Blog Tour: Belladonna by Fiona Paul

HELLO! If you all know, I'm a ginormous fan of Fiona Paul. As in, I feel like I force her to pick me for all her Venom Things. SO I AM HERE WITH THE BELLADONNA BLOG TOUR and an awesome annotated excerpt that'll make your toes tingle and your book buying side shiver.

Check out my review of BELLADONNA.

Excerpt

Cass couldn’t move. She stood there, transfixed, speechless, letting her eyes wander over his whole body. The moonlight outlined his broad shoulders and the dark brown hair that had grown even longer since she’d last seen him, the ends of it brushing against his cheekbones and dangling below his square jaw. He broke away from his friends with a wave and began to cross the piazza toward her, the collar of his shirt flopping open to expose a triangle of muscular chest. Warmth bloomed in Cass’s cheeks. Her hands had been all over those muscles just a few weeks earlier.

Falco’s jaw dropped slightly as he approached, his lips curving into the lopsided smile she had missed so much.

“Starling,” he said. “I cannot believe it. Are you the product of too much wine or too many wishes?” He reached out, taking one of her hands in his own. “You feel real enough.”

“Hello, Falco,” she managed to say. She felt as if she might explode. Only now did she let herself realize how she had missed every tiny detail of him. More than anything, she wanted to pull him into her arms, to press her lips to the tiny scar beneath his right eye, to bury her face in the warmth of his hair.

Falco lifted her hand to his mouth, brushing his lips gently across her soft skin. It was an innocent gesture, but Cass could sense the urgency beneath it. He felt exactly the same way she did. She knew it.

Pulling her close and cradling her face in his hands, he said, “I have visited Florence’s breathtaking cathedrals and reviewed the works of the masters, but you are the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since I left Venice.”

Heat coursed from his fingers into her skin and the blood and bones beneath it. Falco’s hands smelled faintly of paint. Cass smiled. She couldn’t help herself. For a second the two of them were back on San Domenico, kissing on a bench in her aunt’s garden. For a second, desire budded and bloomed inside of her, as scarlet and fragrant as Agnese’s roses. Intoxicating. For a second nothing had changed.

Only everything had changed.

Fiona’s thoughts: Erm, what? Oh sorry, I got distracted. So again, you all KNOW Falco is coming back in the picture from the flap copy, so I don’t consider this passage spoilery. I figured we couldn’t have a whole blog tour without at least a taste of Falco since the other tours are having Falco-related posts.

The reason I picked this passage is to show Cass’s character development. Clearly, she still has the hots for Falco, but instead of being the wild impulsive girl from Venom who would have run and thrown herself into Falco’s arms, she’s holding back. Inside she’s budding and blooming and freaking out, but outside she’s more like “’Sup?”

This is for two reasons. First of all, she doesn’t blindly trust Falco like she did back when he first ignited all of her hormones. Reviewers like to write about characters acting irrational and how Instalove is so bogus, but dude, I still remember those first couple of guys who set me ablaze when I was a teen and I probably would have followed them off the edge of a cliff. Maybe it isn’t love, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t FEEL like it. Anyway, Cass is a little wary. Falco lied to her. Then he essentially left her to pursue his art after she refused to run away with him.

The second thing going on here is that between Venom and Belladonna, Cass spends a few weeks with Luca, trying to be the fiancée she is expected to be. Even if she doesn’t have feelings for her fiancé at this moment (open for debate) he’s a decent guy who saved her life. It’s a lot easier for her to cheat on a person who she hasn’t seen in years than it is to cheat on a person who just saved her. Especially when that guy is currently in prison and Cass feels indebted to him.

Belladonna Blurb

In the second in the stunning Secrets of the Eternal Rose series, Cassandra Caravello is trying to forget Falco, the wild artist who ran off with her heart, as she grows closer to her strong, steady fiancé, Luca. But Luca seems to have his own secrets. When he’s arrested by soldiers in the middle of the night, Cass’s life is once again thrown into chaos. She must save Luca, and that means finding the Book of the Eternal Rose—the only evidence that will prove he’s innocent.
So begins her journey to Florence, a city haunted by whispers of vampirism, secret soirees and clandestine meetings of the Order of the Eternal Rose. And home to Falco, who is working for the Order’s eerily stunning leader, the Belladonna herself.
Can Cass trust her heart to lead her to the truth this time?
Nothing is as it seems in this seductive thriller, where the truth may be the deadliest poison of all.

Short Author Bio

Fiona Paul lives in St. Louis, MO where she's managed to persuade prestigious universities to award her degrees in psychology and nursing. Between her studies, she traveled around five continents and spent time living in Thailand and South Korea (which is probably why she finds the idea of wearing shoes in the house a little weird.)

In addition to writing, Fiona is somewhat obsessive about coffee, music, and adventure sports. Her future goals include swimming with great white sharks and writing a whole truckload of novels, not necessarily in that order.She also writes contemporary YA under the name Paula Stokes.

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