Smoke by Emily Mims ❤️ Fun Facts, Book Tour & Gift Card Giveaway ❤️ (Romantic Suspense)

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A concert violinist and musical prodigy, Francesca Giordano is internationally acclaimed and always in the spotlight—right where she doesn’t want to be. Not after she’s witnessed a murder. Suddenly on the run, she finds her way to Bristol, Tennessee, and to the music club Acoustics. There, as “ Chessie Hope,” she can hide out in the open. But with this newest gig comes a different kind of danger. Older and impossibly sexy, bluegrass singer Cooper Barstow is everything she’s ever wanted in a man, and his daughters are just as easy to love. Yet Francesca cannot enjoy the luxury of such a relationship, not even if he could protect her from the men on her trail or if she could be honest with him about who she is. Cooper is as wounded as he is strong, and he needs someone who will stay by his side for the rest of his life. Just as Francesca does. And the smoke on the mountains and the haze of desire almost make her believe that could happen.

About Emily Mims

Fun fact #1
Emily met her husband Charles when she crashed his birthday party on Feb. 6, 1970. She didn’t see him again until they got on a bus for a field trip to Mexico over Easter/Spring Break, where he asked her and several other girls to smuggle some film into Mexico for him. Emily happily complied. He retrieved his film and took her out for the first time on Friday. The attraction was instant and mutual. On Tuesday, he proposed. (Yep, five days later.) She said yes and he gave her an amethyst ring to ‘hold her’ until he could put a diamond on her hand. They married a year later and are still together forty-six years and two kids later.

Fun fact #2
Emily’s alter ego, ‘Mrs. Mims,’ taught science for 39 years in the San Antonio public schools and wrote the district curriculum in astronomy.

Fun fact #3
Emily has had two writing careers. She wrote 18 books under the pen name ‘Emily Elliott’ for Candlelight Ecstasy in the 1980’s, took a long hiatus, and returned to writing as ‘Emily Mims’ in 2013.

Fun fact #4
Emily has grandchildren in Tennessee and Georgia and thinks nothing of a two-day road trip to see them. She loves Appalachia and Georgia, and loved to go to Hawaii when she had a grandson living there.

Fun fact #5
Emily plays several musical instruments and performs in two musical groups, The Riverpickers and Ukulele Ladies and Gents. She plays piano and organ, some guitar, the dulcimer and banjo dulcimer, and really loves the ukulele. She loves the old-time mountain music she makes with the Riverpickers and makes as many dulcimer festivals as she can. But she also loves Hawaiian music and other music with Ukulele Ladies and Gents and has been known to play everything from murder mystery dinners to parades with them. In fact, the Smoky Blue series is the outgrowth of her love for making music.

Fun Fact #6
Emily loves to go with her husband Charles to their lake home in the Texas Hill Country. The home has been in the Mims family for sixty years. The home and the little community surrounding it became the inspiration and backdrop for Emily’s first nine books for Boroughs Publishing, the Texas Hill Country series.

Behind the Scenes #1
Emily haunts the Lancome counter. She loves makeup and wouldn’t be caught dead outside the house without a full makeup job!

Behind the Scenes #2
Emily works from a quiet corner in her bedroom when she is in San Antonio. She works at the lake from a computer desk overlooking the beach.

Behind the Scenes #3
Emily loves Aloha shirts. She has tons of them and wears them most of the year in sunny, hot south Texas.

Did you know #1
Emily and Charles have UAS, Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome. Between them they own 18 ukuleles.

Did you know #2
Emily loves road trips. She went on six last year and literally drove from coast to coast. She saw the Atlantic from Savannah and the Pacific from San Diego. She and Charles drove over 15,000 miles last year!

Did you know #3
Emily loves to write! She just finished her 31st novel and already has plots written for four more.

Cooper hit his front door and took the quickest shower on record. Still, he was almost a half hour late by the time he pulled into Chessie’s driveway. Hopefully she would understand. He was about halfway across the yard when he heard music coming from somewhere inside the house. He slowed down and stopped, listening in astonishment to the outpouring of a violin, a violin in the hands of an incredibly gifted musician. Who was playing the violin? Was Chessie a closet classical music fan? Was that a recording, or was that Chessie herself making this incredible music?

Cooper glanced in the window and his mouth fell open. It was Chessie. She was standing in front of the window in her pink cotton robe, her fingers flying over the strings so fast they were a blur and her bow moving nimbly over the strings as she made that violin sing. It was Chessie making that incredible music. Music that Jake never in a million years could have made. Music that he himself could never have made. Music that required more talent and technique that she would ever need as a bluegrass fiddler. Music that somehow seemed strangely familiar, even though he didn’t think he’d ever heard it before. Cooper suddenly thought back to his initial reaction to her, the first time he heard her play. He wondered then why a woman of her talent played bluegrass music.

Now he knew. She didn’t play just bluegrass music. She played classical music too. And she played it wonderfully.

Chessie Hope was not the simple bluegrass musician she presented herself to be.

Author of thirty romance novels, Emily Mims combined her writing career with a career in public education until leaving the classroom to write full time. The mother of two sons and grandmother of six, she and her husband Charles live in central Texas but frequently visit grandchildren in eastern Tennessee and Georgia. She plays the piano, organ, dulcimer, and ukulele and belongs to two performing bands. She says, “I love to write romances because I believe in them. Romance happened to me and it can happen to any woman-if she’ll just let it.”