Pamela Palmer ~ Riveting Tales of Dark, Paranormal Romance

The Potomac River’s wild, untamed Great Falls.

When deciding on a setting for the Feral Warriors series, I knew I wanted it somewhere in the Washington, D.C. area. Not only is D.C. a fabulously interesting city that I happen to live near, but the surrounding area possesses a wonderful variety of choices. Beaches, mountains, Civil War battlefields, all lie within a couple of hours’ drive. But the location of Feral House was another matter. Their wild, animal natures demanded a setting as untamed as they are. And I knew just the place. One of my favorites for the very reason that the wild nature feels so out of place in the civilized suburbs of our Nation’s Capital.

The place was Great Falls Park.

Great Falls Park, and the towns of Great Falls and McLean, Virginia, lie along the rugged stretch of the Potomac River where the river narrows, building up dangerous force as it pushes through the narrow Mather Gorge. At the Gorge, the river races over a series of steep, jagged rocks, 76 feet of Class 5-6 Whitewater, making the Great Falls one of the most thrilling fall line rapids in the eastern U.S. The Great Falls are located 14 miles upstream from Washington, D.C. And it’s along this stretch of the Potomac, in the thick and rocky forest, where the Ferals live.

Kara MacAllister paced the floor of her mother’s blue-sprigged bedroom, frustration and grief shredding her insides as rain slashed at the windows.

“Kara, honey.” Her mom’s words sounded pained and slurred as she eased out of another drug-induced nap. “Why don’t you hire a nurse?” The same question every day.

“No nurse, Mom.” Kara’s heart shriveled as she met her mother’s pain-filled gaze. Propped up on thick pillows stuffed into white, lace-trimmed pillowcases, her mother looked twenty years older than she had just a few months ago. Her once full cheeks lay sunken in a pool of skin, the pasty gray of the terminally ill. The doctors had opened her up to remove a tumor on her left lung only to close her back up and send her home to die. A few weeks, they’d said. Maybe a month. That was two weeks ago.

It felt like two lifetimes.

“But your job, honey. You’ll lose your job.”

Kara squeezed her mother’s thin hand. “It’s okay, Mom. I found someone to cover my class until I get back.” If she went back. For nine years, ever since high school, she’d been content to stay in tiny Spearsville, Missouri, to share the old farm house with her mom, and teach preschool in the basement of the local church. Maybe it wasn’t the most exciting life, but her mom had begged her to stay and she’d been okay with it. Even happy.

Until three months ago. Two days after Christmas, she’d woken up a frustrated bundle of restlessness as if overnight she’d developed a chronic, severe case of PMS. Everything annoyed her all of a sudden. Her boyfriend, her friends, her life, even the preschoolers she adored. She’d felt as if she needed something, but didn’t have a clue what.

The only thing she knew for certain was her mother’s dying wasn’t it.

Her mom squeezed her hand, her grip weaker even than yesterday. “I want you to…have fun, honey. Not watch me die.”

Fun. As if she could possibly enjoy herself doing anything under these circumstances. Kara leaned down and kissed a fragile cheek. “I love you, Mom. I’m right where I want to be.” For now.

Her mother was all the family she had, all the family she’d ever had, and her cancer was killing them both. If only Kara could share with her a bit of her own remarkable health. It was so unfair. Kara was never sick. And her mom lay dying.

She rose, unable to remain still a moment longer. “I’m going to heat some soup and make a batch of blueberry muffins. After dinner we can watch a movie. How’s that?”

“Lovely.”

On her way out of the room, Kara reached for the television on the dresser and flipped on the local news. Glancing back, she caught her mother’s sad smile twisting in pain.

It wasn’t fair. She slammed the heel of her fist against the blue painted wall as she started down the stairs. Her mom didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve this.

Kara blinked back the film of moisture that suddenly clouded her eyes. In a few weeks time, she’d be all alone. Orphaned.

Could you call it orphaned at twenty-seven?

The sun had set while Kara was upstairs and the main level of the old farmhouse was shadowed with dusk. But she’d grown up in this house, lived here all her life, and could find her way blindfolded.

She slipped into the dark kitchen…and froze.

Silhouetted against the thin gray light coming through the back window was the dark form of a man inside the house.

Her heart rushed to her throat. Her stomach buckled beneath the slam of fear even as her logical mind screeched, It’s just a neighbor. But when she flipped the light switch, the sight that met her gaze beneath the fluorescent strips did nothing to dispel her terror.

He was huge, well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and thick, bulging biceps. Tawny hair hung in waves to his shoulders framing a hard face and cold amber-colored eyes. With his dress pants and expensive-looking shirt, he could never pass as one of the local farmers even if she hadn’t known everyone within a ten mile radius of town. This man was a total, and frightening, stranger.

“What do you want?” Her words came out breathy, forced around the constriction in her throat.

Her mind screamed, Run! But she couldn’t. Not with her mother upstairs and helpless. Heart thundering, she gathered every last scrap of her courage, rose to her full five foot five and lifted her chin.

“Get out of my house.”

A single, tawny eyebrow rose. “Bare your right breast.”

Kara gaped at him as the full realization of his intent sent her pulse into a grinding thud in her ears.

As if reading her mind, the man rolled his eyes with an exasperated grunt. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Kara choked out a laugh. “Right. You just want to see my breast, then you’ll go.”

“Something like that.”

She stared at him, her terrified mind grasping for a plan. Any plan.

He started toward her. Kara lunged for the knife rack, but as her fingers curled around the handle of a small paring knife, the stranger closed the distance between them. He hauled her against his chest, face to pecs, his large hand clamping around her wrist, immobilizing her.

Swallowing a scream, she struggled against his iron-like hold, but she might as well have been a fly in a spider web for all the good it did her. He was too strong. Kara tried to kick him, to knee him, but he only pressed her against the counter, his hips tight against hers as he towered over her.

Terror flashed in her mind like an explosion of light. He was going to rape her. Murder her.

Her pulse began to slow, the terror slipping away as if someone had opened a drain in her head. Even her shallow, desperate breathing evened out as if she’d suddenly, inexplicably, lost her fear of the huge man.

He eased the knife from her hand and returned it to the knife block. “I’m calming you.”

And that’s exactly what it felt like, she realized. A strange, unnatural calm settling over her as if an invisible hand were squashing her fear.

“How?” Though the word rang incredulous in her head, her tone, as it left her lips, was one of simple curiosity.

This wasn’t right. He shouldn’t have this kind of control over her. Her pulse tried to leap fearfully, but was instantly stroked into complaisance.

“Stop it.” She needed to be afraid of him. He overpowered her. Overwhelmed her. Her senses swam in his nearness, in the elemental scent of wind and earth and pure, raw male. The intoxicating blend teased and tantalized, sending the blood rushing to the surface of her skin in a hot flush of awareness. An awareness that horrified her.

“Let me go.”

“I’m not going to harm you. I need to know that you’re the one I’m looking for.”

“I’m not.”

He stepped back, putting a slight distance between them even as he kept tight hold of her wrist. Feeling utterly detached, she watched him reach for her with his free hand, felt the pad of his finger slide down her upper chest to hook into the top of her scoop-neck tee and tug downward.

His eyes flared, those well-sculpted lips compressing as his thumb brushed over the flesh rising above the lace of her bra, tracing the odd stretch marks she’d noticed for the first time around Christmas.

Her gaze caught on his lips, mesmerized by their perfect fullness as a single, disturbing emotion finally broke free of his unnatural control to sweep her imprisoned body. Lust. Delicious fire skimmed over her skin, burrowing deep into her bones and blood, rushing straight down to her core.

He released her shirt as if he’d been burned and met her gaze, his own cool and shuttered. “You are the Radiant.”

“I’m the what?” She stared at him, trying to make sense of his words. Of any of this. “What do you want?”

Those amber eyes glowed with a dark determination that would have made her heart pound if he weren’t tamping her emotions. He slid his free hand over her jaw, his palm rough and calloused, his touch not ungentle as his forefinger hooked around the back of her jaw, coming to rest beneath her ear.

“What do you want?”

“You.”

The sudden, sharp pressure at the base of her ear stole her thoughts and vision, sending Kara tumbling into a dark, unconscious abyss.

END OF EXCERPT. Like it? Order it.

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(at the Therian enclave near the end of the book)

Her family was on their way.

Kara’s gaze swung back to Paenther, her hands smoothing her skirt with quick, agitated strokes. “Do I need to change? I’ve never met family before. I don’t know what they’ll expect of me.”

Paenther smiled. “You look fine, Kara.”

“Perfect,” Tighe concurred.

Jag snarled. “They say one negative word and they’re out of here on their asses.”

Kara felt the sting of tears as affection flowed warmly through her. She grasped Tighe’s forearm on one side of her, Jag’s on the other, and smiled at Paenther.

“Thank you,” she said softly. She might be about to meet her blood family, but her true family was right here.

Tighe patted her hand and chuckled. “Trust me, Kara. This won’t be like any family gathering you’ve ever seen.”

Tighe’s words proved to be dead on. Kara stood in the middle of the living room, flanked on either side by Tighe and Jag while Paenther and Lyon escorted the eight twenty-somethings, five men and three women, to her.

How could this be her family? Families were old people and young people and children. This felt more like a ten-year class reunion — a reunion of a class she’d never been part of. These people looked exactly like humans her age.

She didn’t know them. But if the looks on their faces as they spotted her were anything to go by, they certainly seemed to recognize her. All the women and several of the men had tears in their eyes as they rushed toward her.

Kara took an instinctive step back, her gaze flying to Lyon. Tighe and Jag both stepped in, setting up a protective barrier between her and her over-eager family.

“She doesn’t know you,” Lyon barked.

One of the men in the front of the pack, a dark-haired man with an intelligent face and warm mist-filled green eyes, stopped and threw out his arm against the onslaught of the others.

“Lyon’s right,” he said. “She looks like our Henrietta, but she’s not. We’re strangers to her.”

As the others held back, the man, dressed in jeans and a button-down, slowly came toward her. When he stopped several feet away, Kara touched Jag and Tighe’s shoulders and the two men stepped to the side, allowing her to resume her place between them.

The stranger’s gaze roamed over her face as if he was searching for something, or someone. Someone precious he’d lost.

“Was Henrietta my mother?” she asked softly.

Sadness filled his eyes and his mouth turned wry. “Yes. But not the one who raised you. Where?”

“Spearsville, Missouri.”

The man nodded. “A seer told me Henrietta drove as far west as she could before the birth pains became too much. A woman found her and helped her birth you. Henrietta begged her to take you far, far to the west and raise you as her own. To let no one find you, including human doctors. And never tell anyone, including you, that you weren’t hers.”

Kara felt the chills race along her skin. That’s why her mom, her adoptive mom, always told her they had no family. “Why did Henrietta leave here?”

“She had a premonition that you would be the next Radiant. That someone else knew, and if she stayed, you’d be killed as a child. You needed to be raised by humans, far from the enclaves so you would be safe from the draden. Safe from the one who meant you harm.” Pain filled his eyes. “I tried to tell her I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. That I would protect you both. I thought she believed me. When she went missing days before she was due to give birth, I knew she’d flown. By the time I tracked her down, it was too late. She was dead and you were gone.”

Kara looked at him. “Who are you to me?”

His mouth softened into a sad smile. The mist grew thicker in his eyes. “I’m your father, Kara. And I would very much like to come closer.”

Kara felt tears bloom in her own eyes. She didn’t know this man, and yet in a strange way, she recognized him. And felt his instant and unconditional love for her.

She nodded and stepped toward him as he enveloped her in a hug, in a scent, that were achingly familiar even though she couldn’t possibly have known them before.

He stroked her hair as she pressed her cheek to his shoulder. “I know you don’t me, Kara, and I won’t push you for more than you’re able to give. But I want you to know I’ve loved you since the moment you were conceived. I’ve never stopped praying you’d someday find your way back to us.”

Though his words were a balm to her grieving heart, the ache was still only for the mother she’d known. The woman who’d raised her and loved her enough to give up everything for her.

Kara lifted her head and stepped back so she could meet his gaze, and found a smile for him. “I always wanted a father.”

He flashed her a grin that held a familiarly crooked eye tooth. And while he looked young, in his eyes she saw a depth and a wisdom that far exceeded her own or that of any other twenty-something human she’d ever known.

“Good enough,” he said. “Now can I introduce you to the rest of this pathetic excuse for a family?” he asked grinning.

Good-natured objections came from behind him and Kara nodded. He swept his arm around her shoulders and turned her, introducing a beautiful strawberry blond as her great-great grandmother on her mother’s side, and a cocky-grinned man who could have passed for a blond California surfer-dude, as her grandfather. The others were all ancestors of some sort, but she quickly lost track as they pressed around her, demanding hugs, exclaiming at how much she looked like Henrietta, and demanding to know if the humans had treated her well.

Throughout this strange reunion, her gaze kept tight track of Lyon. Even standing halfway across the room, he was her anchor. She’d always wished for a big family. Now, apparently, she had one.

And all she wanted was one taciturn lion.

“Pamela Palmer never disappoints as once again she has crafted an incredibly good dark fantasy tale! The world building in Desire Untamed is phenomenal… the first in a series and wow, what a fantastic start it is!"

~ Debbie Wiley, Book Illuminations (posted November 2009)

“Everything about Desire Untamed makes it a book destined for the keeper shelf."

~ You Gotta Read Reviews (posted October 2009)

“All I can say is WOW! I was literally unable to put this book down. Ms. Palmer captured my attention from page one and didn’t let go until the very last word. I love discovering new paranormal series and this one is definitely one to watch."

~ The Romance Reader's Connection Read the entire review. (posted July 2009)

“Gritty, raw, passionate, and full of desire and unexpected twists and turns, Desire Untamed is definitely a keeper to be read over and over again! It was magnificent!"

~ Wild on Books (posted July 2009)

“With Desire Untamed, Pamela Palmer has started a brand new dark fantasy series that explodes with action immediately and keeps going full speed ahead until we reach the conclusion. …an intense book full of danger, passion, and magic."

~ Kelley, reviewer for CK2S Kwips and Kritiques (posted July 2009)

“…violent, sexy, dark paranormal fantasy of the first order and creates a compelling world that fans will find hard to resist."

~ Kristin Ramsdell, Library Journal (posted June 2009)

“…a powerfully unique novel with suspense and intrigue to keep you eagerly turning the steamy pages."

~ Fresh Fiction (posted June 2009)

“Readers will be flipping the pages. Palmer has created a fun, realistic story and a great set of major and minor characters."

~ Romantic Times Magazine (posted June 2009)

“A powerful tale of survival, adventure, nobility, passion and love.”

~ Bitten by Books reviewing Desire Untamed. Read the entire review. (posted June 2009)

“With hidden intrigue, danger and conflicting emotions, Desire Untamed is grippingly spellbinding."

~ Amelia Richard, reviewer for SingleTitles.com awarding Desire Untamed 5 stars. Read the entire review. (posted June 2009)

“Magic and passion run wild in this steamy paranormal series debut. Palmer… sets up an intriguing world. The fast-paced action keeps readers guessing."

~ Publishers Weekly, May 4, 2009 (posted June 2009)

“Ms. Palmer does a fabulous job of defining her fictional world and introducing readers to the characters who will guide them through the series. Desire Untamed has danger, chemistry and romance that will captivate readers and keep them guessing."

~ Kimberly Swan, DarqueReviews.com. Read the entire review. (posted April 2009)

“Pamela Palmer's Desire Untamed took my breath away!"

~ Anna Campbell, award-winning author of Tempt the Devil (posted April 2009)

“A sexy, suspenseful, and hot book...another must-read series for paranormal fans everywhere.”

~ Coffee Time Romance (posted April 2009)

“Desire Untamed is one of the most unique, inventive shapeshifter novels I've ever come across. Fans of out-of-the-ordinary paranormal romances are going to add Pamela Palmer's Feral Warriors Series to their keeper list!”

~ New York Times Bestselling Author of Bloodline, Maggie Shayne (posted February 2009)

“Full of fast-paced action, heart-breaking angst, and bitter betrayal, Pamela Palmer's Desire Untamed delivers what the title promises--and much more. The Feral Warriors are hot.”

~ NYT Bestselling author, Rachel Vincent (posted February 2009)

“What is going to be the next big, hot dark paranormal series? Pamela Palmer's Feral Warriors."

~ Night Owl Romance Reviews (posted February 2009)