Meet Devyn Quinn!

Today's guest is the fantastic Devyn Quinn. I have to tell, the cover on this book is fantastic...Love it!

Devyn will pick one lucky winner from those who comment to receive a book, so make sure you check out her blurb and excerpt and say something profound!

Devyn Quinn lives in the scenic Southwest, though she has called several other states home. She is a huge fan of dark gothic music & shoot-’em-up action movies. But reading is her first love and Devyn spends too much time with history books, as well as feeding her addiction for celebrity biographies. She especially enjoys reading books on Hollywood before the 1960′s and is crazy about Marilyn Monroe, her legend and her myth.

Devyn lives with her cats, ferrets, and one little single Shih Tzu doggie, Tess.

She is also the owner of several tattoos, including one based on her “Eternity” books.


Blurb:

Refusing to embrace her mermaid heritage, Gwen Lonike prefers to live as a human. All she wants it to run her hotel in Port Rock Maine, in peace. But when her sister Tessa returns from the Mediterranean with news that she had inadvertently opened the gateway to a lost mermaid kingdom–and accidentally freed its dangerous queen–Gwen can no longer hide behind her idyllic life.



Covert-ops agent Blake Whittaker is far from happy when he’s assigned to trail paranormal activity back to him hometown, where he can’t escape crushing memories he’d rather forget. But when he meets and falls for Gwen, he knows he can’t cut and run. Yet how long can he hide his true mission from her? And how long can Gwen and her sisters remain safe from a nemesis bent on their destruction–and from Blake’s own superiors, whose ultimate mission could prove the greatest threat of all?


EXCERPT

Turning into the hotel parking lot, Blake Whittaker guided his black sedan into the nearest available space and killed the engine. Instead of making an immediate grab for the bag in the passenger seat, he simply sat, staring into the distance.

It was amazing how things had changed since he’d last been in Port Rock. Almost seventeen years had passed since he’d last set foot in the small Maine fishing village. And while the old familiar landmarks were still in place, a lot of things looked different. The hotel, for instance, was new. Back when he was a kid the oceanfront acreage overlooking the bay was undeveloped, offering an unobstructed view of the open water and the small island that lay about a mile offshore.

Little Mer Island, he thought. That’s where he’d be heading first thing tomorrow. To get there he’d have to rent a skiff, crossing over the wide open waters of the bay.

A flush prickled Blake’s skin as his heart sped up. Despite the humidity permeating the warm summer night, he shivered. He hated deep water of any kind. Aside from a shower, he did his best to stay far away from the stuff. It didn’t matter if it only filled a swimming pool, or the wide open ocean. The less he saw of it, the better.

Mouth going bone-dry, his grip on the steering wheel tightened as a series of images flashed through his mind. For a brief second he wasn’t a thirty-three-year-old man, but a four-year-old boy facing an insanely furious woman filling a deep old-fashioned claw-foot tub with ice-cold water.

Forcing himself back toward calm, Blake blew out a few quick hard puffs, filling his lungs and then quickly expelling the air. The strain of clenching his jaw made his teeth hurt. The last thing he needed was a full-blown panic attack while sitting in the parking lot. Thank God the lot was abandoned. There was no one around at such a late hour to see him melt down.

Catching hold of his fear and forcing himself to stuff it away, he slowly uncurled his fingers. A low curse slipped between his numb lips. “Damn.” Just thinking about his mother made him twitch, setting his nerves on edge.

He hadn’t expected that memory to come crawling out of nowhere and ambush him. He did his best to forget those petrifying moments when his mom was drunk on vodka and raging with malice.

Men. She hated them. Every last blasted one and . . .

And some things are best left alone, Blake reminded himself. Remembering his mother was like sticking his hand into a den of poisonous snakes. He was bound to get bitten, but he just couldn’t stop prodding the deadly reptiles.

He’d better stop it or he was going to get bitten. Badly.

Coming back to Port Rock certainly wasn’t helping matters. When he’d finally gotten old enough to leave it, he hadn’t intended to come back. Not ever. At the age of seventeen he’d gotten the hell out, going as far away as he could. A one-way bus ticket and a suitcase was all he had to his name. If he hadn’t just joined the army, he would’ve had no place to go at the end of the trip.

Blake rubbed his burning eyes. To be sane himself, to continue being sane, he had to quit tearing at the scars marking old wounds. There were a lot of ghosts lingering in his past, a lot of skeletons shoved into his family’s closets.

Shut them, bolt them, and go on. That’s the way he’d always gotten things done. As a kid he’d put on the stiff upper lip, taken the beatings, and gone about the business of living as best he could.

He’d survived.

Sighing again, he shifted his body in the uncomfortable seat, feeling the cramp in his legs. The three-and-a-half-hour trip through a massive thunderstorm had taken its toll on his nerves.

Palm rasping against a day’s growth of whiskers, he reached for the cup balanced between his splayed legs. He took a gulp of its contents; black unsweetened coffee. It was cold and tasted like shit. As much as he didn’t like coming back to Port Rock, he had a job to do. Not a hard one. Not even difficult. Just ask a few questions, poke around a little. It wasn’t rocket science.

But it was top secret.

As a special agent, Blake presently worked in the A51-ASD division of the FBI. Had it not been a highly covert organization, the A51 would have been familiar enough to tip off most Americans as to its purpose. After all, Area 51 was the nickname for a military base presently located in the southern portion of Nevada in the western United States. Supposedly the base’s primary purpose was the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems.

That was somewhat true. And anyone not presently situated under a rock knew about the intense secrecy surrounding the base, one that had made it a popular subject among conspiracy theorists who held a belief in the existence of alien life on Earth.

The crackpots weren’t wrong, either. Blake Whittaker knew for a fact the federal government took the existence of aliens very seriously. The genesis of the current operations stemmed from an incident in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico. At that time, the military had supposedly recovered alien craft and corpses, purportedly held under lock and key, never to be revealed to the public.

It was absolutely true in every respect.

The ASD had been created to cover not only future occurrences of possible alien activity, but also to investigate other incidents deemed alien, paranormal, or hereby inexplicable.

Curious. Strange. Bizarre. You name it, the ASD had an agent on it.

And that was why he was in Port Rock. Because something curious had taken not only a strange turn, but a bizarre one as well.

It had all begun in the 1950s, when an intense concentration of electromagnetic energy was located in the Mediterranean Sea. There was no rhyme or reason why the energy should be at that precise spot, or what caused it. Using the latest technology in deep-sea exploration, scientists had yet to discover the source. Given the location of the disturbance, most theories ranged from a geothermal field due to volcanic activity, to some sort of alien homing signal or beacon.

For the most part, the energy seemed to be harmless, a phenomenon never to be explained. Naval ships in the area monitored it, and no changes had been reported in the last sixty years. Whatever it was simply was.

And then something happened.