#blogtour Sacred Salvation by Casia Pickering

 

Father Sebastian has found a home in St. Augusta College.

But when that home is threatened by a student, questions arise in his own
beliefs.

Sacred Salvation

Part of Sins of the Sacred

by Casia Pickering

Genre: Dark Priest Romance

St. Augusta College is known for weaving the Arts with
Theology. Within its iron gates lies a prestigious education that can drive a
person mad.

Father Sebastian Hardwicke is new to the position. Not once has his religious
fervor been tested until he is sent to the cathedral on St. Augusta’s campus.
The school is not what he expected. Hymns and prayers echo within the
cathedral, and the faculty are pious and helpful. Even the students held a
reverence he had only experienced in seminary. On the outside, it is perfect.

But a mask is still a mask, no matter how enticing.

Emilia Trent has two goals in life: to convey true emotion into her art and to
quiet the voices. But the voices have gotten louder, screaming and demanding
that she keep painting. There is no freedom in her expression. With the new
priest coming to campus, her urges grow to a point where she no longer knows
who she is. There is an almost paranormal force growing inside her.

There is only one person capable of holding the demon at bay- Father Sebastian
Hardwicke. But will he choose to face the evil head-on or fall into the deep
embrace of temptation?

Part of Sins of the Sacred, a
dark priest romance shared world series featuring eleven amazing authors.

 

Amazon * Bookbub * Goodreads

 

“I don’t think there is a demon
inside you,” Sebastian sighed, “that wasn’t my intention-”

 

“My father died when I was
starting high school,” Emilia said. “He used to drive freight trucks at
night. During one night, a nasty storm happened, and, well, it crashed. He was
in the hospital for weeks until we couldn’t keep him on life support.”

 

“I’m so sorry,” Sebastian said. He
looked off into the distance, as if heweres lost in his own thoughts.

 

Emilia shrugged. “I’ve had
depression ever since. My painting helps with it and so did a therapist when I
had one, but it isn’t because of my depression that I struggle.”

 

“What is?” Sebastian asked.

 

Emilia thought quietly. She
glanced at Sebastian. Without the white collar pinned into his polo shirt, he’d
look like any other well-dressed man. It was that and the type of shirt that
seemed out of place with his jeans and glasses that he was constantly pushing
back up the bridge of his nose. She wondered what made him choose the life he
chose.

 

Was he a believer, or was it
pushed onto him by people around him? She remembered an argument she had with
her mother about maybe joining the military to help pay for college. That was
before the art contest and scholarship that got her into St. Augusta. As much
as she stressed about being at the school, she wouldn’t change her choices if
she had the chance. But her knowledge about Father Arthur, Sister Rebecca, and
Miranda would be for Sebastian. It may not be her responsibility, but it was
something Emilia didn’t want on her conscience.

 

“I’d rather not talk about it,”
she finally decided, shaking her head, “no offense, but I doubt you’d take my
life experiences into consideration if I told you.”

 

“What do you mean?” Sebastian’s
eyes furrowed in confusion.

 

“Imagine being abused or having a
bad relationship with a friend or something,” Emilia said, “can you do that?”

 

Sebastian’s expression went still.
It was as if he were seeing something from his past. A pang of guilt hit
Emilia’s chest. If she had known he might’ve experienced something like what
she was suggesting, she might not have said that.

 

“Okay,” Sebastian whispered, “go
on.”

 

Emilia nodded. “Let’s say you told
someone about that experience, but that person you told didn’t believe you
because the person who abused you or the friend who was awful hasn’t shown that
side of themselves to that person. Can you imagine how that feels?”

 

“I can.” Sebastian’s voice was
raspy and hard. He worked his jaw and rolled his head from side to side.

 

A squirrel jumped from headstone
to headstone as birds twittered. His cheeks were bulging from the collection of
nuts. The leaves rustled as another autumn breeze brushed past. Emilia looked
around at the quiet beauty of it all.

 

Even the voices weren’t around.
Emilia looked around, this time paying attention to every small detail. There
was no fog or shadows. The only brightness that held her attention, aside from
the slowly dying sun, was Sebastian. It was as if the cemetery was an oasis
away from whatever plagued the campus. 

 

“That’s why I’m not ready to say
anything,” Emilia said. “I don’t know if you’d believe me or not, but it’s
not worth saying if we end up arguing.”

 

About the Sins of
the Sacred series

The Sins of the Sacred dark romance shared world series
brings together standalone stories by multiple authors, each exploring the
collision of faith and forbidden desire within religious settings. From
medieval abbeys and dissolution-era monasteries to modern churches and
theological colleges, priests, nuns, exorcists, and other religious figures
face temptations that challenge their sacred vows. The series spans various
time periods, incorporating paranormal elements including demon possession,
angelic intervention, and exorcism that intensify conflicts between duty and
desire.

With diverse pairings including M/F, MM, F/F/F, and MFM
configurations, each book delivers explicit romantic content while exploring
themes of religious trauma, repression, and the struggle between devotion and
forbidden longing. The series features omegaverse dynamics, second chance
romance, and enemies-to-lovers tropes alongside darker explorations of
possession, crisis of faith, and the psychological impact of religious
structures. Designed for readers seeking taboo romance that examines the
tension between sacred vows and human desire in emotionally complex narratives.

 

Find them on Amazon!


Even though she claims she can write anything, the biography
remains to be Casia’s arch-nemesis. Despite this, Casia has used her Writing
degree to craft stories in over ten anthologies, maintained a book blog for
more than a decade, and has begun to write novels. A multi-genre author, Casia
Pickering, is incapable of keeping to one thing. Every story has a piece of her
personality that she treasures and shares with her readers. She currently lives
in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia with her biggest supporter and helper,
her son, affectionately known as Bug. Previous works are under the name, Casia
Courtier.

 

Website * Facebook * Instagram * Bluesky * TikTok * Bookbub * Amazon * Goodreads

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#blogtour The Great Inversion by Jordi Ter Woord


Social Science / Media Studies; Technology & Society; Philosophy / Ethics
& Moral Philosophy; Popular Philosophy; Artificial Intelligence &
Society; Cultural Theory; Attention Economy

Date Published: July 1, 2026

For ten thousand years, ideas needed human minds to copy themselves
forward. That has ended.

The Great Inversion is a trade non-fiction book about the moment culture stops
needing us as its bottleneck. From ancient stories and print culture to
algorithmic feeds and generative AI, Jordi ter Woord traces how ideas learn to
survive, why the mirror of the internet feels so personal, and what remains
human when creation becomes cheap.

This is not a digital-detox book. It is a book about attention as the one act
the machine cannot perform for us.

About the Author

 

 Jordi ter Woord is a Dutch writer, solution architect and IT lead with a
background in philosophy and artificial intelligence. He has spent much of his
working life close to the systems that move information through organisations,
and much of his private life wondering what those systems do to the people who
live inside them.

His non-fiction debut, The Great Inversion, is about the moment culture stops
needing human beings as its bottleneck. From ancient memory and print culture
to algorithmic feeds and generative AI, it asks what remains human when
creation becomes cheap and attention becomes the expensive side of the
transaction.

Jordi also writes Whimsical Weather, a children’s weather-adventure series
about Cloudy, storms, patience, migration and letting go. He lives in the
Netherlands with his partner and daughter.

 

Contact Links

Author website

BookBuzz

 

Purchase Link

Amazon

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#blogtour Rogue Reckless Kings MC by Harley Wylde

(Reckless Kings MC 10)

MC Romance

Date Published: July 24, 2026

Publisher: Changeling Press

She ran from a monster. I became her shield — and everyone else’s
nightmare.

Lennox — I was supposed to marry a man chosen by my family. Smile for the
cameras. Say the vows. Do what I was told. The wedding wasn’t about
love. It was a business deal, and I was the price being paid.

So I ran. Terrified. Still wearing my wedding dress. I didn’t have a
plan. I didn’t have anywhere to go. Then a biker named Rogue stopped
beside the road and changed everything.

Rogue — I’ve spent years handling problems for the Reckless Kings MC.
Quietly. Permanently. Picking up a runaway bride wasn’t part of the
plan. Neither was getting married. One look at the bruises she tried to hide
and the fear she couldn’t quite mask, and I knew one thing for certain.
She wasn’t going back.

Now her wealthy family, powerful ex-fiancé, and anyone else stupid
enough to come after her will have to deal with me first. The longer Lennox
stays under my protection, the harder it becomes to remember this started as a
way to keep her safe. She deserves freedom, a future, and the chance to choose
her own path. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve already made
my choice. She’s mine. And nobody is taking her away.

 

Excerpt

Copyright ©2026 Harley Wylde

Rogue

The lot at Hadley’s sat empty — one rusted Buick, a flickering sodium light, dead still except for the canopy buzz. I rolled the Harley under the canopy and killed the engine. The noise dropped away. The night pressed close.

I’d been on the road since nine, a pointless run Hawk sent me on to check a stretch of road south of Nashville. Two of our guys thought they’d picked up a tail last week. I’d seen nothing but dark asphalt. Now, twenty minutes from turning north for home, I was hungry, bone-tired, and needed gas. Hadley’s had it all.

I swung off the bike and stretched the road out of my shoulders. The canopy lights hummed. Inside the store, a kid in a Titans cap sat behind the counter with his face in his phone, and a country station played thin from a blown speaker mounted by the cigarette racks. I paid him cash for two gallons of regular, picked up a black coffee and a Slim Jim I wouldn’t eat, and walked back out under the buzzing light and its collected moths.

I was about to unlock the gas tank when I clocked the white.

It was a flicker, no more — a piece of something pale catching the edge of the security light around the corner of the building, where the dumpsters sat behind a low cinder block wall the owner had built so the highway couldn’t see the trash. The Buick at the far pump still had no driver. The road was empty in both directions. The tree line beyond the lot was black. Tennessee woods in November swallowed light whole. I stayed at the pump.

I leaned against the pump, uncapped the coffee, and took a long, slow sip I didn’t want. Then I looked. The lot. The road. The tree line. I gave it two minutes. Nothing moved. The flicker of white stayed put.

I set the coffee on top of the pump and walked around the corner of the building.

She was crouched in the gravel between the cinder block wall and the back end of the second dumpster, knees up, the skirt of a dress that had cost somebody a year of salary bunched around her thighs and stained dark at the hem with whatever Hadley’s back lot had to offer. There was a veil in her hair. An actual veil. Pinned high and torn loose at the bottom edge where she’d caught it on something. Brown hair had freed itself from the pins on one side.

She was pressing her left wrist against her ribs.

The wrist was already swelling. Fresh. The skin had gone an angry red and was thinking about turning purple, the kind of mark left by a hand closing around it and yanking hard. It hadn’t happened long ago.

She heard me before she saw me.

Her head came up so fast I thought for a second, she was going to put it into the cinder block behind her. She got her feet under her in one motion. She looked around eighteen. Small. She moved with the twitchy speed of prey, getting her back against the wall, her hands flat to the block at her sides like she could push it down behind her and go through it if she had to.

I stopped several feet from her and put out my hands where she could see them. Palms open. Empty
 except for the Slim Jim still in one of them, which was not the dignified detail I would have picked.

I didn’t say anything for a beat. I let her look at me. Let her clock the cut, the patches, the boots, the beard — whatever she needed. She scanned fast, doing math on the distance between me and the road, where the gap was. She was a girl who had learned how to measure rooms.

The veil moved a little in the night air. She didn’t.

“You hurt?” I kept it short. I kept the road out of my voice — the put-her-at-ease lilt I used on women at the bar who didn’t know me yet — because she didn’t need a man being charming at her right now. She needed a man being quiet.

She lifted her chin.

“I’m fine.” The words came too even. Too rehearsed. “I just need a ride.”

Bruised jaw. Swollen wrist. Veil still pinned in her hair.

“Okay,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes half a degree. She’d been ready for the next question. People who looked the way she did were always ready for the next one, and the one after that, and the moment a man decided he’d earned an answer.

I tipped my head back toward the front of the building.

“Bike’s at the pump.”

I waited for the second it took her to understand that I wasn’t going to walk her to it. Then I turned and went back the way I’d come, around the corner of the building, into the buzz of the canopy lights. I topped off the tank, returned the nozzle to the pump, tightened the gas cap. I picked up the cup of coffee from the top of the pump and held it like I had reason to be standing there. I didn’t look back.

A few seconds passed. The night did its small noises. The fluorescent up by the air pump ticked through another bad cycle and gave up, then came back on.

Then I heard the gravel.

Two steps. A pause. Three more, slower, picking the path. I could hear the soft drag of a hem.

I took another sip of the now-cold coffee, and I waited.

She came up on my left, two feet of clearance between us, and stopped at the back end of the bike like she’d been told once, a long time ago, that you didn’t walk up on a man’s machine without permission and she’d never quite let go of the lesson. The dress dragged on the concrete behind her. There was gravel pressed into the white of it in a stripe across the hip. Up close, under the canopy lights, the bruise on her wrist had gone the dirty red of something the next hour was going to make worse.

I’d kept my attention on the road for the last forty seconds because something had started pulling at the inside of my chest before my thinking brain caught up, and a man in my line of work learned to pay attention to that pull or learned to bleed.

That was when the first set of headlights came up out of the dark to the south.

They came slow. Slow enough that I had time to set the coffee down on top of the pump. Slow enough that I had time to read the shape of the vehicle before I clocked the speed of it — square, high, blacked-out, the kind of SUV nobody bought in this county to haul kids to school. It turned in off the county road without indicating, and the second one came in behind it without indicating either. They didn’t roll up to a pump. They rolled past the pumps. They stopped twenty yards from the front doors of the store, in the open part of the lot where they could see everything, and sat there with their engines running and their windows up.

I felt her go still beside me.

She didn’t make a sound or move. She froze with the instinct of someone who’d learned motion could get her hurt.

I unhooked the helmet from the handlebar.

I held it out to her without looking at her. Sideways, low, between our hips, where the bulk of my body was between it and the SUVs.

“Take it.”

She took it. Both hands. The bruised wrist came out from her ribs and caught the light, and she tightened her fingers around the foam at the helmet’s edge hard enough that the skin across her knuckles pulled flat and colorless.

The driver’s door of the front SUV opened.

A man stepped out. Dark jacket. No coat for the weather, which meant he didn’t plan to be outside long. He didn’t walk toward the store. He stood in the open door of his vehicle with one hand on the frame and the other hand down at his hip where I couldn’t see it, and he scanned the lot — left to right, slow, taking inventory.

He took clocked the Buick, my bike, and even me.

I threw a leg over the bike.

“Get on.”

She followed the softly spoken command. She didn’t ask which side. She didn’t ask where to put her hands. She scrambled on, hiking the dress up with a clumsy heave. She swung a leg over the seat, her heel scraping against the pipe before her foot found the peg. The helmet bumped once against the back of my shoulder as she settled, grabbing for purchase.

Her fingers dug into my shirt as she held on.

It wasn’t the loose grip of a girl who’d been on the back of a bike before and remembered the etiquette. Both of her hands closed in the front of my jacket like the leather was a railing and she was a half-step from going over, and both fists pressed into my stomach through the cut.

The man in the dark jacket lifted his hand off the SUV’s frame.

I was already moving.

I twisted the throttle. The rear tire spat a plume of gravel, the back end sliding for a split second before it caught traction. We shot out from under the canopy, and I leaned hard into the turn onto the county road. She moved with me instead of fighting it. On a first ride, that was the only thing that kept you upright.

Behind us, a door slammed. Then a second door. The high beams of the second SUV swept across the front of the store, across the pumps and the spot we’d been parked in three seconds ago, and then they swung wide toward the road.

I opened the throttle the rest of the way.

The county highway south of Nashville at eleven-thirty on a weeknight was a black river with a yellow line down the middle of it, and the bike ate it. The tree line on either side blurred into something you couldn’t look at without your eyes watering. Cold came up off the asphalt, through my jeans, through the cuffs of my jacket, and somewhere behind us, in the mirror, the SUV headlights came around onto the road in a wide, scrambling arc and started after us.

They were big vehicles. They were fast on a straight. They were not fast through curves, and I knew every curve on this stretch of road between Hadley’s and the county line by the time I was twenty.

I took the first one without braking.

Her hands clamped tighter. I felt the second fistful of jacket bunch under my ribs. She made a small sound, not quite a word, swallowed almost before it started. She put her helmet against the back of my shoulder and pressed it there. That was all.

I checked the mirror.

The headlights clung to us through the first curves, too bright in my mirror. I knew a feeder road up ahead they wouldn’t expect. I took the turn hard, the tires screaming. I saw their brake lights flare red as they overshot the turn-in. They’d be back, but I’d bought us thirty seconds. It would have to be enough. I didn’t slow down.

The next exit north was a county road. From there, I could hit a web of back roads leading to the woods south of the compound. A man on a bike could get lost in those trees. The men in the SUVs would have to be born in them to follow. I pointed the bike at the exit.

About the Author

Harley Wylde is an accomplished author known for her captivating MC Romances.
With an unwavering commitment to sensual storytelling, Wylde immerses her
readers in an exciting world of fierce men and irresistible women. Her works
exude passion, danger, and gritty realism, while still managing to end on a
satisfying note each time.

When not crafting her tales, Wylde spends her time brainstorming new
plotlines, indulging in a hot cup of Starbucks, or delving into a good book.
She has a particular affinity for supernatural horror literature and movies.
Visit Wylde’s website to learn more about her works and upcoming events, and
don’t forget to sign up for her newsletter to receive exclusive discounts and
other exciting perks.

 

Author on Facebook, Instagram, & TikTok: @harleywylde

 

Publisher on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok: @changelingpress

 

Pre-Order Today


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#blogtour Field of Purple Bonnets by Dave J Brown

 

Speculative Fiction, Literary Fiction

Date Published: May 21, 2026


You’ve been standing in the field your whole life. You just couldn’t see
it yet.

 

If you’ve spent any time in Texas in spring, you know the bluebonnets. Now
imagine a pair of glasses that shows you what you had been missing: every
ultraviolet the flower had been wearing all along, a field suddenly purple, a
world you had been standing inside without seeing.

That is love, for Richard Smith. That is Zin. Richard is the kind of man who
learned early how to disappear. Quiet. Careful. Brilliant in ways he rarely
lets anyone witness. He writes poetry in notebooks no one is allowed to open
and gives his best hours to work that asks nothing of his heart.


Then Zin walks into his life
—sharp, guarded, beautiful, and impossible
to reduce—and does the thing he never prepared for.

 

She sees him.

All of him.

 

And instead of flinching, she stays. Together, they help bring a technology
into the world that does for millions what Zin did for Richard: it lets people
see what was always there.

 

Hidden color.

Hidden beauty.

Hidden power.

 

A cheap, wearable lens that reveals the spectrum just beyond ordinary sight.
For a moment, it feels like freedom. But a world that profits from keeping
people blind does not celebrate new sight.

 

It studies it.

Owns it.

Sells it.

Weaponizes it.

 

What began as wonder becomes surveillance.

What began as intimacy becomes empire.

And as the device they helped create starts tracking faces, movements,
desires, and private lives, Richard and Zin are forced to confront the
difference between being seen, being wanted, being protected, and being
controlled.

The world Richard wanted to open is becoming a machine that watches everyone.
And the woman who first opened him may be the only person brave enough to tear
it down.

 


The Field of Purple Bonnets is a literary speculative love story about being
seen versus being watched. About a man brave enough to be soft, a woman wise
enough to know what that costs, and a country slowly forgetting the difference
between freedom and possession.

 

 

About the Author

 

 Dave J. Brown writes fiction about love, technology, consciousness, and the
strange systems people build to survive themselves. Field of Purple Bonnets is
his most ambitious work to date.

He pays his bills helping organizations navigate enterprise technology
rollouts, building small applications, and consulting on the kinds of complex
implementations that make most people’s eyes glaze over. The technical fluency
shows up in his writing
 not as exposition, but as texture. When
Richard designs BeeVision, the engineering feels real because it comes from
someone who thinks in systems.

He lives just south of Austin, not far from a field of bluebonnets that looks
exactly the way you’d imagine.

Contact Links

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