Guest Blogger Cari Quinn - Turning Up the Heat With Test Shot

Huge thanks to the NNN for having me here today! I’d love to share a little bit about the first book in my new Hot Shots series, TEST SHOT, releasing August 28th at Loose Id.

First, check out the cover! Mad love to the designer, Valerie Tibbs, who is an absolute genius and captured the book perfectly. The story is m/f/m and set in New York City, one of my absolute favorite places in the world.

Here’s the tentative blurb:

Layla Palmer is starting over in New York City with a new job at Hot Shots, an agency that specializes in hiring talent for jobs with an erotic bent. Happily engaged, she writes off the changes in her relationship with her fiancé, Aidan, as growing pains. But that all comes into question when her beloved fiancé comes up with a startling suggestion: he wants to watch her have sex with another man.

Aidan's a man on the edge, fighting demons he won't name in fear of losing the woman he loves forever. But the game he's playing can only continue for so long, especially when the man they decide to invite into their bed turns out to be Layla’s newest prospective model, Sawyer Blake.

Passion explodes between them, threatening to spill over and burn them all. Soon Aidan and Layla's already incendiary relationship hits the boiling point. Now she's fighting her own battles, including the conflicted feelings of lust and love she harbors for both men. But how can she figure out who to trust when everything she ever knew is changing, including herself?

This series has been a true labor of love for me. Last summer I came up with the idea for an erotic talent agency and pitched it to a publisher who gave me ideas on how to strengthen the concept. I decided to shelve it for a while, but the characters and the setup wouldn’t leave me alone. Back then, Drew and Kirby, the hero and heroine of book two, MONEY SHOT, were the characters in book one but I wasn’t ready to write about them yet. So I decided to make their story the second book, which left me needing new characters for book one.

Layla, Sawyer and Aidan’s story didn’t exactly evolve into the book I’d expected to write and I think I enjoyed the process even more because Sawyer, in particular, refused to do anything I’d had in mind for him. He’s one of my favorite characters I’ve ever written because he’s unflinching in his honesty—and his willingness to put himself on the line. All three characters risk a lot in this story and their world looks very different at the end of the book than it did in the beginning, that’s for sure!

In honor of my new series, I would like to give away an ebook from my backlist to a random commenter who answers this question: when reading a series, do you prefer all the couples’ pairings to be the same? (All m/f, all m/m, all m/m/f, etc.) Why or why not?

Add TEST SHOT to your Goodreads shelf here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15721128-test-shot

Visit Cari Quinn at www.cariquinn.com or http://blogspot.cariquinn.com

USA Today bestselling author Cari Quinn saves the world one Photoshop file at a time in her job as a graphic designer. At night, she writes sexy romance, drinks a lot of coffee, and plays her music way too loud. When she’s not scribbling furiously, she’s watching men’s college basketball, reading excellent books, and causing trouble. Sometimes simultaneously.