Bibliophile Mystery: Excerpt and Giveaway for What Love Is by Emma South

Publication date: April 29th 2016

Genres: New Adult, Romance, Suspense

Amazon / Barnes & Noble

In this epic romance collection that spans eighteen years, the lives of six people will be changed forever.

Ask a million people what love is, and you’ll get a million different answers. None of them are wrong.

What makes a Marine take a bullet for a Hollywood starlet?

What makes a singer with a deep-seated hatred for the wealthy find herself smiling for the first time with a billionaire?

What makes a small-town princess defy death to be reunited with her small-town prince?

The answer is love.

I hadn’t been held quite like this ever before, so tenderly yet with an unmistakable undercurrent of lust. I’d had embraces in the past, in another lifetime, that meant all kinds of things. Celebrations, commiserations, I-was-just-jokings, they’d provided so much I didn’t even realize until they were gone.

One minute they were there and then all of a sudden there were no more shoulders to cry on. The shoulder that I should have been able to turn to was busy with other things, things that weren’t me, and that had maybe done the most damage of all. That had hurt a lot.

“Are you going to hurt me too?” I whispered without even consciously willing it, so quietly that I didn’t think Jeremy would hear, but he did.

Jeremy stopped moving and I could feel him looking down at me.

“No. Bea, look at me,” he said.

Jeremy let go with one hand and I felt his finger lightly pushing my chin until I opened my eyes and gazed up at him. Jeremy’s brow furrowed and he shook his head gently.

“No,” he repeated.

I lost myself in his eyes for a second and then raised myself up on the tips of my toes to get closer to him. Jeremy lowered his head and our lips met for the second time in as many days, a much slower kiss that soon had me as oblivious to the outside world as I had been while dancing just a few moments ago.

The song faded away and our lips parted as I heard the sound of a couple people clapping. Our waitress was standing next to the young man who had been moving tables earlier and an older man, the owner perhaps. They were all clapping politely, but only our waitress had a truly dreamy look in her eye.

When we had been interrupted the previous day I had been anxious to get some distance between the two of us as quickly as possible. I didn’t feel that now, I didn’t want to be apart from him even a single inch.

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I'm in my thirties and living in New Zealand. About 3 years ago I lost somebody very close to me. I was lucky in a way, I was given enough time to make a promise. My promise was that I would never forget our young and innocent love, and it's a promise I intend to keep.

My writing is a way to help me keep that promise. I've always enjoyed writing but was forced into being 'prudent' and giving myself over to soul-crushing office work for the sake of a steady salary. Recent events forced me to re-evaluate my priorities and I decided to take a chance. I like to put little pieces of 'us' into my writing, from funny conversations we had, to apocalyptic arguments, to that special feeling you get when you hop into bed fully aware that your feet are freezing but your partner doesn't kick you away.

Even though these things are set in fictional worlds and attached to fictional characters, in a way it feels like I'm doing something that will make our love live forever. If somebody reads one of my stories and likes a joke or sheds a tear, then our love has lived on, and I thank any readers I might have for that.

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