Mini-Review/Excerpt/Giveaway!! The Chef and the Ghost of Bartholomew Addison Jenkins, by Aletta Thorne

Welcome to the blog tour for

The Chef and the Ghost of Bartholomew Addison Jenkins,

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Bewitching Book Tours!!

For my stop, I'm featuring a 
mini-review with excerpt.

There's also tour-wide giveaway!!

The Chef and the Ghost of Bartholomew Addison Jenkins

Aletta Thorne

Digital Edition, 158 pages

Evernight Publishing

October 26, 2017

Contemporary Romance, Fantasy, 
Paranormal Romance, 

Holiday Romance

Halloween, 1982. MTV is new, poodle perms are the rage, and life just might be getting better for Alma Kobel. Her ugly divorce is final at last. Her new job as chef at Bright Day School’s gorgeous old estate is actually fun. But the place is haunted—and so is Alma’s apartment.

Bartholomew Addison Jenkins’ ghost has been invisibly watching Alma for months. When he materializes one night, Alma discovers Bart—as he likes to be called—has talents she couldn’t have imagined … and a horrifying past. Can you have a one-nighter with a ghost? And what happens if you decide one night is all you want—and end up ghosting him? Some spirits don’t like taking “no” for an answer.

Note
This mini-review is of the excerpts below, and 
not of the entire book.

I decided to include two excerpts from this book, instead of one, as I really enjoyed reading both, and couldn't pick one over the other. Both of them are enchanting, and get the reader immersed in the story right away!
I love the interactions between Bart, as he likes to be called, and Alma. (Her first name is highly significant, by the way, as "alma" is the Spanish word for "soul".) They are obviously both wonderful people. It just so happens that one of them passed into the next world in 1784..... I love their bantering and humor, and Bart is endearingly sweet, as well as sexy. He comes across as total gentleman, as well. As for Alma, she's obviously taking it in stride that she's being visited by a very attractive ghost who is definitely interested in her. She feels as attracted to him as he does to her. Their encounters are not scary at all, but instead, sweetly romantic.
I know I will enjoy reading this novella! 

Excerpt 1

A ghost. Of course he was a ghost—even though before that night, she’d never felt anything spooky at her place in the almost-year she’d lived in it. Alma still had the plate with the omelet on it in one hand. Ghosts didn’t eat, did they? She held it out to him anyway.

“Go ahead and have your supper,” he said. “I don’t need food. I take it you understand why.”
Alma nodded, not sure what to say. For a ghost, the man looked rather....dashing, she decided was the word. He must have been muscular in life. There were nicely rounded biceps under that loose shirt, and they showed when he moved his arms. His knee knickers fit tightly over a flat belly, and his stockings make his calves look like they were made out of smooth, white marble. His eyes were a startling, luminous golden brown.

“Sadly, we are still perfectly able to smell a good meal cooking.”

“We?” Alma said.

The man nodded. “Your dead,” he said, solemnly.

“My dead?” she said.

“Well, you live here, don’t you? So, I’m your dead, now.” He stopped looking so serious then and as if guys in knee knickers and white stockings were born doing it, he opened her refrigerator and pulled out the bottle of Chablis. “Here, give me your glass,” he said, and topped it off. The glow from the refrigerator’s light made him even more luminous—and just the slightest bit translucent.

“Thanks,” she said, although it was her wine. She put her plate and glass down on a little enamel-topped kitchen table she’d bought at a local church thrift shop and pulled out one of the table’s funky old chairs for herself.

“Fork? Napkin?” he said, pulling those things out of the drawers next to Alma’s stove. Alma used cloth napkins from the restaurant supplier—big white ones.

“You know where my things are,” she said, spreading the napkin across her lap.

“That shouldn’t surprise you,” he said. “Eat your omelet while it’s hot. Go ahead.”
Alma took a bit. "Um, the pepper grinder on the stove?" she said. "Could you, please?"

“My lady.” He smiled and handed it to her with a little bow.

 She ground a little pepper over her plate and took another bite and sipped her wine. He sat down across from her, put his elbows on the table, and his chin in his hands.

“I enjoy watching you eat.”

“Okay, I guess. It’s not … weird?”

“No.”

 A ghost is watching me eat an omelet. “What’s your name?”

“Bartholomew Addison Jenkins,” he said. “These days, I just use Bart.”

“These days. But you’ve been here since you…”

“Since 1784,” he said.

“Which was when you died, I guess.”

“I must tell you, dear lady, saying that to one of us is considered rude. In better ghostly circles, that is. Some of us are not aware we are dead. Some of us do not like to be reminded of it.”

****************


Excerpt 2

When she opened the door to her apartment, her stomach sank. A dim square of light flickered in the hall outside her bedroom door. Yikes! Was I actually dumb enough to have left candles burning? Alma was scolding herself for having been dangerously spacey when she realized that the light from her room did not come from any sort of flame.

It came from Bart. He was standing beside her bed in his high-collared, loose-fitting shirt and his knee britches. And that was … not really strange at all. Just the friendly, resident ghost. No danger of burning down the house. A relief—and Alma had to be honest with herself—a pleasant surprise.

“Good evening, m’lady,” he said.
Alma opened her mouth to say hello back -- and burped, instead. A Garbage Pie burp was an impressive burp. "Oh, wow. Excuse me."

Bart chuckled as she dropped her purse in the chair next to her dresser.

“Rich dinner?”

“A Garbage Pie,” she said. “It sounds awful, but it’s—you know what pizza pie is, right?”

“The previous residents of this apartment ate little else. I know well what Garbage Pies are,” he said. “I do not fear them.”

Then he stepped in front of Alma and slipped his arms around her, something else that should have been shocking but wasn’t. Just the resident ghost, after all. The resident ghost who can really kiss. Bart’s touch tingled with cold fire.

“Well, hello,” Alma said.

“I missed you,” said Bart, then he put his mouth over hers and kissed her. She felt something feathery—his chest touching hers--and she nearly dissolved into it. His tongue was cool in her mouth, and full of sparks. He tasted almost sweet.

Purchase Links
Amazon US/Amazon UK/Amazon CA
Barnes & Noble/Evernight

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Aletta Thorne believes in ghosts.  In her non-writing life, she is a choral singer, a poet, a sometimes DJ, and a writer about things non-supernatural.  But she’s happiest in front of a glowing screen, giving voice to whoever it is that got her two cats all riled up at three AM.  Yes, her house is the oldest one on her street.  And of course, it’s quite seriously haunted (scared the ghost investigator who came to check it out).  She is named after a little girl in her family who died in the late nineteenth century, at the age of two. The Chef and the Ghost of Bartholomew Addison Jenkins is her first romance.

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