LOVESICK TITANS by Amanda Meuwissen

LOVESICK TITANS
by Amanda Meuwissen

Not even a Titan can always stand up to a God.

Malcom Cho is in over his head, wrapped up in a love affair with his superhero nemesis Zeus, who most people in Olympus City only know as Detective Danny Grant.

Lovesick Titans begins where Lovesick Gods left off, after a heist gone wrong that ended with a museum guard dead and Mal and Danny beaten and exhausted from their fight with the new threat in town, Cassidy Ludgate—Hades.

Unaware that Ludgate’s true motivation is revenge for the death of his father at Zeus’s hands, Mal wants only to keep Danny close, while Danny races to solve the cases surrounding Ludgate to stop him from whatever he has planned for them next.

What Mal doesn’t know is that Danny didn’t pursue him with the purest of intentions but sought to break his heart in retaliation for not being there when he needed him in the fight against Thanatos. Even though Danny no longer seeks that end, the lies between them loom like a shadow about to descend upon them both.

And Hades has only begun to toy with them…

EXCERPT
Danny let Mal hold his hand in place on his arm, while his other hand strayed, drifting down to Mal’s hip and resting at the edge of one of his larger scars. Mal had many, from years of abuse and a hard way of living. Normally, when Danny touched one, he pushed on with confidence, but tonight, the raised scar tissue made him snap to his senses like he’d been in a trance.

“Sorry,” he said and pulled both hands away.

But Mal reached for them, hung onto them, and brought Danny’s hands back to his skin. “It’s okay. Broken bottle one night when Dad got drunk. Now I get to add another knife wound to the collection.” Mal smirked as he nodded at his bandaged arm.

Danny smiled with him, but it was a sad, shattered expression. He teased the tips of his fingers over the scar tissue. “Are all these really from…” With a startle, he tried to pull away again as if he’d said something he shouldn’t.

“My father?” Mal said, refusing to let him go. “Not all. Most though. Some are from prison. Some dumb mistakes. Fights like tonight. But most…yeah, they’re his.”

Taking Danny’s hand still resting on his hip, Mal drew it upwards, guiding it across his bare chest until he reached his shoulder and the faint circular scar tissue near his clavicle.

“Freezer burn. From his powers. Because I broke my leg when I was eight and I cried. He wanted to teach me a lesson. Teach me how to keep pain in and never let anyone see it. So he held the tip of a frozen finger there until it burned.”

Danny’s brow furrowed with indignant anger.

Mal trailed the hand lower to a particularly bad scar across his stomach—his worst and the one he remembered the clearest. “First knife wound. Caught me with a boy in my room. Would have killed him if I hadn’t stood in the way. I took the brunt of it. Let him run off. Never brought a boy home again, not ‘til Dad was gone. Brought a couple girls home,” he shrugged.

“Girls?” Danny asked with a touch of humored skepticism bleeding through his concern. He splayed his hand flat against Mal’s stomach, warm and intimate in his touch.

“Occasionally. Not as often.”

Danny nodded but his smile quickly faded, his eyes trained on the scar and the affectionate way he traced it with his fingers. “Sometimes…I think my dad hates me because…” he trailed and the motion of his hand slowed. “There’s something I never told you. About the night I killed Thanatos.”

The smile dropped from Mal’s lips as well as he waited for Danny to continue.

“He killed my mom.”

~Follow the rest of the tour

>AN INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA
-What inspired you to become a writer?

I don’t think I could pinpoint the moment I realized I wanted to create my own worlds, other than just always loving fiction and make-believe as a child, playing on my own, loving books and movies and video games, and then at a very young age, starting to imagine my own stories and work on writing them down.

However, an incident in high school where I made a lasting impact on a reader who was going through troubled times was what prompted me to want to be an author for more than just a hobby. I knew then that I wanted to pour all my focus into writing, and I’ve never regretted it.

-If you could visit your book’s world for a day, what one thing would you do?

In the universe of the Lovesick series, everyone has a connecting element which displays itself through their eye color – fire is red, yellow is lightning, etc. And while most people manifest minor benefits from their element – fire people maybe being able to handle extreme heat better than others, for example – some display stronger fantastical abilities like my two main protagonists.

So, were I to suddenly find myself in their world, I’d want to see if that changed me – are my eyes different, and if they are and I’m connected to an element, which one and what can I do with that? I’d definitely want to experiment.

Personally, I’ve always thought of myself as a fire person, hence those example.

-It’s two in the morning. What does your protagonist reveal in confidence? (Don’t worry, we won’t tell.)

Mal would admit that why yes, he IS a huge dork, but it’s part of his charm, since he played video games when he was younger as often as possible.

Danny would admit that he wants a family someday, even if he hasn’t been in a place in his life lately where that would be a good idea. Whether adoption or something else, he’s always wanted to be a father.

-Which of your characters would you go out for drinks with?

Dom. Me and my fellow fire chick would have a blast together. She drinks crap beer though, so I’d have to show her what good beer tastes like. As long as I’m buying, she’d listen, and by the end, we’d be best friends – though the evening would likely end with a bar fight WE’D start.

-You’re in a tavern, and a dwarf challenges you to a duel. What do you do?

Depends on my persona, but if it’s my current Dungeons & Dragons character, Wyn, a half-elf ranger who’s a thief, I’d assume the dwarf is drunk, smooth talk them into a sense of false security, pick their pocket, and slip away before they even realized they no longer had the sword they’d used to challenge me.

-Is there a genre you could never write? Which and why?

Historical fiction isn’t really my bag, largely because there are many time periods I’m not a fan of, all the research that would be involved, and how I tend to focus more on either fantastical settings, futuristic sci-fi, or just straight up modern.

But then I used to say I’d never write contemporary romance without some sort of fantasy or sci-fi element, and I’ve been proven wrong on that recently as my upcoming release next March is exactly that – A Model Escort – so any genre is possible someday.

ABOUT AMANDA

Amanda Meuwissen has been writing and posting online for many years, including maintaining the website and blog for the software company Outsell. She is an avid writer and consumer of fiction through film, prose, and video games, and is the author of the paranormal romance trilogy The Incubus Saga and young adult novel Life as a Teenage Vampire. Amanda lives in Minneapolis, MN, with her husband, John, and their two cats.

Find her online:

–Amazon Author Page
–website
–Tumblr
–Goodreads
–Facebook
–Twitter

GIVEAWAY

Amanda Meuwissen will be awarding a $25 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.