Tuesday, May 7, 2024

Double Book Review: Bound Across Time (Book One) by Annie R McEwen + giveaway

Bound Across Time  paranormal romance book cover
Bound Across Time (Book One)
by Annie R McEwen
May 7, 2024
Genre: Paranormal Romance, Ghost Romance
Publisher: Harbor Lane Books
Date of Publication:
ASIN: B0CV4RPDDX
Number of pages: 324
In a castle on the shores of the Irish Sea, she’s met the love of her life. Clever, witty, strong, fiercely attractive. What’s the catch? He’s a ghost.

Historian CeCe’s dream job in a Welsh castle goes sideways when she’s ordered to ditch the history and lead ghost walks. That’s the worst of her worries until she meets Patrick: strong, handsome, irresistible…and dead since 1761.

Desire and hope flare in Patrick’s heart when CeCe touches him while, for CeCe, Patrick is everything. But she’s in the bright world of the living while he’s trapped in the shadows.

Loving a ghost is deadly business. Patrick and CeCe struggle to outrace fate as it hurtles them toward disaster. Can the ancient riddle of an Irish seer save them? The spells of Welsh witches?

Or can powers CeCe didn’t even know she possessed bridge time and defeat death?


 KD
Getting 4 and 1/2 "lets make some clay pots" Sheep

Bound Across Time by author Annie McEwen is book one in a new PNR series featuring Ghosts. Yes, Ghosts! I absolutely needed to try this one just based on that part alone.

Was I hopeful for some Patrick Swayze (RIP) and Whoopie moments? Hell yes I was! That was an awesome movie and obviously this author must have thought so as well, since she writes a whole dang new series about them. Send in the unchained melody, I was onboard from the jump and loved every minute of this one.

Some hot and heavy romance for sure lights up these pages. Adding the longing across the centuries to be freed from the half-life this dashing Irishman Patrick has limped through. CeCe is a very funny and believable leading lady, I would have enjoyed even more snark and humor in her character.

A very well thought out and planned new series by an author that seems to know her base audience and how to keep us fully entertained. I look forward to reading more and keep making those ghosts freaky cause this gal loved it!
 
JeanieG
Getting 3.5 ghostly sheep

Well, what a love story and unique vision.

I enjoyed Cecelia and Patrick’s love story but am always amazed that a human has no idea of a special “skill” until confronted with a “slap in the face” experience. Cecelia was a historian and was adamant that ghosts and spirits were not real. Until, of course, she meets one in the course of her job as tour guide at the historic mansion.

She still fought the reality even as she was falling in love with the spectrum Patrick. I guess I can’t say I really blame her since he was the only one she could see. Apparently he had been waiting for her centuries stuck in limbo. She might be the cure for his inability to pass on to a better afterlife but it may be at a cost to her humanity.

Falling in love with Cece gives Patrick reason to protect her and is torn between wanting to be with her or keeping her safe. Cece can’t keep her distance and is eventually willing to brave the unknown after her family enlighten her about her ancestry.

A heartwarming fairy tail with little violence and a tasteful love story. Not a lot of gut wrenching scenes or “Oh No’s” but enjoyable all the same.

Excerpt from Bound Across Time, by Annie R McEwen

You’re an idjit, Patrick. Death was always too good for you.

He should have gone slower with her, no doubt about it. He was a lout, a brute, to startle her so thoroughly, and that was never his intent. He could have—no, he should have—whispered, or moaned, or shimmered from a distance. Instead, he was hasty.

Hasty? He was a burning brand of desire. Who could blame him after two hundred-fifty…how long had it been? He’d lost count of the years.

That was still no reason to be an imbecilic knave, popping up like codswalloping Punch on a puppet stage while wearing the same filthy linen he was tipped overboard in when the Earl didn’t have the decency to give him a proper burial. At least the sea water had washed away the blood.

His honor, his common sense—perhaps they’d washed away as well. Within reach of this woman, he could remember nothing he’d learned of subtle romance and courtly manners. All he could think of was making her his, now until the end of time.

What an embarrassment he was, to his sainted mother, to his upbringing, to the gentleman he was reared to be. An embarrassment to every Irish bard who ever sang songs or wrote poems about women who were doves, and lilies, and other things he couldn’t remember.

He did remember that they were fragile and easily startled. Easily driven away.
Next time, I will be slow. I will slowly and gently explain things to her. Unusual things. Highly unusual, uncanny, frightening, nigh incomprehensible things.

Sure, now, Patrick, me boyo, that’ll be a stroll along the banks of the Shannon.

By the right hand of God, but she was beautiful. Slumbering on the stone floor, her skin smooth ivory but gilded, as though the sun had kissed her once and then fallen in love, unable to leave. She’d lost her cap, and her hair—rich, deep brown and burnished with red, like brandy—tumbled around her neck and shoulders. Her sun-brushed skin, high and perfect cheekbones, the delicate slant of her eyes, the plump swell of her breasts above the top edge of her bodice, the curves of the body he could imagine pressed to his own aching and lonely one…

Beauty itself, she was, not only of body but of mind. In the weeks before she’d seen him, he’d watched her exercise that beautiful mind among the slower thinkers of the Castle, who doubtless envied her. She was stubborn, spirited, and quick-witted—he liked that.
He crouched over her crumpled form, not touching, only taking in her scent. Rose attar and mint—he liked that, too.

The only thing he didn’t care for was the name she went by, See-see. What sort of name was that? It was something you called a canary. He would never call her that, not when the French name with which she’d been christened was just like her.

Céleste, meaning heavenly.

She was waking now. He rose and backed away. Time for him to depart, as he must, and breathe a prayer. Not for himself, there was no point to that. If God had ever listened to him, he wouldn’t be where he was, and he deserved no better. His prayer would be for her, the angel who defied or escaped God’s curse to light his endless night.

Come back, Céleste Gowdie. Please come back.

About the Author:

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Annie R McEwen is a career historian who’s lived in six countries, under every roof from a canvas tent to a Georgian Era manor house and driven herself to work in everything from a donkey cart to a vintage Peugeot. For her, it feels perfectly natural to create stories of desperate love and powerful secrets in faraway times and places.

Winner of the 2022 Page Turners Award, Genre (Romance) Category, Annie also garnered the First Place 2022 RTTA (Romance Through Ages Award from Romance Writers of America; Post-Victorian to WWI Category), the 2023 MAGGIE Award, and the 2023 Daphne du Maurier Award. Her Regency murder mystery “Death at Dunarven” appears in the 2024 Murder Most International Anthology.

Annie’s books are published by Harbor Lane Books (US), Bloodhound Books (UK), and The Wild Rose Press. When she’s not in her 1920s bungalow in Florida, Annie lives, writes, and explores castles in Wales.

Tweet:
She’s an American historian: rational, logical, sure that she’s found her dream job in a Welsh castle. The job comes with a dream man: clever, strong, fiercely attractive. What’s the catch? He’s a ghost. https://amzn.to/3uTAwNo
#paranormalromance #ghostromance #ghostlove #romance #witchcraft #timeslip #celticfolklore #Samhain #DayoftheDead #standingstones #magick #familysecrets #Wales #haunted #supernatural #series #welshmagick #Wicca #welshwitchcraft #Irishfolklore #hauntedcastle #castleghost

Tour Giveaway




3 comments:

  1. What a fascinating book! Great cover and excerpt. I'd love to read more.

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  2. I'm really excited to read Annie's book. I've read some of the reviews, on some other blogs on the book tour and they all enjoyed it.

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  3. Ghost romance is my absolute favourite!!!!!

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