Release: Year of the Scorpio

Book Title: Year of the Scorpio: Part One (Mafia Romance)

Author: Stacy Gail 

Genre: Contemporary Romance 

Release Date: October 9, 2016 

Hosted by: Book Enthusiast Promotions

***TRIGGER WARNING: This is a DARK mafia romance. In addition to several scenes with strong sexual content, there are also scenes involving violence, death, gun play, mention of sexual abuse, and adult language. Due to the nature of this book, it is intended for 18+ audiences only***

They call me Dash.

Sixteen years ago my brother and I were kidnapped. The Scorpeones believed our father, boss of the Vitaliev Bratva, could be pressured into relinquishing his hold on Chicago’s underworld.

They were dead wrong.

Ultimately the Scorpeones made the youngest of their family pay for their sins. I tried not to care. Marco Polo Scorpeone, the hostage whose life was forfeit if his family moved on the Vitalievs, was the enemy. Why should I care if he was tortured worse than a prisoner of war?

Except I did care.

For sixteen years I’ve cared, more than I can say.

They call me Scorpio.

There was no light in my world. Then I saw Dash smile.

No voice could pierce my darkness. Then I heard Dash speak.

I’ve killed to survive. Killed to please my handler. Hell, I’ve killed to please myself. Killing is what I do.

I know I’m not good enough for Dash, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she’s mine, from now until the end of time. But that time might be nearer than I think, because someone deadlier than me is closing in…

109,000 words

Author’s Note: This is the first half of a two-part story arc. YEAR OF THE SCORPIO: PART ONE ends on a cliffhanger, which will be concluded in YEAR OF THE SCORPIO: PART TWO. You have been warned.

“I’m pretty sure Chicago’s Future was dealt a mortal blow today. Tiffany Stoddard-Fanning is the center of the charity community in Chicago, and to say she was upset by being held hostage by a power-mad cop is putting it mildly. All she has to do is tell a few contributors that I’m a shady, drug-dealing Russian mobster like my father, and suddenly I’ve got zero donations coming in.” And it hurt. It was bad enough, thinking that this might be the end of my dream of making some kind of difference in the world, but saying it out loud crushed me.

That darkness in his eyes deepened. “Tell me how to fix it, and I’ll do it.”

“You can’t un-ring a bell, Polo.”

“So?”

“So, you can’t un-traumatize a snooty socialite, whose idea of hardship before today was having dinner without an onsite sommelier.”

“I could always ask her, politely of course, to keep her fucking yap shut.”

Politely. Uh-huh. I could imagine. “You’ve already saved me enough times in the past twenty-four hours.”

“There’s no cap on how many times I can save you.”

“That doesn’t seem fair. When will I ever get a chance to save you?”

“You saved me from tangling assholes with that sonofabitch Schott today, didn’t you? I’m not in jail now, and he’s not dead with his goddamn tongue ripped out of his lying mouth. All because,” he leaned deeper into my space, a move that somehow gobbled up every ounce of air in the room, “you kissed me.”

I could only pray the sudden heat in my face didn’t glow like a neon sign. “Hm.”

“The thing is,” he went on when I couldn’t come up with anything better than monosyllabic grunts, “by saving me, you landed yourself in hot water all over again.”

“I did?”

“Hell, yeah, you did. Boiling hot.”

“Funny, you’d think I would have noticed something like boiling hot water.” I swallowed, trying valiantly to ignore the fact that boiling hot was a fantastic description for what was going on in my panties at the moment. “Just how dangerous is this boiling hot water?”

“Normally I’d advise you to avoid it at all costs, for your own safety.”

“That sounds like good advice.”

“Yeah, but it’s like you said—you can’t un-ring a bell.”

My lips parted hungrily when his breath feathered across them. “So…what kind of advice do you have for me now?”

“Get used to the burn.”

This time it was his mouth that came to mine. At that first touch my knees nearly buckled, because I somehow wasn’t prepared for this. Our earlier kiss had been a rushed, hit-and-run kind of thing. A stolen kiss, really.

But this kiss…

This was another thing entirely.

His lips fused to mine with a heat that was staggering. I barely had time to marvel at how perfectly we fit together before the sweep of his tongue against the inside of my lower lip and the increasing pressure against my lips opened my mouth to him.

The floor dropped from under my feet as his tongue invaded, and I instinctively wrapped my arms around his shoulders so I wouldn’t fall. That was how powerful his kiss was. It was the kind that knocked a woman off her feet. The kind that was better than any fantasy. The kind that changed lives, worlds, universes.

The kind that nearly stopped my heart.

His tongue dueled and danced with mine, wet, deep and bold. That was when I absolutely knew that for the rest of my life, I would never have a kiss more perfect than Polo’s.

“Dasha.” My name was caught by my mouth, no louder than a breath. I even thought I had imagined it as he adjusted the angle of his lips over mine before he dived deeper, his hand coming to once again cradle the back of my head. For a second I feared he was going to rip me away like he did before, but then he whispered my name once more into my mouth, while still kissing me, and it was so sexy my thighs began to shake.

If this was how I reacted to his kiss, complete with a hot surge of wetness in the cleft between my legs and seriously trembling thighs, I’d probably dissolve into a puddle if he ever took me to bed.

 

A competitive figure skater from the age of eight, Stacy Gail wrote stories between events to pass the time. By fourteen, she told her parents she was either going to be a skating coach who was also a romance writer, or a romance writer who was also a skating pro. Now with a day job of playing on the ice with her students, and writing everything from PNR and cyberpunk to contemporary romance at night, both dreams have come true, publishing both as an indie author and with Harlequin's Carina Press.

 

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