K is for Kept Tears. Hopefully I can get this uploaded this time as my first attempt to write this corrupted. However, nothing will stop me from telling everyone about my first novel. I still love this one to death and not just because it was my first. I got to pull a plethora of my favorite things together in this.

You got to meet Aaron, one of the protagonists in A is for… He’s a disabled veteran and as I said then, ever since I was a resident doctor at a series of V.A. hospitals I’ve wanted to have a character who incorporated some of the best and some of the worst of my former patients.

Aaron, like me, grew up outside of Pittsburgh in the country and through him I was able to showcase some of the fun things about Pittsburgh (and there are plenty of fun things there). Aaron is a geeky grad student who thinks he might be ready to date again, having come to some sort of peace with his amputated arm and rearranged life. When he spots Rhys at a steampunk party, he thinks he’s found the hottest guy there, a man so out of his league he couldn’t possibly have a shot. When Rhys proves him wrong, Aaron has to rethink the whole ‘I’m ready to date’ thing. With his best friend, Corinne prodding him on, Aaron steps out into the dating world and quickly is swept up with Rhys.

What he couldn’t possibly have imagined is Rhys is something out of the fantasy novels Aaron so loves. Before he knows it, Aaron has a wicked fey, Morcant, Rhys’s ex, after him. Elves, dullahans, fairies and nixes, all the things Aaron has loved as fiction prove to be all too real and potentially dangerous. Rhys is Tylwyth Teg, a crown prince of the fey and he is centuries old (heck even his children are all over a hundred). With a life that long there is baggage and this particularly baggage could be deadly. Morcant wants to make Rhys suffer and if Aaron has to die to achieve that, Morcant is thrilled to do it.

Urban fantasy and steampunk are some of my favorite things and it was fun weaving them into this. People seemed to enjoy the story and it was a Rainbow awards finalist. I’m never not going to be proud of this novel. I love Aaron and Rhys and would love to revisit their world.

If you want to learn more I’ll leave you with the blurb and where to find it. Also, check out Paul Richmond’s beautiful cover!

Blurb
Having left most of his arm and his self-confidence behind in the Afghanistan desert, young veteran Aaron Santori has enough on his plate learning to use his prosthetic arm. Attending graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh makes life both interesting and challenging. Mentally, he’s ill prepared for meeting Rhys Edwards, a young-adult novelist from Wales and everything Aaron could want in a man. Between the scars from the explosion and his PTSD, he’s reluctant to date. Ready or not, though, Aaron finds himself jumping into the deep end of the relationship waters.
What Aaron couldn’t possibly know is that Rhys isn’t human at all. As a prince of the Tylwyth Teg, Rhys is fae, with a list of enemies he’s accumulated over the past few centuries—among them a former lover, Morcant, who is back to make Rhys’s life miserable. An unwitting pawn in their Machiavellian fae politics, Aaron only knows he’s falling in love, never suspecting love might be his death sentence.

Find Kept Tears here.