorgeous face. She kissed his beautiful eyes, licked his delicious clean-shaven jaw.

Her desperate attempts to devour his face had nil effect on his balance. His chuckle, deep and sexy, ambushed her nerves. Her teeth sank into the fleshy part of his earlobe. Her long skirt tangled about both their limbs as she tried to climb up his six-foot-two frame.

“Glitterbug…whoa.” He forced an arm’s-span distance between them. Her cheeks burned. She’d never live this day down in her life. Never. “I’m happy to see you too. But shouldn’t we talk first? How are you?”

He insisted on niceties? She wanted him naked and inside her. She pushed into his chest and toppled him onto a velvet-upholstered Louis XVI loveseat. Her surge of foreign strength caught them both off guard.

“I haven’t seen you in…” His voice reverberated down her spine, setting off lively celebrations in all her nerves.

“I’m sorry.” She straddled his lap, ripped his tie apart, broke the buttons off his shirt and unfastened his belt. “I’m so sorry. I can’t seem to stop myself.”

Her hands ran up and down his concrete eight-pack. “I can’t control this. Oh, oh, oh.” His powerful thigh wedged between her legs. She ground her pussy against his contracted muscle, rocking herself, and was sure she turned a new shade of red. “This isn’t me.” Her breasts. He needed to touch her breasts. She captured his hand and smacked it against her chest.

“Squeeze.” She manipulated his fingers around her engorged flesh and licked her lips at the torturous pleasure. “I have no power to stop this.” She looked into his face and begged he’d see how useless a grip on the situation she had.

A bemused grin flitted across his lips. “Do your aunts have anything to do with your new uninhibited self?”

“Yes!” she screamed. “Yes,” she repeated, less vociferous. If anyone could understand her strange behavior, Sebastian would. He knew her three chubby and cheerful aunts, who lived in a cottage on his father’s land, practiced real live witchery. He’d understand and forgive her, her erratic, uncharacteristic conduct. “They said they would help me with a bit of flirting. In fact they talked me into it. Said I needed help in that department. I’m getting old as they put it and they thought a tiny little spell would make me less…cold and more…inviting. Look what they’ve done to me instead!”

Available at Ellora’s Cave: http://www.jasminejade.com/p-10020-unbound.aspx

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April Vine writes erotic romance by night and is a professional dreamer by day. She has two precious sons who keep her sharp and one very tolerant husband who chivalrously and bravely defends her honour daily.

Writing keeps sane her, or so she says. She’s been found on more than a few occasions eyeing her laptop lasciviously, pulling her hair out in front of her laptop, smiling stupidly or cussing badly at her laptop, pacing nervously before her laptop, shoving it under the bed and more than once, she’s been seen hugging her laptop with tears in her eyes. Case rested.

She writes contemporary erotic romance and paranormal erotic romance for Ellora’s Cave and The Wild Rose Press.

Connect with April:
Website: http://www.aprilvine.co.za/home.html
Email: april.vine@yahoo.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/April-Vine/1540121433
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/April_Vine

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If you’d like to be entered to win a copy of Unbound, take a moment to say hi to April in the comments!