Guest Blog & Giveaway with Hailey Edwards

The Sweetest Kind of Love

      I love baking. I can cook with varying degrees of success. I’m a fire hazard with a grill, but baking…yeah…we get along just fine. Considering my fondness for sweets, it’s unsurprising some of my characters have sweet teeth. While I’ve yet to write a baker, I do have a diner owner. 

       Emma is a mishmash of every waitress I’ve met during diner hops with my husband. She’s bold and sassy, smart-mouthed and pushy, and she’s also, well, a half demon.

      While she and I have another love in common—hello, fried food—her hero, Harper, is the one with a hankering for sweets. But it gets better. He bakes. Sure, you don’t get to see much of that side of him in his book, Evermine, but he does bake Emma cookies that do me proud, and I’d like to share his recipe with you. Emma loves sugar cookies (with purple sprinkles of course).

Harper’s Gimme Some Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

1 ½ cups butter (softened)

2 cups white sugar

4 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

5 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Mix butter and sugar together in a large bowl until smooth. Beat in eggs and add vanilla. Sift in the flour,    baking powder, and salt. Then cover and chill dough for at least an hour.
2. When you’re ready to bake, preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. Roll the dough on a lightly floured surface until it’s ¼ to ½ inch thick. With cookie cutters, cut into shapes. Place cookies one inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
3. Bake for six to eight minutes, then allow to cool.

There you go. Simple and easy. Bake them for your sweetie. S/he will thank you. ;)

He can be a slave to his past…or allow her love to free him.

There’s such a thing as too much change. Emma’s sister is mated. Revolution is brewing in her home realm. The last straw: her would-be mate is back from the dead and back under her skin—yet when it comes to the last five years, he’s not talking.

Desperate for a chance to start her own life, she answers the queen’s call to ensure equality for all of Askara’s newly freed slaves. It’s the perfect opportunity to escape a heartbreak in the making named Harper.

Harper loses a piece of his fractured soul when Emma walks away. His lies were meant to protect her from torturous years that drove him to the point of madness. Instead, when he comes to her a year later to help avert a crisis in a freed-slave community, the wedge those lies drove between them is firmly in place.

As their new lives collide with old wounds, they race to stop a threat that could not only destroy the queen, but send Harper back to the hell he escaped. Emma must decide if the man she still loves deserves equal rights to her heart.

Warning: This title contains torn pants, ripped gowns, and sand in uncomfortable places. It also includes one overcompensating villain, one gnarly priest, and two battered hearts willing to give this thing called love one last chance.

Click here to read an excerpt from Evermine. Click here for more information on my upcoming releases, including the third book in the Daughters of Askara series, Eversworn.

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Samhain Publishing

GIVEAWAY
In celebration of Evermine’s release, I’m giving away one digital copy of Everlong and one digital copy of Evermine to one lucky visitor. Leave a comment below on your favorite cookie or your favorite dessert, and you’ll be entered for a chance to win!

Please make sure to leave your email in your comment. The giveaway is open to everyone. The winner will be announced on February 28th. Good Luck!