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🌟 Please join me in welcoming author SE Jakes to Stories That Make You Smile. SE is here today celebrating the recent release of her popular new novel, Keeping Cade. She’s brought along a wonderful excerpt and giveaway and has kindly sat down to answer a few questions. Pull up a chair and read on to learn more about SE’s writing process and discover her most useless talent! 🌟
Keeping Cade by SE Jakes
Protection has its price, but so do fantasies…
Series: Crave (book #1)
Cover Artist: Croco Designs
Release Date: May 24, 2019
Length: 321 pages
Heat Rating: Adult
Pairing / Genre(s): M/M Menage Romance
Blurb
Protection has its price, but so do fantasies…
Fantasy Week happens twice a year at Crave, and it’s always a big hit—a way to live out your wildest fantasy in a safe, sane, and consensual manner.
But when Cade comes in with his Fantasy Week invitation, he’s not happy about it. He’s stoic as hell and his preferences don’t seem to match his fantasy at all…and yet, despite that, he enjoys himself with Tegan and Vic. At least at first.
When it becomes glaringly apparent that the fantasy isn’t something Cade’s comfortable with, it’s confusing for the men he’s been paired with, and Tegan and Vic put a stop to the scene immediately.
What Cade doesn’t know is that Tegan and Vic are not only co-owners of Crave, but they’re also owners of a mercenary group, Gray Ops, that’s run out of Crave. They’ve also been circling each other for years… but nothing sparks until their session with Cade.
What happened in Room 4 is something none of the men can forget…but it’s got nothing to do with a fantasy and everything to do with blackmail. Can Tegan and Vic help Cade keep his secrets, while keeping all of them safe at the same time? Because the threatening to spill out aren’t only Cade’s…
* This series is set in the MEN OF HONOR world, in the bar called Crave from Bound By Honor.
Excerpt
“Am I being chauffeured or can I take my own truck?” Cade asked as they walked out the back door of Crave, leaving behind Oz’s yells of “I can’t promise what I’ll do if you leave me alone with him.”
“We’ll drive you,” Tegan told him.
“Why don’t you just carry me across the threshold of the fight club when we get there?” Cade muttered.
“Didn’t know you needed that level of romance,” Vic said seriously. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Cade sighed heavily and got into the back seat with Vic, while Tegan drove. He guessed it was for protection, and arguing wouldn’t change a damned thing. He needed to preserve his strength anyway.
Vic handed him a Gatorade and a PowerBar. “Eat up.”
Cade muttered, “Fucking starving and this shit tastes like cardboard.”
“Fight first, then I’ll get you a goddamned buffet,” Vic promised.
“There’s a McDonald’s on the corner,” Cade pointed out hopefully.
“You had an entire pizza recently,” Vic reminded him.
“Recently to me is the last hour.” Cade bit into the PowerBar and stared at Vic. “I think this went bad.”
Vic frowned. “They can’t go bad.”
☆ Author Interview ☆
Congratulations on your new release. Please tell us a little bit about it. What’s your favorite aspect or part of the story? Do you have a favorite character? Who/Why?
Thanks for having me here today! Keeping Cade is an MMM romance between three former military men. Cade is the youngest of the three, and he shows up to the bar during Fantasy Week…and he meets Tegan and Vic. But he’s there under false pretenses and things go both very right and very wrong.
My favorite aspect is watching each of them let their walls down and begin to trust. That’s always the hardest part for my men. So when it finally starts to happen, it fascinates me.
I’ve got a returning character who makes a cameo in this book (Law, from Bound By Law) – and I loved being able to revisit him and bring him together with these current men. But really, I love all my characters (even if I want to strangle them) or else I couldn’t write them.
What was the inspiration for your latest story?
My Men of Honor series, which were some of the first MM’s I wrote as SE Jakes, were definitely the inspiration. First, Bound By Honor and Bound By Law are probably the only two of my own books that I reread regularly. And second, I always get asked to write more Men of Honor books. To do that, I really wanted to connect back to the first book especially and I thought, what better way then to center the new series around the original bar / club in Bound By Honor, called Crave. Damon and Law sell the club by the end of Book 1 / start of Book 2, so this new series seemed like a great way to introduce a new generation of military men but in a familiar space.
Are you a planner or a pantser? How much do you know about your story before you start writing? How often does your plan change? Why does this work best for you?
Pantser. Total and complete. I’ve tried to plot and write in order and it just doesn’t work for me. Life would be much easier if I could, but I probably wouldn’t have as much fun! I’ve written probably 60 plus books this way, so my process is pretty well ingrained. And I like talking about it, because when I started out, I didn’t know that you could write a book out of order –it just didn’t occur to me, and I had all these unfinished books around that stalled after chapter 3 or 4. And I read an interview with an author who said she wrote the ending first and a lightbulb went off. I finished my first book a month later. Out of order.
For me, the book starts with a character or characters. Sometimes they’ve been waiting quietly for me to notice them and sometimes they just walk on and take over, but they’re fully formed. Named. They have their own backstories and I just sit and follow their lead. If I get stuck, it’s usually because I’m not listening to the characters and trying to make them do something they normally wouldn’t do. So, for instance, Cade showed up in my head, this young former Ranger and fighter and he was pissed and worried about his best friend. And he was walking into a bar. And everything just clicked from there.
Did any of the characters in this story lead the story astray of your original plan?
Oh, you must know Strider 🙂 Strider is a minor character in this book and he just showed up in the middle and I was like, ‘okay, yes, you can have your own book but not now.’ I wasn’t sure why he was there but then I saw that there’s a larger arc in this series that surprised me, and he’s a big part of it. So it didn’t change the main plot of this book, but it helped me see ahead to the 10 books I’ve got planned. I love discoveries like that!
What is your favorite quote?
It’s from Kahlil Gibran: The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
And it’s the truest thing I’ve ever read–it describes both me and all my characters. I tend to write a lot of angst and most of my characters have been broken in some way–they’re all survivors…but they all have so much strength and they all find their joy, which is much sweeter because of what they survived.
What’s your most useless talent?
I would win at Real Housewives Bingo. Seriously. Put me on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and I will win all his games. I should probably write recaps of the shows. You know, in all my spare time 🙂
Ask permission or beg forgiveness?
Beg forgiveness. I actually used this quote in one of my very first m/f Stephanie Tyler novels. Jake went for forgiveness over permission as well…and hi, Prophet? LOL!
Desert Island Keepers (the 5 books you’d want with you if you were alone on an island for years)?
Only 5?! Okay, I’ll give you my favorites that really got me into the MM genre in the first place, and I do reread them frequently:
Force of Law by Jez Morrow (unfortunately it seems to be out of print but there’s an audible still available!)
Rough Canvas by Joey W. Hill
Double Blind by Heidi Cullinan
Mistletoe and Submission by Kim Dare
Bareback by Chris Owen
What’s your favorite scene that you’ve written?
The Hurricane Scene between Prophet and Tommy in Long Time Gone. It came out complete, all at once, and I barely had to edit it. I wrote it longhand (and still have the notebook) and it was like 40 pages. It took me probably an hour and I thought my hand would fall off but I couldn’t lose the movie in my head–I couldn’t not write it down as it was happening or I’d lose it.
Meet the Author
SE Jakes writes m/m romance. She believes in happy endings and fighting for what you want in both fiction and real life. She lives in New York with her family and most days, she can be found happily writing (in bed). No really…
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Giveaway
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Sounds yummy. Thanks for sharing!