Friday 17 August 2018

🌼 Kelsey Kingsley 🌼 DAISIES & DEVIN 🌼 #StandaloneRockstarRomance 🌼

© Bianca ✰ 
    


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• 17 August 2018
• a contemporary friends-to-lovers,
roommates-to-lovers,
rock star romance!
• standalone!

★★★★★
5 Stars
Every story has a hero.
Devin O'Leary was mine.


Everybody has a dream,
And mine could take me far.
Just me, and my voice,
A stage, and this guitar.
With patience and some luck,
I could see me standing there,
But that was before I saw her-
The girl with the purple hair.

Enchanted by her beauty,
Her soul, and then, her eyes,
I saw the broken girl within,
And my dream became her life.

So, I found myself on a journey,
Of tragedy and letting go,
Of happiness and daisies,
Of serenades and Poe.
But no one taught us how to cope,
With life's unpredictable scheme.
Still I'm the hero in her story,
And she's my only dream.




The book starts in 2006. Kylie is in her last year of college. Her dream - hers and her dad's - has always been to open a CafΓ© with amazing drinks and poetry readings and singer/songwriters serenading the guests. But her dad is also her biggest problem. He's a drug addict and he just can't stay clean. Kylie and her mom have sent him to rehab so often but it never sticks and Kylie just can't deal with loving and hating him at the same time.
Enter Devin.
She meets him at a party - a year before the book starts, but we go back and forth in time in the beginning of the story. Devin is two years older than her and he never went to college. He works for his dad's construction company. He loves it. Makes good money. But he dreams of making a living with his music. He's an amazing singer, guitar player and songwriter - and Kylie loves it when he sings to her. But Kylie also doesn't want any romantic relations at the moments - she just can't deal with that on top of worrying about her dad.
Devin tries to be patient. Hoping for more than being her best friend - but if that's what he'll always be - he'll take it. He's been madly in love with her since he saw her at that party. He just wants to be in her life.
And in her life he'll be ... the years go by ...
Things happen - things that weren't planned - life doesn't turn out the way Kylie and Devin have always thought it would.... but they adapt and change dreams and it could all still work out ok in the end ... but of course life is not yet done with them .... life is not yet ready to give them their Happily Ever After ...

What will happen with Kylie & Devin??
Will they find their Happily Ever After??
READ THE BOOK TO FIND OUT!
 







Kylie & Devin.
Oy.
This was such a ... HUGE and ... HEAVY ... book.
I adored it. But it also kinda broke my heart. Several times.
It has this melancholy mood throughout ... but also this hopeful young adult mood at first. We sooo hope that Kylie and Devin will survive everything life throws at them. We need them to get that happy end.
But of course it's a looooong way until we might see a happily ever after on the horizon. If at all. ☺
But we love every single page of that journey.
Sweet, funny, heartbreaking. With lots of music and feelings and poems and waiting and so much love.
I just fell for those two immediately. Even though I wanted to shake some sense into Kylie a few times. To get out of that depression and fight for her guy. And for Devin to fight harder. Ugh. This book is really hard on the reader's heart! But it's so worth it!



I just wish they wouldn't have wasted all those years. Just one tiny little conversation in the first year or in the second year and bam - Happy End. But nooooo - we had to wait over a decade! Ugh. Really sad when you think about it! But like always in such 'wasted-time-situations' in books, it had to be that way for them to be ready for each other ...
BUT still - it was an amazing book - and amazing love story.
I had to put down my kindle a few times and go do other things. I was just way too afraid of what might happen to those two along the way.
The only things I didn't love other than the huge amount of wasted time.... I don't like cats and I'm not a fan of tattoos (especially on a girl - sorry - no offense to the author and other tatted girls, it's just my personal opinion. I know I'm weird!)☺ But it didn't bother me much. I still adored Kylie and Devin. I grrrrrrr .... I just wanted them to fight harder for each other. But I guess they were just too afraid to lose the other completely.
I think they really needed all those years to grow up. Some moments in that book I thought??? What??? How old are you? 16? 22? Guys! You're in your thirties!! Jeez! ☺
Ok, enough! I LOVED the story and I need Netflix to come and make something out of this asap!

Another tiny little side note - I loved that we meet Patrick Kinney from the Kinney Brothers Series!!!

DAISIES & DEVIN was such a heartbreakingly beautiful  & emotional & frustrating & moving & adorable love story full of love & music & Poe & cats & tattoos & daisies & hope & dreams & waiting & ALL THE FEELS!!! Run to your nearest amazon to see if Kylie & Devin will get that happily ever after - but get your own sexy construction-guy-rock-star - this one is MINE! ☺



• EXCERPT •

“So, uh …” I cleared my throat. Goddamn nerves. “Uh, what do you want me to play?”
“Oh, you take requests, huh?”
I laughed awkwardly. “I, um … I didn’t say I’d know everything, but you could, uh—”
“Oh my God, you’re so anxious right now,” she teased, pressing her shoulder into mine. “Just surprise me.”
I slapped my hand over my eyes. “Oh Jesus. Okay …” Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Okay,” and I cleared my throat again and dug into my pocket for a pick.
I placed it between my teeth, strummed downward, determined I was satisfied with the sound and positioned my hands on the frets and over the strings.
“So, what are you going to play?” She wiggled her feet excitedly, and I laughed.
I squinted my eyes at her under the streetlight as I pinched the pick between my fingers. “You promise not to make fun of me?”
“I’m making no promises to a guy I just met.”
“Hey, I promised not to abduct you,” I countered, pointing my pick at her.
With a roll of her eyes, she wobbled her head. “Fine, fine. I promise to not make fun of you … much.”
I made a show of glancing around, swiveling my head this way and that, and I tipped my mouth to her ear. “I’m really, really into John Mayer.”
I was so close to her. I closed my eyes for a nanosecond and inhaled her scent. It was something floral, laced with a sweet, crisp fruitiness. Apple, maybe. I didn’t know if it was her perfume or a shampoo, but whatever it was, it calmed my nerves while perpetuating the pulsing arousal I had been plagued with since seeing her for the first time.
“You’re not going to sing ‘Your Body is a Wonderland’ to me, are you?” She was laughing lightly, freely, and I leaned away to stare into her glimmering eyes. Fucking hell, all of those blues.
“God no.” I said it with a groan and a dramatic roll of my eyes, but I was lying. I liked that song, but she didn’t need to know that.
My pick started to strum and my fingers bounced from chord to chord on the fretboard, as her feet moved in time with the tune. I opened my mouth, got out the beginning of a single word, and her jaw unhinged.
“Wait, wait, wait … you didn’t tell me you sing too!” Her hands went to her mouth to stifle her squeal and I laughed, my fingers freezing against the strings.
“Was I supposed to warn you?”
“Devin,” she said, following the roll of her eyes as she tipped her head toward my shoulder. “You can’t just serenade a girl under the stars without at least giving her a heads-up.”
I laughed again, shaking my head incredulously. “Okay, fine. I sing, I play the guitar and sometimes I do this little knocking, foot stomping thing. Happy?”
“Yes thank you, I now consider myself thoroughly warned. Please, proceed.”
I looked to her, caught the excitement in her eyes, and I knew for certain that I was in trouble and this was a trouble I had never known before. This wasn’t the condom went missing kind of trouble. This wasn’t the called her the wrong name kind of trouble. This was deeper, meaningful. It was dangerous and my heart panicked with the twitching of her lips. God, I wanted to kiss them more than I wanted to get my hands on a Gibson Hummingbird.
I managed a smile despite the rush of fear and started over. I thought a rousing rendition of “No Such Thing” was called for—a fun song that sounded the way summer felt. Except, I went slower, suddenly wanting to serenade her, despite her insistence that she wasn’t sleeping with me. That was still fine. I could take things slow, or, I could take them not at all. I just wanted to show her what I could do, what I was made of. Because for some reason, it now felt like it all mattered.
My fingers played “Not Myself” and my voice carried the lyrics into the night. It was an odd pick, I thought, but it felt fitting somehow. As if maybe I knew where time was going to take us, or maybe it was hope; I couldn’t really say. I sang my heart out, squeezing my eyes shut, feeling the words and the music. Strumming the strings with patient perfectionism. It was one of my favorites from Mayer’s Room for Squares album. One of the songs I had practiced until the strings cut through my calluses and I had to wear a few Band-aids for a week.
My grand finale was a smooth segue into the chorus of “Bigger Than My Body.” It was unrelated in tone and meaning, but I loved that fucking song. I felt it and it felt me. It was my anthem, the musical embodiment of the feeling saying I was meant for something so much more than this. More than suburban Connecticut. More than tool belts and jigsaws. I couldn’t not play it when I already had the guitar out, when I already had the music pumping the blood in my veins.
I glanced at Kylie, at the tapping of her toes against the pavement. The chewing of her lower lip, the glint in her sapphire eyes. She grinned at me as I tipped my head back to send those high notes into the sky. Her shoulder bumped into mine, rocking with the strumming of the guitar, and when I hit that last chord, throwing my pick-hand up into the air like I belonged next to Springsteen, I beamed back at her. I felt more elated than I ever had and I let out a loud and echoed whoop toward the sky.
I continued to grin, energetic and buzzed. “So, do I suck?” I asked, cocking my brow and draping my arms over the guitar’s hollow body.
Kylie’s smile spread over her face and her teeth sunk into her lower lip. “You already know the answer to that question.”
Feeling alive and fearless, I tilted toward her, gently touching my forehead to hers. “You promised to be honest,” I reminded her.
She wrinkled her nose, playfully shoving me away and I leaned back, laughing, drunk on my music. “You want honesty?”
I nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“’Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry,’” she said.
My eyebrows lifted and my mouth quirked into a sheepish little smile that probably would’ve embarrassed me, had she been anybody else. “Uh, what?”
“Oh, it’s, um … it’s Poe. I memorize a lot of his quotes and stuff,” she said, her blush creeping over her cheekbones. “Well, anyway,” she continued, not waiting for a response, “I guess all I can really say is that, you are wasting your time building houses.”
“You’ve never seen my houses,” I said pointedly.
She found my eyes and held my gaze. “I don’t need to to know that you could never love anything as much as you love playing that guitar.”
I just smiled and nodded, because It was then, in that moment, I truly knew there was one thing I could love more than that guitar, if she let me.


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When I was a wee lassie, I was told by my preschool teachers that I was a natural at storytelling. When I was just a little older than that, an old friend's mother said to me, "Kelsey, one day your books are going to be on the shelves at the library." 

Well, Diane, I don't know if my books are ever going to be on the shelves of libraries, but I'm sure as hell going to try. 

When I'm not writing stories destined to be bestsellers, I enjoy devouring TV shows, listening to every type of music there is and going to concerts, reading pretty much anything (with a soft spot for romance and certain books located in 18th century Scotland), obsessing over makeup, and pretending to workout. 

I also have a fondness for cats, my family, tattoos, and a really good French fry.