Today's Special - - A Torch in his Heart

It's my pleasure to welcome the Anna Belfrage blog tour to The Romance Dish today. Anna is here to talk about A Torch in his Heart, the first book of her The Wanderers contemporary romance/time slip series.   

Had Anna been allowed to choose, she'd have become a professional time-traveller. As such a profession does not exist, she settled for second best and became a financial professional with two absorbing interests, namely history and writing. These days, Anna combines an exciting day-job with a large family and her writing endeavours. Plus she always finds the time to try out new recipes, chase down obscure rose bushes and initiate a home renovation scheme or two.

Her most recent release, A Torch in His Heart, is a step out of her comfort zone. Having previously published historical fiction & historical romance, with this first book about Jason and Helle Anna offers a dark and titillating contemporary romance, complete with a time-slip angle and hot & steamy scenes. 

Her first series, The Graham Saga, is set in 17th century Scotland and Virginia/Maryland. It tells the story of Matthew and Alex, two people who should never have met - not when she was born three hundred years after him. With this heady blend of time-travel, romance, adventure, high drama and historical accuracy, Anna hopes to entertain and captivate, and is more than thrilled when readers tell her just how much they love her books and her characters. There are nine books in the series so far, but Anna is considering adding one or two more...

Her second series is set in the 1320s and features Adam de Guirande, his wife Kit, and their adventures and misfortunes in connection with Roger Mortimer's rise to power. The King's Greatest Enemy is a series where passion and drama play out against a complex political situation, where today's traitor may be tomorrow's hero, and the Wheel of Fortune never stops rolling. 

Connect with Anna at the links below: 

Website | Facebook | Twitter

There is something fascinating about the concept of reincarnation. Other than making death somewhat less final, it also seems to offer the opportunity to do better next time round—assuming, of course, that you want to do better. 

In some religions, reincarnation is a fundamental tenet of faith—like in Hinduism. The purpose with each life is to better yourself, strive upwards spiritually. If you don’t, you may end up reborn as a lowly dog in the next life, i.e. you’ve been thrown several steps backwards in your pursuit of Nirvana and eternal bliss.

In other religions, reincarnation is a major no-no. Such is the case for Christians, Muslims and Jews. All these religions say we have one life—only one—in which to determine how our souls will spend eternity. These religions all differ in how they depict the hereafter, but on the matter of multiple lives they speak with one voice: IMPOSSIBLE.

Me, I don’t know. I’m not so sure I’d like to be a reincarnated soul—and especially not if I remembered my preceding lives—but I am not about to dismiss it out of hand as impossible.
“Good to know,” Jason Morris says drily. Well, he would, seeing as my protagonist in A Torch in His Heart is a multi-reincarnated man who has spent over fifty lives looking for the woman he loved and lost first time round. “It would be terrible if you considered me an impossibility,” he adds.
Seeing as he doesn’t really exist outside my head (and between the pages of my book) I’m not sure it matters if he’s an impossibility—but I don’t tell him that. Protagonists tend to be sensitive souls that bruise easily—especially true of Jason, whom I lumbered with all those lives and memories of all of them. Frankly, how he holds on to his sanity is a bit of a mystery.

That, I think, would be the huge, huge downside of multiple lives: remembering it all, not going crazy when trying to sort out which memories are relevant to the present lives, which are not. Our poor brains aren’t made to accommodate memories from more than one life—which, I suppose, supports those saying reincarnation is impossible.

“Unless the slate is wiped clean every time,” Helle Madsen says. I give my female protagonist a warm smile. I like this young woman who has absolutely zero memories of any prior lives until the day she ends up face to face with Jason, a shadow who has figured frequently in her dreams but whom she has never, ever met before. She thinks. Maybe. Because seriously, she must have met him at some point seeing as she recognises him, right?

Helle does not believe in mumbo-jumbo stuff like reincarnation, so it is something of a wake-up call to suddenly stand face to face with a man who professes to be the reincarnation of her lover from 3 000 years ago. In fact, Helle worries Jason might be crazy but the way he looks at her, the way he makes her feel, all those butterflies that soar through her belly when he smiles at her, the heat he generates in her, the memories he seems to awaken in her…
Helle gulps. “Memories?” She gives me a panicky look.
I pat my heroine on the head and nod. “Memories, Helle.”
“Shit.” She collapses to sit. “So what Jason is telling me is true? We’ve been around for like eons?”
“Yup.” I choose not to tell her that while everything Jason is telling her is true, it does not follow that Jason is telling her everything. There are some things he desperately hopes she will never, ever remember from that first life of theirs. Unfortunately, once the barriers to her ancient memories have been broken, Helle starts remembering. A lot.  What can I say? Jason is about to realise that just because he has found Helle again that doesn’t mean there’s a fail-safe Happily Ever After waiting down the line…
“no!” Jason scowls at me. “no way! You’ve put me through hell, you’be had me live and die, live and die, over and over again, and now you tell me it has all been for nothing?” His amber-coloured eyes flash with anger, and he drags his hand repeatedly through his heavy fall of mahogany-coloured hair.
“I didn’t say that,” I tell him. I pat his hand. “But just because you feel entitled to closure with Helle, it doesn’t follow she feels the same way. After all, she doesn’t remember, right?”
“Lucky her,” he mutters, glancing at the woman he has followed through time, at present busy working out in a patch of sunlight. His face softens. “Lucky me, for finding her again.”
“Yeah.” I pat his hand again. No need to tell him a HEA is more or less guaranteed for my protagonists – but that doesn’t mean I don’t make it very, very hard to get there!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Torch in his Heart 
by Anna Belfrage

Publisher: Troubador Publishing
Release Date: September 1, 2018

In the long lost ancient past, two men fought over the girl with eyes like the Bosporus under a summer sky. It ended badly. She died. They died. 
Since then, they have all tumbled through time, reborn over and over again. Now they are all here, in the same place, the same time and what began so long ago must finally come to an end.

Ask Helle Madsen what she thinks about reincarnation and she’ll laugh in your face. Besides, Helle has other stuff to handle, what with her new, exciting job in London and her drop-dead but seriously sinister boss, Sam Woolf. And then one day Jason Morris walks into her life and despite never having clapped eyes on him before, she recognises him immediately. Very weird. Even more weird is the fact that Sam and Jason clearly hate each other’s guts. Helle’s life is about to become extremely complicated and far too exciting.

What say you, fellow readers? Are you as fascinated by the possibility of reincarnation as I am? 

Have you read any books that deal with this topic?