Since September by Allison Martine is a Celebrate Weddings Event pick #romance #ku #giveaway
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    • Jun 8, 2023
    • 6 min read

Since September by Allison Martine is a Celebrate Weddings Event pick #romance #ku #giveaway



Title: SINCE SEPTEMBER


Author: Allison Martine


Genre: Women’s Fiction, Contemporary Romance, RomCom


Book Blurb:


Most brides dream of planning every last detail of their wedding. Not Olivia Markham. She’d been down the aisle once already and regretted that decision, along with every other judgment call connected with her unfaithful ex. But she also never planned on falling for Adam Burkhardt, who proposed sooner than anyone could have guessed.

So when Adam suggests letting their mothers suss out the particulars for their big day, Olivia agrees, hoping it will assuage their mothers’ trepidation towards their upcoming union. She even relents to having a bachelorette weekend, for the sake of her friends.

Olivia shall endure more nuptial nonsense and play bride once again.


They should have eloped.


Excerpt:


He didn’t say a word as they walked, and Olivia was both excited and fuming. If he was going to take her back early only to pat her on the head and put on his flannels—which were decidedly adorable on his long legs, but that wasn’t the point—she would kick him. She understood what he was trying to do, in theory: she’d lost her virginity in this blasted town. Sin City. And not entirely by choice. And so if he was trying to let her have a weekend where she could be with him and not be seen as a sexual object, well, she could appreciate it. Theoretically.


But what it was doing was driving her batshit. And it was bad enough last night, when he’d kept his hands to himself and barely brushed his lips against hers, but tonight? Over dinner? He was torturing her. He had to know. It was no accident he chose to feed her the slices of otoro, watching her as he did. And he’d kept his hands to himself last night but there was no way he’d just forgotten what his hand on her thigh did to her, had always done to her. He’d known it back in Texas and he knew it now, too.


But she didn’t ask what they were going to do. She just let him lead her, even if the only touch she’d get was his hand on hers. They were silent in the elevator, and she could swear she could hear his heart hammering, and stole a glance at his throat, wondering if she’d see his pulse against his skin. She couldn’t.


He unlocked their room, opening the door for her to go in first, closing it behind them. She went and sat down on the bed, taking off her least-favorite heels—cutest, but most painful; the same ones she’d worn to that fundraiser where she’d mistaken him for a donor, only worn then because Melinda had made her switch shoes before she’d driven to the event—and waited for him to do something. Anything.


He stood there, watching her silently, a few feet away from the king-sized bed. He didn’t even take off his shoes.


“How are you feeling, Livi?” he finally asked, voice just above a whisper. It would have been easy enough to hear him if he was next to her, lips near her ear, breath on her skin, but he hadn’t moved closer.


She raised her eyebrows. “How am I supposed to feel?” she answered.


He put his hands in his pockets, and she supposed he was trying to act casual but she could see the nerves across his face. She knew his face too well for him to keep anything from her.


“Truth be told, Melinda’s kind of screwed things up,” he admitted.


Olivia gave a shrug, “My mind isn’t on Melinda,” she said, disappointed that his was, and not on her.


“No,” he said, “but she’s—I wanted things to go a certain way this weekend. Had thought about it, how—what I could do. And I didn’t factor in Melinda deciding now was the time to get upset about something that hardly registered with me, and was over nine months ago,” he said. “And I definitely didn’t expect her to call you a slut.”


She sighed and couldn’t argue because she had nothing to say to that. She had no idea what he had planned, exactly, other than to drive her insane, and certainly couldn’t have anticipated any of the nonsense with Melinda, since she’d been literally ambushed by it at the spa.


“Honestly,” she said, “don’t let Melinda’s name-calling get to you, Adam. I don’t—I know I’m not—” she started, not sure how to finish that sentence.


“I know you aren’t,” he said, “and for someone to call you one when she was the one who was…” he started, looking away without finishing.


“Was what, Adam?”


“Olivia, I find it hard to get past her calling you a slut when she offered to go home with me the first night I met her.”


“She what now?


He looked surprised; she was shocked. Clearly something had been left out of the story Jamie had told her earlier. Or, she suspected, had been left out of the story Melinda had first told Jamie.


“Olivia, I was meeting all my new co-workers for the first time. Except you. You—you weren’t there. God, I wish you had been. But you weren’t. And Melinda chats me up and was incredibly friendly. And when only a few of us were left, she offered to go home with me.”


“She did?”


Adam nodded. “And it was clear why she was offering.”


“Well shit,” Olivia said. “Jamie said Melinda just asked you to go get drinks sometime.”


“Yeah, well, Jamie wasn’t there.”


Olivia blinked hard a few times, wondering if she was starting to cry or was just still in shock. But that meshed with what Jamie had said: that she’d seen Melinda working on Adam and that Melinda had told her later he’d turned her down and the excuse he’d given about not dating co-workers.


“Peter was,” he added, “although I’m not sure how much he heard. She wasn’t exactly yelling across the room.”


Olivia felt numb. She didn’t know if she was supposed to respond. She wasn’t sure she could.


“So where she gets off calling you a slut is beyond me,” he finished. “And I know she doesn’t know what happened here, with you and—and your ex,” he said. “But that makes it worse, for me at least. To know how you felt about yourself, after—”


“After I didn’t stop him?”


He nodded. He finally came and sat next to her on the bed, taking her hand in his. “After he didn’t ask,” he corrected, “and took what he wanted.”


He was quiet for a minute. “God, I wish I was your first,” he whispered. And she wished the same; she wished there was an overwrite button and she could wipe out every sensation associated with her ex, to expunge the memories and the chain reactions they still caused. That only Adam’s hands had touched her; only him inside her. She only wanted Adam.


“And I wish you were my only,” he added. “I wish I had waited for you.”


Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub):






What makes your featured book a must-read?


A sexy fiancé, troublesome family and frenemies, and a joint bachelor/bachelorette party in Vegas? Yes, please!


Giveaway –

Enter to win a $15 Amazon gift card:



Open Internationally. You must have a valid Amazon US or Amazon Canada account to win.


Runs June 6 – June 12, 2023.


Winner will be drawn on June 13, 2023.



Author Biography:


Allison Martine (“A.M.”) Hubbard is a speculative fiction and contemporary romance author, penning romcoms as “Allison Martine”. A master of bad analogies, mixed metaphors, and poorly translated Latin, (which she vaguely recalls from her years as an attorney), Allison has a penchant for bourbon, wonderfully weird books, and throwing tropes out the window. She is the co-host of the popular literary podcast, Vox Vomitus, and host of To The Moon, Allison, which focuses on speculative fiction and romance, interviewing hundreds of best-selling, award-winning, and debut authors. A near-native Californian, Allison is a graduate of UC San Diego (John Muir College), and Pepperdine University School of Law. She lives in Orange County, California, with her husband and three children, and can often be found folding laundry while listening to an audiobook or trying to use her laptop in the pickup line at her children’s school.


Social Media Links:


Book group page: The Bourbon Books: https://www.facebook.com/groups/678304989387710/

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