It’s always a red letter day when one of my dear friends releases a new book for me to enjoy, but when it’s a new instalment of the fabulous Lancaster’s Luck series OOH BOY!!
Peeps, this is SO GOOD.
Title: The God’s Eye
Author: Anna Butler
Series: Lancaster’s Luck
Necessary to read previous 2 books? Best read in sequence
Wordcount: c110,000
Category: Steampunk adventure | M/M romance.
eBook Publication Date: 21 January 2020
Publisher: Glass Hat Press © 2020
Editors: Desi Chapman (Blue Ink Editing)
Megan Reddaway
Cover Artist: Reese Dante
Internal Art: Margaret Warner
Blurb:
Rafe Lancaster is reluctantly settling into his role as the First Heir of House Stravaigor. Trapped by his father’s illness and his new responsibilities, Rafe can’t go with lover Ned Winter to Aegypt for the 1902/03 archaeological digging season. Rafe’s unease at being left behind intensifies when Ned’s fascination with the strange Antikythera mechanism and its intriguing link to the Aegyptian god Thoth has Ned heading south to the remote, unexplored highlands of Abyssinia and the course of the Blue Nile.
Searching for Thoth’s deadly secrets, Ned is out of contact and far from help. When he doesn’t return at Christmas as he promised, everything points to trouble. Rafe is left with a stark choice – abandon his dying father or risk never seeing Ned again.
About The Series
The Lancaster’s Luck series – which is best read in sequence – charts the adventures of Rafe Lancaster, ex-aeronaut and pilot in Her Britannic Majesty’s Aero Corps. After being shot down and injured in action during the Boer War in 1899, Rafe’s unable to continue as a fighter pilot.
The Gilded Scarab
Returning to London, hard up and looking for a new career, Rafe buys a coffeehouse close to the Britannic Imperium Museum in Bloomsbury where he meets love of his life, archaeologist and First Heir House Gallowglass, Ned Winter.
The Gilded Scarab was a finalist in the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Awards, and nominated for the Independent Publishers Book Awards in 2015.
The Jackal’s House
Ned’s excavation at Abydos, Aegypt, faces disruptive tricks and pranks that develop into a real threat to their lives, all seeming orchestrated by the god Anubis. When the life of Ned’s young son is on the line, Rafe carries out a daring rescue attempt and learns the shocking truth about his own heritage.
The Jackal’s House won joint first place for Best Gay Historical Romance in the 2018/19 Rainbow Awards, and joint third place for Best Gay Book.
GIVEAWAY
Between 20 January and 07 February, enter this Rafflecoptor for the chance of a first prize $20 (or equivalent) Amazon gift card, or the second prize of an ecopy of The Gilded Scarab
Rafflecoptor code: Click here to enter the competition
EXCERPT [NSFW}
The rhythm was always there, underlying everything.
Our lives for the last few days had been all chaos and confusion—anarchic, even—but at that time and in that place, in a quiet private room, with the muted sounds of a Cairo night drifting in past the half-drawn curtains, we found our peace again. It was there in every touch, every movement, every kiss, every gasp and low moan, every hitched breath and soft-voiced word. With us through entangled limbs, fingers laced together or smoothing heated skin; through kisses flaming like comets across a winter sky; shaking with us through every shattering moment.
Harmony and empathy. Two of the pillars holding up my world.
I never used to believe in love. Not before Ned. He did change me, I can’t deny it. But for the better, I believe. Thanks to him, I felt love then.
And now. And always.
It was hard to breathe. I let my fingers move in the cool, fine linen sheets to ground myself, remind me who I was and where, and raised myself to stare down at Ned’s head, bright gold in the lamplight. He looked back up at me, greeny-hazel eyes warm, expression soft, smiling around the tip of my cock, teasing me with his tongue. First with a languorous sweetness, his tongue flickering so softly, so gently, I was straining to feel it. Then, without warning, he changed the entire cadence. The unhurried touch of his lips became a sudden, hard lick from root to crown and, each time he reached the crown, he stayed there to savour it, mouthing it and swirling his tongue around the tip until I was giddy. Faster. And faster. Urgent. Demanding. And slackened again in an instant. Sweet again. Calming me with lips and tongue.
And all the time, one of his hands trailed up the inside of my leg from knee to the softer skin of the inner thigh, and back again. Over and over. Fingers fluttering and sometimes barely touching, sometimes the harder pad of finger tips pressing and claiming. The other hand he twisted, somehow, to find the bottle of fragrant oil, and while his tongue now teased the skin of my thigh, he smoothed the oil over my straining cock.
By then I was helpless, writhing, hips rising and falling to match Ned’s rhythm. A restrained, quiet pace when Ned had offered slow, undemanding sweetness, faster when he denied me the delicious, calm deliberation for a more frenzied, powerful snap of the hips.
I was the arrow trembling against the pulled bowstring, waiting for the pluck of Ned’s fingers to send me flying.
Perfection.
About Anna
Once Anna was a communications specialist with several UK government departments. These days she’s thankfully free of all that, and writing full time. Anna lives in the depths of the Nottinghamshire countryside with her husband and the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockapoo, who’s supported by Mavis the Assistant Editor, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several times bigger than she is but with no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.
The Butler’s Pantry (Facebook Group)
Liberty and Other Sttories
Elin Gregory 