Romance Addict Book Blog: BLOG TOUR & REVIEW - Desert Rice & Desert Flower by Angela Scott

He removed his shirt and when he started to unzip his jeans. I did what he told me not to and closed my eyes. The zipper, the sound. Panic crawled up my chest and hitched in my throat. Stop it. Just stop it. This is different. Carson loves you. Carson loves you....

"Please, Sam, open your eyes."

My eyes fluttered open and latched onto his—my safety, my solace.

He lifted me in his arms, my naked upper body pressed against his bare chest, and he carried me into the room that would someday be the master bedroom. He knelt and placed me down on the shag carpet before sliding the length of his body next to mine. Naked, we both lay there in the completely empty room.

He ran his hand through my hair and brushed it from my face. "Are you sure, Sam?"

I nodded. I needed to be with someone who understood me, loved me, cared for me. My someone was Carson—it had always been.

He kissed me as his hands gently explored my body. When his hand found the second little bandage on my thigh, he paused and looked at me. "Two?"

What would he think of a tattoo on my inner thigh? What kind of girl did that? Slutty girls and ones who were trying to hide something—was I one or both of them? He removed the bandage and looked at the tiny identical flower.

"Now that is the sexiest thing I've ever seen." He smiled and bent to kiss it. I drew in my breath and held it as his lips and tongue touched my sensitive skin.

Oh, my—

He held himself above me. "Keep your eyes on me, Sam. Don't leave me, okay?"

My breathing became labored, my fear genuine. It had all come down to this. This moment. I looked at him, my eyes firmly locked onto his, in an effort to prepare myself—though nothing could really prepare me.

It just had to happen.

And when it did, I stopped breathing until it was over.

Desert Rice by Angela Scott starts off with us meeting Sam and Jacob Haggert as they’re trying to move their mother’s dead body back into the trailer, where they lived. Neither one of them showing any remorse for their mother being dead, just remorse over having to move the dead body of someone who was suppose to have loved them and take care of them.

Sam and Jacob take off in their mother’s old beat up truck to drive across the country after securing her body in the trailer. They drive around for what seems like a few weeks before settling in a motel in a small town in Arizona. After a while they come to find this town as their permanent home.

This story is told to us by Sam, and we go along in their journey from her perspective. She is only thirteen and Jacob is only fifteen, but Jacob takes the role as Sam’s protector and keeps her on a tight leash at all times. She doesn’t feel like she has any freedom and most of the time resents Jacob for constantly enforcing rules and telling her how it has to be.

Desert Rice broke my heart for this little girl and little boy several times over the course of reading it. I can’t even begin to imagine myself in any kind of similar situation. Only now as an adult do I worry about having to take care of myself and helping provide for my family. To think about having these responsibilities at that age doesn’t even register in my mind.

I just wanted to drive to that town myself and pick both of them up and bring them home with me. There were also times when I wanted to ring both of their necks and knock some sense into them! My heart raced when I thought they were in danger and it fell out of my chest when they faced another heartbreak.

There are things about their past they are pretty obvious by Sam’s reactions to different situations but you don’t find out the depth of everything until they are taken in by man and his girlfriend after they have to face a life threatening condition. When the couple demands to know everything in order for them to stay, their past comes to a head, and Jacob is no longer able to protect Sam from all the demons he tried to help her run from.

Desert Flower by Angela Scott starts off six years later when Sam finds a (presumably dead) man lying naked in the middle of the desert. Only, he isn’t dead.

This story becomes a little bit more of a romance novel as it focuses on Sam’s love life and getting over her past in order to have a future. She suddenly finds herself torn between two men when she never had plans of ever being in a romantic relationship to being with. Carson knows everything about her and her past and loves her despite it, while the appeal that Turner doesn’t know anything about her past pegs at her as well.

You follow Sam as a young woman suddenly having to make adult decisions once again. She makes bad choice after bad choice and you just want to shake her and tell her to get over it, because you know it’s her past that’s guiding the road she leading down. However, there are situations she gets into that are out of her control and your heart just continues to break for her as it seems she can never have anything to come to her easily.

Honestly, it probably varies on the reader as to which guy you want her to pick. Personally, she didn’t pick the one I wanted her to because I didn’t think she even wanted to pick him, and just did it because she felt she had no other options. I kept waiting and waiting for door number two to open again for Sam, but by the time it did Angela Scott had changed my mind, and I liked door number one. My heart still broke a little bit for door number two in the end.

This might be a bit of a spoiler, so stop reading if you don’t want any spoilers, but I have to be honest about one part. The part about the post-pardon depression really got to me because I too suffered from post-pardon. I didn’t suffer to the extent that it’s described in the book, but I had a hard time reading it and had to just skim through it. While I think it’s important to bring awareness to post-pardon depression (as well as the effects in can have on the family) and I felt like Angela Scott did a wonderful job portraying it, it was just a little tough for me to read.

These books were beautifully written and so incredibly amazing. They took me on an intense journey through Sam’s story. I couldn’t put it done because I just had to know that everything was going to turn out ok for her. After all the struggles she has had to face you just want her to have some sort of peace.

I hear voices. Tiny fictional people sit on my shoulders and whisper their stories in my ear. Instead of medicating myself, I decided to pick up a pen, write down everything those voices tell me, and turn it into a book. I’m not crazy. I’m an author. For the most part, I write contemporary Young Adult novels. However, through a writing exercise that spiraled out of control, I found myself writing about zombies terrorizing the Wild Wild West—and loving it. My zombies don’t sparkle, and they definitely don’t cuddle. At least, I wouldn’t suggest it.

I live on the benches of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains with two lovely children, one teenager, and a very patient husband. I graduated from Utah State University with a B.A. degree in English, not because of my love for the written word, but because it was the only major that didn’t require math. I can’t spell, and grammar is my arch nemesis. But they gave me the degree, and there are no take backs.

As a child, I never sucked on a pacifier; I chewed on a pencil. I’ve been writing that long. It has only been the past few years that I’ve pursued it professionally, forged relationships with other like-minded individuals, and determined to make a career out of it.

You can subscribe and follow me on my website, where I blog obsessively about my writing process and post updates on my current works. I’m also on Twitter and Facebook, but be forewarned, I tweet and post more than a normal person.

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Website: http://www.angelascottauthor.com/

Angela will award one commenter at every stop on the tour a Mobi or ePub copy of WANTED: Dead or Undead or Survivor Roundup from her backlist, and one randomly drawn commenter on the tour will receive a $15 gift card to Amazon.

Follow the tour and comment; the more you comment, the better your chances of winning. The tour dates can be found here: