Highlander Enchanted(82)
“I think we need a storm,” he replied. “One to last a day or two. We’ll no’ leave our chamber.” His eyes sparkled with promise and desire.
Heat warmed her features. “Only two?”
“Verra well. Three days, perchance four, ‘til ye beg me fer sunshine.”
“I do not beg,” she returned. “Ever.”
“Then ‘twill storm until our home is ready or until our son is born.”
She laughed.
Pink gems sparkled in the air around them. The lights twirled around them before darting into the sky and blooming into clouds.
“’Tis the color of home, hearth and love,” he said, admiring the pink lanterns. “My magic has been this hue since the battle with Laird Duncan.”
“’Twill always be this hue, I believe,” she replied. “’Twill always reflect our love.”
“Yea, lass, ‘twill.”
Isabel sent a silent prayer of gratitude with the lanterns into the heavens and watched with a smile as grey-bellied clouds rolled across the sky.
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“Omega” - For fans of “Divergent” and “Hunger Games” …
In a modern world torn apart by territorial Greek gods, the fate of humanity rests in the hands of a teen girl with incredible powers and her unlikely allies.
“Omega,” the first book in a young adult dystopia trilogy by award winning author Lizzy Ford, releases in October.
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Want to know more about “Omega”? Keep reading for an exclusive excerpt!
Chapter One: Alessandra
No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.
– Homer
For once, Tyche, could you grant me a little luck?
I slowed before reaching my favorite meadow in the forest, my heart racing and chest heaving. A grin stretched my cheeks, and I stopped to listen for the boy I’d challenged to a race. I heard … voices. Male and at least two females.
“I guess not,” I muttered aloud.
The damn nymphs had him. My giddy excitement faded. I was the one who managed to lure a teen boy from the nearby campground into our forest and, as usual, the nymphs stole him. I couldn’t compete with the beautiful women. There were thirty of them my age, all unusually perfect, feminine and graceful. Even my guardian said they weren’t normal, and we’d coined the term nymphs to describe the other girls at the isolated orphanage where I lived under the thumb of strict priests. The other girls were all my age, too, each of them destined for positions befitting their beauty, according to the priests.
It was disgusting. I couldn’t stand them.
I was an athlete, uncomfortable in anything but tennis shoes and yoga pants, terrible in school and bearing a scar from childhood across one cheek. No matter how much makeup I plastered over it or how far forward I brushed my dark locks, I wasn’t able to hide it. I was always late to class, always the last to understand whatever torture the priests were teaching us, always trying to catch the first light of Aurora in the reflecting pool or scaling a hill to watch the last rays of Hersperides.
The nymphs laughed at me. I hated them for it and me for not being able to fit in no matter what I did. I couldn’t change the fact I was shorter, smaller and otherwise imperfect compared to them.
“Lose another one, Lyssa?”
“Yeah.” I heard my guardian’s approach and looked up into his scarred, ugly face. A mountain of a man with bright red hair, Herakles had never once understood why I was so disappointed to lose every guy I looked at to the nymphs.
“If a man can’t outrun you – ”
“– I can’t bring him home with me. House rules. I know.” It was a stupid rule. Surely there had to be one man somewhere who shared my deer-like agility.
My guardian chuckled.
“He was so handsome!” I whined with a sigh, recalling the gorgeous brown eyes and smile of the teenage boy I’d met today. When he had looked at me, my insides turned fluttery and warm. “He almost outran me, too.”
“Only because you slowed down.”
I rolled my eyes and spun away, headed towards the compound in the middle of a forest where we all lived. “So what? Everyone here has kissed a boy and I can’t even look at one without the stupid nymphs taking him away. They just bat their eyes and the boys fall all over them.” I made a show of shaking my hips and blinking rapidly in mockery.
“I’ve never kissed a boy.”
“You know what I mean!” Herakles was a jerk sometimes. His rules were designed to prevent me from ever having a boyfriend. My interests generally lay in martial arts and sports. If not for the nymphs conspiring to steal any boys I lured away from the campground and always taunting me about everything, I wouldn’t look twice at a boy. But I shared one sole trait with the nymphs: competitiveness. I wanted so badly to best them at something and earn enough respect not to be bullied every day for the rest of my life.