Cree Walker: Maple Lane Manor

Maple Lane returns to the retirement home where she grew up, after ten years away, and must face the music. How can she rebuild the dilapidated building, repay a massive mortgage, and restore her residents’ faith in her with her arch-nemesis – Stacy Three Names – breathing down her neck, hungry for an artifact said to grant immortality? As Stacy sabotages Maple’s efforts, the gorgeous new handyman Derek complicates matters with his demon blood and hot attraction.

How can Maple and her residents fight Stacy, find the artifact, and save their home with the rich and powerful of the town arrayed against them?
…And can she trust a demon to help her?

~Excerpt:

As of about four and a half minutes ago, I officially quit college. I’ve decided that after attending not one but two separate colleges during my nine…okay ten years of switching majors and still not knowing what I want to be when I grow up, that I was never meant to be a serious intellectual. I was not designed to run a corporate enterprise or wow the art world with genius sculpture and paintings. I was studying to become a teacher until I realized I don’t like children. I would have made an excellent veterinarian, except I’m allergic to cats. Or, more accurately they are allergic to me. I wanted to be an engineer, but it turns out I’m also allergic to math, which also eliminated engineering and accounting. I even tried psychology, caseworker, and business major. So after trying everything that ever caught my attention, I switched to a technical college, where I discovered I had no talent for mechanics, carpentry, plumbing, heating, or cooking anything in an oven. And I literally flunked out as a dental assistant when I vomited on a patient while I was cleaning his teeth during final exams. So because of this, or rather despite all of this, I’m going into the family business.

My decision for this very sudden and life-altering change might have been prompted by the three-page, single-spaced letter I am now holding. It’s written in legal speak and since I did a very brief stint in law – after watching a marathon of Law and Order while recovering from a vicious and unprompted cat attack – I will summarize; “Your grandmother is dead, and she’s left you the house and its current occupants.”

This is the letter telling me that my Granny Nan has passed away. It was unexpected, and I’m not saying unexpected as in she was always so healthy and she never said she was sick. No, I’m saying unexpected because she was a vampire. Granny Nan was the first in our family, full born. She came with all the perks of the undead. She could turn into a bat and she never aged. She drank the blood of the living, but she never took more than necessary. She could hypnotize people with a wink of her long black lashes, and any whispered suggestions she made became the victim’s lifelong mission to fulfill. She stayed inside on sunny days and avoided anything resembling a wooden stake. On top of all of this, she was very fast and very smart and very full of life.

She raised me from six months old, as my mother had met her untimely demise in an unfortunate car accident involving a truck transporting picket fence posts. As far as anyone knew in the small town where I grew up, Granny Nan wasn’t my very young-looking, nearly two hundred year-old grandmother. She was just my mom.

I’m a second-generation vampire. Vampires aren’t made, or even bred. As far as we can tell, they just happen once in a while, and the only way they can have children is if they choose to do so with a human. Long story short, that makes me a quarter vampire. Meaning I don’t get to live forever, I can’t turn into any cool animals, and I will never be able to hypnotize people with a look or a whisper. The only thing I got from that side of the family is that I have to wear sunscreen year round and I’m mildly anemic. I don’t drink blood, but I like my steak extra rare. I have a pretty good metabolism, but unlike Granny Nan I do have to burn a few calories on the treadmill a few times a week if I want to eat cupcakes.

Having been raised in a retirement home, I am probably more aware of my own mortality than most. What I learned from my somewhat different childhood experience was that I didn’t want to die without living a full and happy life. The only problem was I seemed to be having trouble getting that life of excitement started. I was so scared to make the wrong move that I ended up not moving at all. So at twenty-seven – okay twenty-eight, I was now the newest caretaker of Maple Lane Manor, Home for Retired Supernaturals.

~Bio:

Cree Walker lives in Northern Maine with her very patient debate partner and their furry love child, mini rat terrier, Titan. When Cree isn’t plugging away at her computer she can most likely be found at the hospital where she works as an advanced psychiatric technician for both children and adults.

To date, Cree has four novel length publications with Naughty Nights Press. Paranormal werewolf romance, Whisper on a Scream, and it’s sequel, Urban Fantasy nominated book for 2012, Willing Sacrifice. She also has paranormal romantic comedy, A Winter’s Grave, book one to the Reaper series and her most recent publication, Maple Lane Manor, Home for Retired Supernaturals. So far, Maple Lane Manor has been a finalist in the 2013 Up Authors Fiction Challenge and all have received the coveted 5 star review rating from the Paranormal Romance Guild.

~Contact Links:

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/#!/cree.walker.9

Twitter https://twitter.com/CreeWalker1

Email [email protected]

Blog/Website http://creewalker.wordpress.com

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