Today I have Milly Taiden
as my guest!!
Milly
Taiden was born in the prettiest part of the Caribbean
known as the Dominican Republic. She grew up between New York, Florida and
Massachusetts. Currently, she resides in New York City with her husband, bossy
young son and their little dog Speedy.
She
began writing when she learned to put words together and her first book
consisted of two homeless dogs living in a park for her second grade English
class. She didn’t win a prize, but she acquired a love for writing that never
went away.
When
she’s not working full-time, texting with her best friend Heidi in England,
chastising her son for pulling the dog’s ears, shopping with her sister Jewel
or watching scary movies with her husband, she can be found writing on her
laptop. She’s addicted to shoes, chocolate, Dunkin Donuts coffee and all Jimmy
Thomas covers.
A
major reader when she can get her hands on a good book, she loves reading all
Mina Carter, Cynthia Eden, Cynthia Sax, Dianne Duvall and Laurann Dohner among
others.
Milly loves this time of year,
especially scary movies. Here’s what she had to say about them…
Halloween is a
wonderful time for me. I love anything and everything that has to do with
horror and being scared. I’m such a fan that I will be under blankets watching
intently, and listening to the horrific sounds of someone being scared to
death. I love it!! My 5 favorite scary movies for Halloween are the following:
Halloween (The
original). There’s something about watching the original Michael Meyer make
Jamie Lee Curtis run for her life. It’s awesome! Not to mention that whole
walking slowly and taking his time but still catching you still creeps me the
hell out!
An American
Haunting. Wow. That movie scares the crumbs out of me each time I watch it.
That little girl getting beat up over and over again. You have no clue what the
heck is going on until you get to the end. And then you want to just cry for
her missing innocence. What a movie.
The Howling.
Remember them? How could I not have wolves as one of my favorite movies? The
truth is I love all the Howling movies. Those werewolves and all their sick needs
to kill and destroy. I know I have issues because I liked the first so much I
had to see all the others.
The Amityville
Horror. Another classic. That movie just kicks ass. That family moved to that
house and had no idea of the crazy things that their dream home was going to
give them. I still can’t go to houses that look like that without feeling all
kinds of scared.
Stephen King’s Rose
Red. This movie just ROCKS! If you have not seen it, you are missing you. Rose
red is the story of a house that’s alive. And you would not believe the kind of
stuff that goes on in there when a group of people go to spend the weekend.
This is THE original creepy movie. It feeds on all the suspense and scaring a
person with taunts and hints. It truly pulls you in and then spits you out. You
can’t watch it and not be worried about going to the bathroom alone afterwards.
LOL.
Thank you for
having me in your blog Nicole! I’ve had a lot of fun talking about Halloween
Movies I love to watch.
Not so fast, Milly. Tell us about your book Sharp
Change! I absolutely love the cover and am dying to hear more. Please stay and
tell us more…
Only
the hottest sex can cool a wolf in heat...
After her sister is bitten by a werewolf, geneticist Sophia Reece begins
researching shape-shifters and isolates a gene she calls Furry Beast—FB for short.
But in her excitement over her discovery—dancing in the lab is never a good
idea—she has a teeny little accident with the samples, one canine, one feline,
and winds up landing on the syringes, pointy side up.
Werewolf Chase is head over heels in lust with Sophia. He can’t stop thinking
about the human’s sexy body or how badly he wants to get her naked. But she
acts as if he has fleas. So why, all of a sudden, does she stare at him like a
wolf in heat? And what smells like cat?
When she experiences her first mating heat, Sophia isn’t prepared for the new
feelings she’s experiencing, and her secret desire for Chase refuses to remain
under wraps. For Chase, this is his wildest fantasy come true—to finally get
his hands on the curvy, caramel-skinned Latina. But when some serious predators
come sniffing around her research, Sophia will have to find out what she’s
really made of, and Chase will have to decide if he’s man—or wolf—enough to
make things permanent...
Excerpt
Holy hell!
She’d done it.
Sophia stared at the computer screen and couldn’t believe her eyes. Number and
letter sequences in front of her drove her excitement. A slow sliver of fear
raced up her spine when she thought of what could happen if the information got
into the wrong hands, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from smiling ear to ear.
She’d finally singled out the particular chromosome in the DNA strand that made
shape-shifters shift. This little baby was the hottest ticket in Shifterville.
It’s what bonded with the rest of a person’s DNA and created the furry beast
that lived inside them.
If it were a person she’d kiss it, hug it, probably spank it for being bad and
making it so hard for her to find it. She grinned; she couldn’t help herself.
Julia would be able to have a choice in life now after being attacked by a
rogue werewolf the previous year.
The one positive outcome was that her sister had met River, the beta of his
pack and her current husband. Talk about love at first bark. His animal had
taken one look at her sister and had literally rolled over for her to pet his
tummy. It was sweet and kind of creepy, considering how damn big he was in his
wolf form.
River was a real nice guy too, but nothing beat freedom of choice in Sophia’s
mind. He loved her sister and treated her better than any other man she’d ever
been with, not to mention the man was absolutely gorgeous. Then there was his
brother, the pack alpha.
Thoughts of Chase, the alpha of the Black Meadows pack, made her heart torpedo
in her chest and rockets go off in her stomach. The better-than-a-sundae,
delicious-looking man, with golden brown skin and enough muscles to share with
his friends, turned her into a puddle of goo.
The man had so much sex appeal her girl parts were ready to lift a white flag
in surrender just by looking at him. Even thinking of him made her tongue wag.
Seeing him was like having your favorite desert and knowing you couldn’t eat
it.
She was very aware of her physical appearance whenever he came around her. She
was short, fat, and shy, and now that she’d hit thirty-two, she also felt old.
She had long ago given up on the idea of finding Mr. Right and had started
focusing on Mr. Right Now. Unfortunately, that hadn’t worked out so well
either. She ended up dating boring, geeky people, and sex tended to be nothing
to write home about.
Shit, sex tended to be nothing she’d want to try again with any of those guys,
having been responsible for her own orgasms for as long as she could remember.
Heat crawled across her skin when she thought of the last guy she’d been with,
Jake the Snake, before she’d moved to town. He was the reason she’d ended up
looking for a new job.
He’d stolen her research and tried to pass it off as his own. Luckily, she
always backed up her work with multiple copies and had months of data to prove
the work was hers.
She blinked and squinted tired eyes, then rubbed cold fingers under her rimless
glasses, drawing in a deep breath. A burst of energy rushed through her blood
when she thought of what she’d just accomplished. Exhilaration made up for the
lack of sleep. She’d been burning the candle at both ends working and doing her
own private research.
She swatted away the guilt that tapped her shoulder over using the lab
resources for her own experiment. Too much depended on the results of her first
test to worry about being found out. And if she was—oh well, they did encourage
“groundbreaking” and “outside the box” research.
Her sister Julia would have kittens if she knew. Or should she say puppies, now
that Julia was a wolf shifter? The woman had been a straight pain before, but
now that she had a dramatic animal inside, she’d taken theatrics to a whole new
level. Her tears could appear and disappear faster than Superman at the scene
of a crime.
As the older sister, Julia always wanted to take care of Sophia, so two years
ago Julia had packed up her life and moved with Sophia to the town of Black
Meadows.
Black Meadows was by no means a small town, but with only the research facility
and a car plant, it was easy to see people as either scientists or engineers.
Then there were the blue-collar plant workers and the small-business owners.
Looking through the microscope at the samples of the particularly special FB
chromosome, Sophia had to smile. Yes, she had called the chromosome Furry
Beast. It was her special way of keeping herself from losing her mind after
working on this for what felt like forever.
Finally she’d pulled a sample of DNA from both sets of shifters and created a
pure chromosome strand of cat and wolf. A slow smile slid across her face. She
could swear she heard birds chirping and a Hallelujah Chorus above her head
while she stared through the small eyepiece of her microscope.
“Goddamn, I fucking rock!” Laughter and excitement unlike any she’d ever
experienced, not including meeting man-candy Chase, popped and fizzled through
her until she was bouncing on her stool, grinning like a fool.
Now that she thought of man-candy Chase, her brain did the usual X-rated
stripping of those rock-hard limbs. Mmm, man-candy Chase… He was her biggest
temptation. If she had an affliction it was called Furry Beast Alpha, or FBA
for short.
Side effects included, but were not limited to: making a woman stop, stare, and
drool on the spot; panties somehow finding themselves off and thrown his way;
and finally, if said subject were to smile, blacking out from sudden
excitement.
She was still unable to figure out how one minute he could be smiling at her,
and the next she would be sitting down on a chair counting fuzzy bunnies
running across her field of vision.
Thank goodness she still hadn’t gone as far as the panty throwing, but she was
tempted…God, she was tempted. Every single time she got near him, her hands
itched to tear off the little slip of lace, wave her arm in the air, and yell
“pick me, pick me!”
She giggled and bounced in her seat, causing her short hair to tickle the nape
of her neck. Looking to celebrate, she turned on the radio at her desk to some
dance mix. She stood up and stretched, lifting her white T-shirt in the process
and showing her softly rounded belly. All alone in the lab, she didn’t care if
she showed some skin.
Her full breasts strained against the cotton while her stonewashed jeans clung
lovingly to her generous hips. When she bent down to stretch her back, the move
made her jeans ride low, and cold air caressed her lower back enough to show
off the one thing she had ever done to be wild—a tattoo of a pink and purple
fairy on her upper right cheek. Thankfully, there was no one around to see
that.
She started singing along completely off-key to some song that talked about
being sexy and knowing it. Snorting to herself, she knew even singing it was a
lie. There were no feelings of sexiness anywhere in her—they only happened when
FBA was around.
She pulled out two syringes, filled each with both werecat and werewolf
chromosome, and laid them on the small collection tube tray. She sang louder as
she moved. It wasn’t like there was anyone around to hear her sad attempt at
singing.
She needed to find her special vials so she wouldn’t confuse these specimens
with any of her other samples. She put away the older mixed strands she wasn’t
actively using in the cold storage only she had access to.
Because she was the head of the genetics department, she was allowed her own
work space. It also meant she got a big lab to use for her research. Other than
equipment and coded papers, the place was kept immaculate. Large and small
machines were strategically placed to make the move of samples from one to the
other quick and efficient, along with multiple computers and printers.
The lab was also really cold. Goose bumps broke on her caramel skin as she
thought of the heater sitting by her desk. Outside the weather was beautiful,
but an iceberg lived inside the building.
She knew complaining would do nothing, since the best way to keep instruments
from growing bacteria was to keep them cold. She would have to go to her
office, which was located right next door, to write her notes before she left,
so at least there she’d be warm.
Bopping to the music, she was careful of the extension cable that crossed the
floor. She’d used all the electrical plugs by her computer, so she’d run an
extension cord to power the amplification machine.
Holding her precious tray of sharps, she walked toward her other metal table to
get to her special colored vials.
Shaking her hips, she lifted one sneaker over the white cord and then the
other. The cord caught on her right foot.
What came next she would later tell herself was due to her own stupidity at
trying to sing, dance, and walk when she was not as coordinated as she liked to
think.
Falling forward in a sickening loss off balance, she saw the floor rush up to
meet her face. Instinctively she let go of the tray to stick her hands out and
break her fall. Everything around her narrowed to just the sound of her
breathing. Distantly, she heard the metal tray clatter across the concrete
floor, and she landed on top of it.
Something stabbed her between her breasts.
She winced and picked herself up off the floor. The damn underwire in her bra,
it always tended to break through the casing. She wouldn’t have bothered with
them if they didn’t make her breasts look so lingerie-catalog good.
“Ouch, dammit!” Looking down at the tray, she saw that the sharps were not on
the floor. Panic seized her, and sharp blades of terror stabbed her gut while
she scanned the ground. A pinching sensation in her chest drew her attention to
where the two long sharps dangled from the area between her breasts.
Icy fear numbed her brain and lodged in her throat, making it impossible for
her to breathe. Frantic, she pulled the two long needles out carefully and
examined the amount in each.
There was a minute amount missing from each of them.
A panicked scream wrenched out of her. Her first thought was to take a blood
sample and check for any alterations in her DNA. After a second thought and
some frenzied breathing, she decided a few days of wait were probably best. No
notable change would show up straight away if there was a delayed reaction. If
there had been any life altering changes to her DNA, she would see it for sure
in a few days.
Tears of frustration filled her eyes. Had she destroyed all her hard work with
a stupid accident? She’d have to wait until Monday when she returned to the lab
to run tests, unless there were any strange occurrences sooner.
Her stomach churned at the thought of her foolishness, but there was not much
she could do other than wait and see. She stood, carefully grabbed the two
vials with shaky hands, and stored her previously untainted samples.
She secured her storage freezer with her fingerprint and voice, which turned on
the double-locked safe. There was no way in hell she was going to take any
chances with what was in there. It was a good thing the freezer was made of the
thickest metal out there and resembled a bank vault.
She headed for her office. Her previous happiness turned into a desolate sense
of impending doom when she thought of the notes she would have to write to
detail the calamity from that night. Then she would head home for a nice long
soak and finally catch up on much needed sleep. She was going to get the rest
she’d denied herself for the past long months.
