We are thrilled to be revealing the cover for Angelina M. Lopez’s Full Moon Over Freedom, along with a sneak peek!
Releasing on September 5th, Full Moon Over Freedom follows Gillian Armstead-Bancroft—Pride of the East Side and once-perfect bruja, wife, and mother— who is going to spend her summer getting good at being bad.
Now available for pre-order and to add to your Goodreads, read on to discover the synopsis, an excerpt, and the stunning cover with illustration by Alex Cabal / IllustrationX and art direction by Tara Scarcello!
The first time she left Freedom, Kansas, behind, she did it by doing everything right.
This time, she’ll hide from the large Mexican American family welcoming her home and work in secret to break the curse that’s erased her magical life. Only by doing it all wrong can Gillian get herself and her two children away from the ghosts of her hometown by summer’s end.
Nicky Mendoza is an answer to her prayers. He was the practical solution to the problem of her virginity when they were younger, and now, as a gorgeous artist in town for only a weekend, he’s the ideal man to launch her down the path of ruination.
But Gillian isn’t the only one who’s cursed.
Nicky has been plagued by his furtive, enduring love for her as long as he’s been haunted by his cadejo, the phantom black dog that stalks his psyche. He’ll stick around to be whatever Gillian needs him to be this summer—but he won’t touch her. Touching her, then watching her leave again, would ruin him for good.
An Introduction to the Excerpt!
After running into each other on the side of a country road and then a storm-soaked interlude when they almost but don’t, Gillian Armstead-Bancroft and Nicky Mendoza discover they’re going to be stuck together for the rest of the summer, working to get their struggling neighborhood back on its feet. The fact that they’re working in a refurbished train station with a broken air conditioner isn’t the worst part of their forced proximity after thirteen years apart. Gillian doesn’t want her gorgeous and successful artist friend to see how much she’s failed. Nicky doesn’t want Gillian to uncover the thing he’s always hidden: He’s deeply and painfully in love with her.
By day four of struggling to keep his eyes away from Gillian Armstead-Bancroft taking off her clothes, Nicky had had it. He knocked on the frame of her open door right after she arrived, his T-shirt back on and his backpack over it.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
She sat on the black-and-white tile reading from a file open on top of a blue tub, already holding her hair twisted off her neck. The two oscillating desk fans played with the tendrils on the side of her face, but didn’t blow away the sweat he could see gleaming in the hollow of her throat.
“Get out of here?” she asked, blinking at him with her new eyes.
Gillian’s latest metamorphosis into a thin-nosed woman with green eyes was no different than her previous transformation from a little girl always in pink to a slim teenager with a long neck and small breasts and wide eyes that looked at everything, including Nicky, as a challenge she could conquer. Gillian’s beauty was baked in deep. She dressed it up different depending on her goals.
For the last three days, the grown-up Gillian had strolled into his work site looking like the accountant other accountants hired for bachelor parties. She’d sit on the tile in her light sweaters and precisely styled hair and perfectly glossed wide mouth and pull up a blue bin to start going through it. Then, in the unforgiving heat inside the depot, she would shuck her cardigan. She would wiggle it off her shoulders then slip it down her slim tanned arms. While he was trying to concentrate on pictorial theme and color palette and the light at different times of day, she would raise her arms, display the curve of her waist or the press of her breasts, and twist up her hair. Sometimes she would bend over to roll up the cuffs of her pants. She would kick off her loafers. The tender pads of her bare feet would get dusty and dark as she walked around her office.
The Freedom train station was turning them into kids again, forcing him shirtless, her barefoot, and making them swim in the same steamy air.
He couldn’t take it another day. He’d stayed to take sips of her. Now he needed a drink. He needed to quench his thirst before he came clean about his fake engagement and showed her the value of getting naked in the train station.
“Yeah, we’ll check out one of the buildings on Milagro Street,” he said as he leaned against the doorframe. “It can’t be any hotter than it is in here.”
She let go of her hair and raked her fingers through it. She closed the folder and held it up. “Start with the Elkhart Hotel?”
As she searched through a desk drawer for the keys of the untenanted buildings Jeremiah had secured for her, Nicky closed his eyes and took a quick breath, inhaling her peach-sun-tea scent that the fans were blowing in his direction.
He had his eyes opened and his grin reattached by the time she turned back to face him.
The sun was white-hot when they stepped out from under the shade of the brick portico. The barren emptiness of Milagro Street made it like a ghost town; Nicky wouldn’t have been surprised to see a tumbleweed roll by.
Loretta’s cheery beer garden across the street with its railroad-tie planter boxes of red-and-white gardenias, red boxcar bar, and closed umbrellas in the middle of café tables looked totally out of place.
Gillian must have seen what he saw. “Trying to resuscitate this street is like pushing a boulder uphill,” she said, slipping on her oversized glasses and fluffing back her hair that was starting to kink in the June humidity.
“What’ve you learned so far?” he asked as they started walking the three blocks toward the once-famed Elkhart Hotel. He planned to incorporate elements of the street’s history into the mural. More importantly, he wanted to hear her voice.
“Well, I’ve learned that when the M.K. & T. ran their train line through here, people thought the oil boom was going to explode Freedom’s population to one hundred thousand. Can you imagine? They thought they’d need this second city center on the east side of town.”
Nicky had visited a lot of weird places but Freedom, Kansas, with the oil millionaires who once lived here and the moldering early-twentieth-century mansions proving it was true, the monkey from its zoo shot into space, and the Pulitzer Prize‒winning playwright who once roamed its streets, was one of the weirdest. Now, as they passed the second-busiest business on the strip, Nicky gave a nod and a wink to the bored check-cashing employee sitting inside behind a barred window. He returned an appreciative smile.
“This area turned out to be most popular with the traqueros, the Mexican immigrants who settled here to work on the railroad. The white business owners gave up on their fine buildings…” She motioned to the boarded-up windows of the Main Street‒style buildings they were passing. “…and Mexican business owners moved in and named it Milagro Street.”
They passed a run-down mini-mart that everyone knew was a rip-off, but was the only spot on the east side to grab milk if you didn’t or couldn’t drive. When Nicky’s mom couldn’t afford to fix their car, they’d shopped here.
“Milagro Street was the center of a thriving Mexican-American community for a couple of generations,” Gillian said, looking both ways on the empty cross street before she stepped off the sidewalk. She was wearing an oversized cotton shirt, cropped linen pants, and slim leather loafers. Dust billowed up around her trim ankles. “Loretta talks about how much fun she had running around on Milagro Street. She attended dances at the community center and met friends at the hotel’s coffee shop and shopped for her mom at the tienda. But my sisters and I only remember it like…” She pointed to the narrow lot they were passing. Behind the safety fencing with Torres Construction signs on it was the rubble of a demolished building.
Nicky had searched for and found his brother in a couple of these abandoned buildings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angelina M. Lopez writes sexy, contemporary stories about strong women and the confident men lucky to fall in love with them. She has been writing professionally her whole life: first as a journalist for an acclaimed city newspaper, then as a freelance magazine writer and a content marketer for small businesses, and now as a romance author. She lives with her family outside of Washington, D.C. You can find more about her at her website, AngelinaMLopez.com.
