Exclusive Cover Reveal & Excerpt: Hot Potato by Allison Temple

Posted August 13, 2019 by Dale

Good morning & hello to you all! I am very excited to share the cover for Allison Temple’s upcoming romance Hot Potato with you all!
Hot Potato is the conclusion to the Seacroft series and scheduled for a release on September 16 – so mark your calendars!

Scroll down for the gorgeous cover art, an exclusive excerpt & also don’t forget to enter the ARC giveaway!

As Seacroft’s resident weirdo, Avery proudly flies a lot of freak flags. It’s a constant battle to be taken seriously when everything, from his red hair to his sexuality, makes him stand out in this small town.

Small towns are also a terrible place to keep secrets, and Lincoln has a bunch of them. But his demons aren’t going to hold him back from his dream job at the Seacroft Fire Department. His life is finally coming together, until the red-haired twink with the big smile and fast mouth calls in an emergency.

Pining or the hot firefighter is Avery’s newest flag, even if he agrees to be “just friends.” For Linc, every minute with Avery is a temptation. He needs to let go of his fear and admit the truth. Linc doesn’t want to be Avery’s friend; he wants to be his everything. But just as Linc is ready to risk it all, Avery gets an unexpected offer to spread his colorful wings and fly away.

Cover Reveal and ARC Giveaway

Cover? Here’s the cover!! I’m so excited to share Avery’s sweet face with you!

Cover art by Cate Ashwood Designs
Release Date: September 16!
Add it on Goodreads

LOOK AT IT!! I’m absolutely head over heels IN LOVE with it. It’s so pretty and look at sweet, precious Avery!

ARC Giveaway!

With just over a month to go, ARCs are ready to go to readers! Reviews aren’t necessary, but they’ll be greatly appreciated, and there are huge karma points for trying a new-to-you author. There are two ways to enter the giveaway:

⇒ Join Allison’s Facebook Reader group and comment on the giveaway post.

⇒ Sign up for The A-List newsletter and you’re automatically entered.

Avery had always been good at numbers. Good at understanding how they fit together. In his life, he had several important numbers:

27—the decimals of pi he memorized in eighth grade to impress girls.

14—the age he realized he was way more interested in impressing boys.

9—(although it seemed longer) the seconds of silence between the time he said, “I’m gay,” to his parents and when his dad said, “Get out.”

3—the nights he slept at a shelter for homeless LGBT teens before his aunt and uncle found him and brought him to live at their house.

And now, two more numbers to add to the list with a certain immediate urgency.

5—how many minutes the internet said it would take to microwave a sweet potato all the way through.

4—(give or take a few seconds) the minutes it took Avery to fall so deeply asleep on his couch that he didn’t notice the sweet potato catching fire and filling his kitchen and his open-concept living room/dining room with smoke.

Fortunately, the alarm he’d had installed the week before moving in did its job and went off, screaming like an air-raid siren.

Avery was upright and scrambling for the alarm panel before he was even fully awake. His pulse thundered, and his brain was goopy sludge as he stared at the keypad and tried desperately to remember the temporary code the technician had punched in.

Of all the numbers to forget.

“You’ll want to change this to something you can remember easily, but that no one can guess.”

Yeah, thanks for that. Avery had meant to. Too many numbers to pick from, though. So he’d procrastinated and figured he’d get around to it eventually. Except now the alarm whooped and made his head hurt as he futilely stabbed at keys and tried to think what combination the technician might have used. Nothing was working.

0000?

1234?

Was it even a four-digit code?

His pocket vibrated, and he fumbled for his phone. The screen showed the name of the alarm company.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Yes, hello sir, we’re receiving an alarm signal from your property,” the voice on the phone said formally.

“Yes. Yes,” Avery gasped. “It’s fine. Just a false alarm.” He’d find a towel to wave under the smoke detector, open some windows—did his windows even open?—and it would be fine.

“False alarm?” The operator sounded uncertain, but what did he know? To him, Avery couldn’t possibly be more than a flashing dot on a computer monitor.

“It’s fine. Just my dinner. Nothing to worry about.”

“So you don’t require the fire department?”

Oh God, that would be the worst. Avery did not need the spectacle of first responders in front of his building.

On cue, flashing lights filled the small space at the top of the stairs to his basement apartment. Avery bounded up to the door and stared in horror at the big red truck parked at the curb.

“I’ll call you back,” he said into the phone.

“Sir? Sir?”

But Avery was already pulling open the door and running out over the lawn.

Allison Temple has been a writer since the second grade, when she wrote a short story about a girl and her horse. Her grandmother typed it out for her and said she’s never seen so many quotation marks from a seven-year-old before. Allison took that as a challenge and has gone on to try to break her previous record in all her subsequent works.

Allison lives in Toronto with her very patient husband and the world’s neediest cat. She splits her free time between writing, community theater stage management, and traveling anywhere that has good wine. Tragically, this leaves no time to clean her house.