Close your eyes for a moment and picture this.
A gorgeous redhead walks into a bar.
No, wait, a wedding reception.
A gorgeous redhead walks into a wedding reception. Poised, polished and flawless - on the outside.
He's tall, dark, and handsome, exactly like a fairytale prince and he won't take no for an answer as he leads her to the dance floor.

But this will be no ordinary dance and theirs is no ordinary story. What begins as rhythmic steps on a dance floor fluidly and beautifully becomes the rhythm of two hearts meant to beat as one.

Until the music stops.

In a moment everything she's put behind her comes crashing down, threatening to destroy what his love has helped repair and rebuild.
Life throws punches and it hits hard when you least expect it.
What they learn is that sometimes, in order to be truly whole, you have to first be shattered to your very core.

She hates me.
I’m in love with her.
Her life is a masquerade.
Mine is cloaked in secrets.
She thinks I can’t see her.
But she’s the only thing I can see.
She thinks we have nothing in common.
We have everything in common.
And I’m done being patient.
I'm determined.
She's stubborn.
You think you know us.
You don't.
The things you know about us are only Skin Deep.

2018 Finalist IAN Book of the Year Awards for Historical Fiction and a Bronze Medal Winner for Historical Romance 2016 Readers' Favorite Book Awards

Everyone loves a good love story. The stories that make you feel warm all over. The kind that leaves you the slightest bit envious because the story belongs to someone else and not you. The stories that make your heart race and on the edge of pain and pleasure. Pain because your heart hurts and pleasure because your heart hurts. An unlikely combination, yet, that’s the stuff good love stories are made of.

Ours could have been like that. We could have made a beautiful love story.
But when he was ready for that epic love story, I was afraid to fall in love, too hurt by my past to trust anyone. Then, when I was ready for the epic love story, he was gone.
And I was alone.
And the only thing I got was the pain.
It was time I told him the things that were in my heart but too afraid to say out loud.

I wrote the letter I needed to write and prayed it wasn't too late.

Dear Charlie,

You were right. I was wrong. I've never been more wrong in my life.
There - I said it.
I’ll say it a million times if you just come back to me.
Come back to me. Please!

I was so wrong. I do love you.

​

Sophie

Award winning author, Pamela Sparkman's fantasy novel is tantalizingly wicked, drawing the reader into a world of forbidden love where nothing is quite what it seems.

Lord Lochlan was cursed in the womb, condemned by the perceived crimes of his parents.

On the thirteenth year of his birth, the red glow of the moon washed over land and sea like a faded bloody stain. A constant reminder of the curse that marked him before he was born. Every night he gazed at it like he was lured and haunted by it. It followed him, it beseeched him. It called out to him. Just once he wanted to see the moon glow as everyone else saw it. Bright and illuminating. But he knew that would never be possible.

The all too familiar feeling of despair suffocated him, like long gangling fingers squeezing his neck, cutting off his air. He fell to his knees and begged for the sky to fall on him. He had suffered long and tirelessly and he was desperate for it to end. And yet, he fought to breathe. He fought to stand back on his feet. Because fighting back was as instinctual to him as breathing. He had come too far to let his loneliness and despair get the best of him now. He was battle worn and weary, but he still had a reason to live.

Or so he hoped.

He stood back on his feet and he fought against the doom that hovered over him since the day he was born and he stared up into the darkened sky.

At the moon that shines red only for him.

I should have stayed away from him. But I couldn't.
HE was my love...my life. And he just might kill me.
I suppose that means...he may also be my end.

“I love the peculiar silence of shadows. They exist, but leave no mark.”

Zeph had been a child, thrust into a war that wasn’t his. When he was older, he discovered he had landed on the wrong side of everything.

He’d been fighting for sweet revenge, because of lies he’d believed—and those lies proved to be his ruin. Falling into despair, Zeph decides living is too painful. So, he writes his final act with poison and chooses to end his story.

But Fate has other plans for Zeph and when he finds himself in the hands of his enemies, he has to decide: Does he want to live? Or does he want to die?

Or maybe that choice is no longer his to make.

Ruled by shadows and armed with secrets he never intended to share, Zeph will be put through his toughest battle yet: the war within himself.

“He isn’t a lost cause. He’s just—lost.”

That’s what Arwyn believes. She sees the monster he has become, but what she also sees is someone worth fighting for. Armed with secrets of her own, she’s determined to help Zeph fight his demons, because there was more on the line than Zeph’s soul. So much more.

Revenge may be sweet. But redemption is sweeter. The question is, can Zeph find the boy he used to be, or will he always believe that no one could ever love—a monster like him.

“You are everything good. And I am everything children are afraid of.”

This is book 2 in the Heart of Darkness Duology and is recommended the reader begin with book 1, The Moon Shines Red.