Book Spotlight: Debt by Rachel Dunning

Today the spotlight is on the coming New Adult Romance titled the Debt by Rachel Dunning 😀

Check out the blurb and the cover of this book – cause it honestly sounds amazing and a little sneak peak into this intriguing New Adult Romance 😀

Enjoy your visit, lovelies ❤

book-cover-debt-rachel-dunning

The Debt Collector

I pay my debts, and I expect others to.

I was raised in the slums of London, I knew nothing of privilege. My father was murdered when I was seventeen. Morty figured my father’s passing meant I would automatically take on dad’s debts. I refused.

And I paid for that refusal.

So did my sister.

So now I fight. All I know how to do is fight. The best cash is in the states, so that’s where I am now. A big fish called Vito came along offering me a “favor” when I arrived.

Another debt.

I paid for that one too.

I knew Kyla Hensley would be trouble when I met her. But I wanted her. I could see through the falsehood of her wannabe-slutty clothes and her sexy legs. So I chased her.

Besides, trouble is my middle name.

Kyla Hensley

I was brought up in privilege, but I lacked everything else. My father is a business tycoon who buys and sells and doesn’t care who gets rolled over in the process.

I never knew my mother, and all I have of her is a photo with a note scrawled on the back in French saying “I’m sorry.” The only Female Figure I had growing up is my dad’s wife who is a bleach blond with seven boob jobs. We never bonded.

I drink. I party. I meet guys.

But I wasn’t always like that.

I’ve had a string of lovers in the last few years, the worst and most recent of which was Vince Somerset. My best friend Vera was dating a guy called Rory Cansoom who is the opposite of Vince in so many ways, and yet so the same.

She and I hit the road for the summer, getting away from the two college psychos and just trying to have some fun.

But there’s a funny thing about trouble, the more you run from it, the more it finds you.

Which is when I met the Debt Collector.

It was only supposed to be sex. He made that clear. I made that clear.

That’s all it was supposed to be.

I never expected to fall in love. I never expected to fall so deeply, madly, uncomfortably in love with a man who is wrong, so wrong for me.

And yet…so unbelievably right.

Content Warning

Not intended for readers under the age of seventeen.

Excerpt

“Tell me for real,” I say. “Tell me what I didn’t guess about you.”

Logan doesn’t answer, and already I’m regretting the question. I know something hurt him, but who am I to ask him about it so soon? I’m breaking my rule, I want to know him, I want to know everything about him.

He shifts his arm so that my head is no longer resting on it, leans forward.

I did overstep it, but I don’t care. Maybe this is the last time I’ll ever see him again, and I want to get everything I can out of it, not only the sex I’ll demand later.

He looks down at his feet, then at me.

He inhales a deep breath, and then he says something to me that will forever change the way I think about the world. He tells me a story that puts my own life in perspective, and makes me question what I’ve held dear, and what’s really important in life.

He tells me about how he lost his father. And his mother.

And why he fights.

And why he continues to fight. And what he really sees when he’s in that cage, the hate, the fury, the pain.

By the end of it all, my world is shattered, the floor is shaking, I have no stability.

By the end of it, I know one thing, and I know it to my core, my very fiber. And I don’t care if it’s too soon, I believe in intuition, I believe in it more now than ever.

The thing I know is this:

I love this man. I love him irrevocably. I love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone.

And I know I will lose him.

I know it. More intuition.

But I love his very soul.

Guest Post

How “Debt” Came About

As with all stories I write, I had no idea when I started it what was going to happen in it.

I find romance incredibly easy to write. Not because romance is simple, but because I’ve written so much of it. After ten or more books you start to get a feel for what people like and what they don’t, what works and what doesn’t.

I tried writing a YA story the other day. I failed completely. I haven’t written enough YA, and I also haven’t read enough YA.

I’ve been in love with romance since I was a kid. My sister raised me on soap operas and so my stories tend to get pretty dramatic. I was hooked on shows like Loving by the time I was six.

Characters are more important in romance than plot. Mystery is different. In Mystery, plot is more important. These are “general” rules which can of course be broken.

The romance plot has small variations to it. But romance readers (generally speaking) demand a few simple things in their stories:

Him and Her
Happily Ever After
A man they can fall in love with
A girl they can respect and want to be like

“Modern” romance tries to break these rules, but they are actually set in stone. Violate any of the above and you’re in for trouble. New writers should never try and violate the generally accepted rules for a genre. Leave that to the best sellers. But even those guys have a problem.

So the romance plot, simply stated is:

Guy meets girl
They fall in love
Some major catastrophe gets in the way of their love
Guy gets girl

If “Guy doesn’t get Girl” you are into the genre of Drama. Yes, it can be a dramatic romance, but now we’re into sub-genres. And it would lean more in the direction of Drama than Romance.

So when I wrote “Debt” I focused on the characters. I wanted to create the best characters I’ve ever put on paper. Plotting has never been difficult for me, but characters have been. Plots are easy. You get some people together, and then you put them in trouble. But it’s characters that people fall in love with, not plot.

So, in Debt, I put more attention on characters than I have ever before in a book of mine.

Usually I just let the story roll. In this book, I did that to a point, but as soon as the characters started getting into shenanigans that made me dislike them, I fixed those points up and got them back on track.

It’s the endless controversy. Characters or plot.

In my books, it’s always characters. Always. It’s what I focus on the most, sticking within the framework of the generally accepted rules for romance.

And in Debt, I did that more than I ever have before.

Rachel Dunning hit the scene in August 2013 and is the author of the highly praised Naive Mistakes Series, Truthful Lies Trilogy, Johnny Series and the paranormal romance series, Mind Games.

A prolific writer, she sticks to stories where Alpha Males aren’t pricks and where women have guts.

She’s lived on two different continents, speaks three different languages, and met the love of her life on the internet. In other words, romance is in her blood.