Genre: Paranormal/Romantic Suspense
ASIN: B00DGL0HBC
Number of pages:
estimated 220 pages
Word Count: 65K
Book Description:
Plagued by
nightmares of terrorist bombings, Lara Freberg is a so-called Lost One, unaware
of her psychic gift for literally being in two places at once. While her true
body sleeps, her twin is helplessly drawn to scenes of unspeakable horror.
Kidnapped by a
corrupt, CIA-like organization determined to exploit her abilities, Lara is
given no choice. Cooperate or die. Until the midnight spying missions that make
her the willing prisoner of an erotic stranger. Does she dare trust him with
her warning of a future attack on American soil?
Jack Mayfield will never forgive himself for being too late to free Lara from the Greys, The Dreamrunners Society's sworn enemies. An elite front line operative, Jack is able to find and save the Lost Ones no one else can. Nothing, however, can prepare him for the shock of losing the woman who holds the key to unlocking his war weary heart. Now Jack is in a race for her life. Lara's dreaming half may be able to drive him wild with passion, but can he believe her when she says the Greys haven't turned her against him and the Society?
It won't be easy to rescue his one true love from certain death.
Jack Mayfield will never forgive himself for being too late to free Lara from the Greys, The Dreamrunners Society's sworn enemies. An elite front line operative, Jack is able to find and save the Lost Ones no one else can. Nothing, however, can prepare him for the shock of losing the woman who holds the key to unlocking his war weary heart. Now Jack is in a race for her life. Lara's dreaming half may be able to drive him wild with passion, but can he believe her when she says the Greys haven't turned her against him and the Society?
It won't be easy to rescue his one true love from certain death.
Excerpt:
The hand that clamped itself over Lara
Freberg’s sleeping face was sweaty and smelled of formaldehyde. She jerked
awake in an instant, completely disoriented.
She’d been deep into one of her
nightmares. Explosions. Fires. Hundreds slaughtered. Something grabbing her
ankle.
Where was she? Was she still in the
dream? No one ever touched her in the nightmares.
“Hurry up,” a man said in the dark.
She was in her bed, at home in her
Baltimore condo.
The crushing weight she’d felt in her
dream, which she’d intuited as the emotional weight of the violence perpetrated
on innocent lives, was actual, crushing weight in real life. A strange man
knelt on top of her.
My
God, what’s happening?
Lara tried to scream, but the hand over
her mouth dug into her face in an explicit warning. The man’s knees pinned her
thighs to the mattress, while his free hand easily captured both her wrists and
forced her still.
She bucked against his restraint on her.
“Come
on, come on,” the man said.
Was
she talking to her?
No,
he directed his words toward someone else in her bedroom she couldn’t see. They
shouldn’t have been able to get in here. She paid for a security service, as
did everyone else in the complex. Who were they? What did they want?
Then it hit her, the answer obvious. Her
heart, already racing, sped up to a painful degree.
Rape.
Frantically, she fought harder. She tried
to throw off the man who smelled like dead things, but tangled up in her
bedcovers, with his body weight pressing down on her, she was trapped to the
bed.
“Forget it, Lara,” Formaldehyde man said.
He pushed down, shoving her head so hard into the mattress she could feel each
spring through the padding. That horrible smell coming off of his skin reminded
her of fetal pigs in eighth grade biology class. Bile rose in her throat. She
began to gag.
“Now,”
the man said to his accomplice.
She still couldn’t make out her
attacker’s face in the dark, but she could tell he was lean, fit, and had a
short, professional haircut. The other man, what she could see of him in the
shadows, looked similar. Why would men like this break into her apartment to
rape her?
Something glinted in her peripheral
vision, the needle at the end of a disposable syringe. She watched the
accomplice holding the syringe come closer. A tiny squirt of liquid from the
tip of the needle sprayed her bare skin.
Lara thrashed anew, her thoughts
frenzied. She didn’t know what they wanted with her, or why they were here, but
she imagined the worse, that she had only hours, if that, to live. She sobbed
without being fully aware of it. What was next? What would they do to her?
Would they torture her first? Cut? Stab? Blind? Skin?
She couldn’t fight them. She didn’t have
a chance at all. Seconds later, the needle jabbed her, a sharp, slicing pain.
Coldness followed as the substance was forced into her arm by the syringe’s
plunger.
Her head swam. Whatever the man had given
her produced an immediate lethargy she couldn’t battle. Her arms and legs
became too heavy to move.
Her attacker got up off of her, deciding
she was no longer a threat.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s get her in
the van.”
He grabbed her roughly and slung her over
his shoulder. She tried to lift her head, but her neck muscles wouldn’t
cooperate. Whatever had been in the syringe muted her sense of fear. She no
longer cared she was taken from her bed.
It was just before she blacked out that
she saw a third man in her bedroom, near the closet. Her head swung like a rag
doll as her captor made an abrupt turn toward the bedroom door, but even
looking at the world from upside down, she couldn’t miss him.
He was transparent.
“Wow,” she whispered, spotting her own
shadowed reflection in her closet mirror, visible right through his body.
His presence suddenly caused the room to
grow brighter. She had the wild notion he gathered the shadows from the darkest
corners of the room to create a body for himself, while his skin flared with
golden light, and he became more substantial by the second. He materialized his
way into the room. It made no sense, but that was precisely what she saw.
Odder still, neither of the other men in
the room reacted to the brilliant, rich light he gave off. He towered over
them, yet they appeared not to notice he was there. Powerfully built, he was
naked to the waist, barefoot and clothed only in a well-worn pair of jeans.
Gradually his face and body defined themselves until she could almost make out
the line of a strong, knife-edge jaw and the shimmer of moonlight haloing his
black hair.
Fierce indigo eyes gazed directly into
hers. A jolt of recognition raced through her.
Lara gasped in shock. She knew him. She
was sure of it. An intense rush of déjà
vu tingled down her spine. Who was he? How did she know him? Wait…did she
know him, really?
Drugs,
Lara. This isn’t real. He’s not real. You’re imagining him.
Blue eyes held her attention ruthlessly.
Hold
on! Don’t let go, he spoke.
But it wasn’t speech. She heard his words in her mind!
I
need you to stay conscious.
“Who are you?” she whispered, her voice
slurring.
“The ones who own you,” said the man
carrying her.
Oblivious to the third man’s presence,
her abductors thought she was talking to them.
I
can’t get to you if you black out, the ghostly figure told her.
His immense shoulders tensed, bracing for
action. His palms shoved outward at nothing, as if he pushed against an
invisible barrier, leaned into it with everything he had, and was inexplicably
held back.
Stay
with me! Stay awake!
- Where did you get the idea for the novel?
It came to me by thinking about all the possible psychic
gifts a paranormal hero and heroine might have. Telepathy, psychometry,
clairvoyance, precognition, mediumship, even dowsing. I liked the idea of
out-of-body experiences, but asked myself, what if you could take your body
with you? What if you could transport a second, real live copy of yourself
wherever you wanted to go? Be in two places at once? And what if there was an
entire secret society of people with this gift? Just think what you could do
with that ability? And what others might fear you would do with it? Which sets
up the conflict between The Dreamrunners Society and the quazi-CIA type
organization known as The Greys, in the novel.
- Your title. Who came up with it? Did you ever change your title?
I decided on the title, DANGEROUS DREAMS. Since the series
is about The Dreamrunner’s Society, I wanted to choose titles that contain some
variation of the word dream. For instance, the next book in the series is
called DREAMING FOR THE DEAD. I’m in the middle of writing that one and having
a lot of fun with it, because the heroine is literally dreaming for dead
victims who can’t speak for themselves.
- Which came first, the title or the novel?
Actually a short story version of the novel, titled IN HER
DREAMS, came first. I wrote it as a submission to a contest being run by
Harlequin. The short story didn’t sell to them, so I took the premise and the
main characters and used them as the start of a new novel. They provided the
inspiration, but so much was expanded, rewritten and added on to the short
story that I felt the finished novel deserved a new title.
- Since becoming a writer, what’s the most exciting thing to ever
happen to you?
Every time I write the last word of a story, and mentally
add “The End,” is a serious thrill for me. Being able to say, “I finished that.
I wrote that.” Even if the book is never sold or gets awful reviews, I did it.
I didn’t give up in the middle. I accomplished something.
- What book are you currently reading or what was the last book you
read?
This week I’m digging into The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo. I saw the movie with Daniel Craig. Now I want to read the book. I also
just finished and reviewed The Outlaw of Cedar Ridge by my friend Lori Connelly.
- What was your first book that you ever wrote (very first one you
wrote, not published)?
A really, really
horrible attempt at a science fiction novel that never found an ending. That’s
if you don’t first count my stories and drawings when I was in the second grade,
which I mashed together into a book.
- What is your writing process?
I sit down with my laptop and start banging out the story.
I try not to be too critical with my first draft. The most important thing is
to get the words on the screen. In fact, I don’t even read over any part of a
novel until I’ve typed that last page. Most of the time that strategy works
well, but, um, there have been times when I’ve forgotten about secondary
characters in the first half of the story and left them hanging in the second.
Once I found I’d changed the spelling of the main character’s name during the
course of the novel and didn’t even notice. Of course, that’s what the editing
phase is for.
- Who are your favorite authors of all time?
Jane Austen, Ian Fleming, C.S. Lewis, Robert Parker, Andre
Norton, Charlotte Brontë.
- At a book signing, do you just sign your name or do you write a
note? How do you come up with stuff to say?
I’m still looking forward to my first book signing, but
I’m sure I’ll be extremely nervous, and worried about how exactly to sign a
book. I figure it’s sort of like when you have to think of something brilliant
to sign in a greeting card. You love sending the card, but what to say?
- What is something people would be surprised to know about you?
I know how to dismantle a computer. Putting it back
together is another matter, but I’m really good at taking things apart.
- How do you react to a bad review?
It hurts, and it will sit with me for a day while I try to
figure out if what the person has written is useful, or if it’s just a matter
of their opinion clashing with what I wanted to achieve as a writer.
Eventually, though, you have to tell yourself to shrug it off and move on.
Otherwise you’ll freeze and never write again.
- How did you celebrate the sale of your first book?
By jumping up an down like a demented kangaroo, of course.
Followed by a celebratory meal at a local restaurant, during which I didn’t
taste a thing of what I ate.
Thank you, Alisia! I appreciate the welcome and chance to
talk about my books. J
About the Author:
Aileen Harkwood is
a die hard fan of the mysteries, thrills and romances life has to offer and has
wanted to write her own since she penned her first,
safely-hidden-away-in-a-drawer-never-to-see-the-light-of-day novel in high
school. She has a B.A. in Creative Writing, and resides in the Southern Rockies
of the United States with her family, a Labrador with an extensive chew stick
collection, and two cats named after birds.
Twitter:
@AileenHarkwood
My thanks for your generous offer to host a stop on the tour, Alisia. Thanks also for asking about the writing process. It was fun discussing it! :-D
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