New sexy short audio story available on Read Me Romance podcast

Just two weeks before After Hours on Milagro Street, my first book in my new small-town, high-heat, Latinx series comes out, I’m thrilled to announce that I have a short and sexy audio-story called Touch Me available on the podcast Read Me Romance (check out listening links below). Read Me Romance is a free weekly podcast hosted by New York Times bestselling authors Alexa Riley and Tessa Bailey that features a free romance audiobook.

Even more exciting is that audiobook queen Stacy Gonzalez is the narrator!!! Stacy has narrated the audiobook for After Hours on Milagro Street, so you can get a free awesome preview of her work by listening to Touch Me. If you go to the Read Me Romance website, you can also enter a giveaway for a signed copy of After Hours of Milagro Street and Lush Money.

Narrated by Stacy Gonzalez. See below for listening links.

Marisol Gutierrez had it all – an amazing husband, great kids, and a successful investment firm. But when you’ve got it all, you’ve got it all to lose, and the stress she’s trying to manage all on her own is why she cries in her corner office for an exact half hour every Thursday before her one-hour massage with the best hands in San Francisco.

When the hands touch her body this Thursday, however, they’re not the hands of her masseuse. Instead, it’s the huge superhero hands of movie star Ray Morgan, her newest client and a man whose desire to take care of her has made him harder and harder to resist.

This fantasy massage story was so fun to write! Here’s a little excerpt:

Marisol Gutierrez had it all.

That’s what everyone told her.

Head of her own wildly successful investment fund, a husband who loved her to his mild-mannered Midwestern bones, two talented and thriving children, and a cadre of employees, friends, family, and organizations who valued her and needed her.

Even her dog, her little brother teased her, was perfect. A perfectly behaved and adorable junkyard mutt.

But what she never told anyone – no journalist or entertainment news reporter or business associate or friend or, even, her staunchly supportive husband – was that having it all meant bearing it all. It all was in your possession. Your safekeeping. It meant you were a possessor of all of these loving, beautiful, smart, talented, valuable entities full of potential and if you dropped one of them – if you got frigging exhausted and it went tumbling out of your over-burdened arms – then…well….

Marisol didn’t like to think about the “then well.”

Instead, Marisol Gutierrez allowed herself a good, hard, half-hour cry every Thursday evening in her corner office’s private bathroom, then she washed her face, took off her clothes, and emerged promptly at 6 p.m. for her one-hour massage with Rhondel. Marisol paid handsomely for the best hands in San Francisco. While Marisol cried, Rhondel set up his massage table, pulled the shades on her floor-to-ceiling windows, and lit aromatherapy candles, all in blessed, undemanding silence. In fact, Rhonda never uttered a word except the rare times that they would grab a drink after the massage, when her husband was at his class and the kids were busy with their own plans.

So when Marisol stepped out into her elegant office, she was fine that she was still hiccupping a little, her face blotchy and her eyes red. She knew Rhondel, tinkering behind the screen he set up, would say nothing. Marisol breathed in the light scent of sandalwood (her favorite) and crossed to the massage table.

She took off her robe, slid between the warmed heavy flannel sheets, and laid her face into the doughnut at the end of the table that allowed her to keep her spine straight. She inhaled deep, then let it all out. For one hour, she’d put her worries and anxieties and terrors into Rhondel’s capable hands.

“I’m ready,” she called, closing her eyes.

She heard him come around the screen and stop at the head of the table. Big male hands pressed against her flannel-covered back. A greeting. She smiled, eyes still closed, breathing deeply. His hands rose up and down with her breaths. That was different, but she liked it.

He circled to her side and folded the sheet down to expose her naked back, picked up her arm, and placed it back down to trap the sheet just above her ass. His touch felt more tentative than normal. Rhondel had worked on her glutes when she’d been deluded enough to train for a marathon; they weren’t shy with each other.

She heard the snick of a bottle, the rub of palms warming up the massage oil. He stood at the head of the table again.

The instant the man put his hands on her shoulder blades and slid them down the planes of her back, Marisol knew this wasn’t Rhondel.

Her head shot up, out of the doughnut.

She was looking directly into the world-famous bedroom eyes of Hollywood superstar Ray Morgan.

Click the buttons below to listen to Touch Me on:

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Mexican-American history you didn't learn in school in upcoming book

In my great-great tío Julian Leon's obituary, it says:

He came to Kansas with his family during the revolution. All of the men, including 12-year-old Julian, worked the railroad.

This little known but seismic fact in my own life -- the entire reason I was born into a large community of Mexican-Americans in southeast Kansas -- wasn't known by me until I was in my mid-twenties. My family didn't sit around talking about why we were brown with Mexican food, heritage, and culture woven into our lives in small-town middle America. We didn't see ourselves as "other."

But when I moved to Des Moines, Iowa after college to work for the newspaper, it was the first time I saw another long-standing Mexican-American community in an area where people didn't expect it. That well-established, multi-generational Mexican-American community in the suburb of West Des Moines was in a neighborhood called Valley Junction. The railroad was the reason their grandparents had settled there. The railroad, I came to discover, was why my family had settled in Kansas.

I tell this little-known piece of history about the Mexican traqueros who helped build the railroad through the central states in After Hours on Milagro Street.

Traqueros

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, railroads needed a new source for labor. The wildly racist Chinese Exclusion Act prevented the Chinese, who'd made up 90 percent of the labor force that built the transcontinental railroad even though they got paid 30-50 percent less than their white counterparts, from immigrating to the U.S. or becoming citizens. Railroad companies began recruiting Mexicans from Mexico, who were dealing with the chaos of the Mexican Revolution as well as circumstances that kept them in poverty. Men were offered the backbreaking seasonal work of coming to the United States to lay track for ten-cents-an-hour.

Thus, the traqueros were born.

Railroad companies realized they could retain their workers, getting more skilled and dependable labor, if they recruited families. They offered box-car housing as an incentive, turning a box car into a two-family housing unit. This encouraged families to come, stay, and commit to the community. It also encouraged chain migration: One family told their compadres in a village, and soon, large populations from small villages in Mexico relocated to towns throughout the central states. Much of my community in Kansas can trace their roots back to Abasolo, Guanajuato.

Why should readers care?

The fact that Mexicans were integral to building such an important and romanticized part of the American infrastructure is a little-known piece of history. Reading After Hours on Milagro Street, you'll learn what a lot of people don't know.

Additionally, we're suffering from an alarming amount of xenophobia in our country. Latinx people aren't "others." The traquero story is one example of how the United States has always relied on Latinx people to do the difficult, essential labor in the farmfields, meatpacking plants, construction sites, and rail yards. Those of Latinx descent have been essential to building, maintaining, and improving this country.

I hate that there's a need to remind people of that.

But what better way to remind them than in a escapist, sexy romance novel that sweeps you away while giving you a peek into a fascinating piece of hidden history.

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Second starred review for AFTER HOURS

My previous blog was about my discontent with people calling my heroines “unlikeable” when I find them admirable. My latest heroine, the bad ass bartender Alejandra “Alex” Torres in After Hours on Milagro Street, has gotten that accusation as much as any of them.

So I was absolutely thrilled by this review from Library Journal, which is my second starred review for the book. After Hours on Milagro Street is about Alex, who comes back to her small Kansas hometown to claim the family bar and finds a professor who mistrusts her intentions standing in her way.

“Likeable protagonists.” It’s absolute magic to my ears!

Booklist review

The Library Journal review wasn’t the only good news I got recently. Booklist also is a fan of After Hours on Milagro Street.

“Not since Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper mixed it up personally and professionally in Ball of Fire has there been such a marvelously mismatched yet inevitably perfect-for-each-other pair of protagonists as Lopez’s sexy mixologist and sweet professor.”

I’ve never seen Ball of Fire, but I can’t imagine Barbara Stanwyck doing to Gary Cooper what Alex does to Jeremiah in the first chapter! Still, I loved this comparison to an out-of-step couple that learns to walk hand in hand!

The full Booklist review won’t be available until June 8. After Hours on Milagro Street will be available in trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook July 26, and you can preorder it at your favorite bookstore or online retail outlet now!

Preorder

Why I write "unlikeable" heroines

(Author’s note: I wrote this in 2022, before Roe v. Wade was overturned but it is still applicable to my books and, unfortunately, to the perception of women today.)

Why do I write “unlikeable” heroines?

When women are still denied autonomy and equality in 2022, the last thing I want to do is write women who prioritize being liked.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

*

It seems like such an easy explanation, doesn't it?

The real world America we're currently living in elected a president who said he grabbed women “by the pussy” and it was excused as locker-room talk. Our right to determine whether we grow a person in our bodies is about to be taken away. And there continues to be a massive pay gap between women and men.

So we all agree, with the continued uphill struggle for women, that likeability is really low on the priority list, don’t we?

No.

The romance genre is stretching beyond the binary, with all genders of people writing and reading romance about all genders of people. But our heroines are still trapped in "likeable" vs. "unlikeable."

Early reviews are already coming in for After Hours in Milagro Street, my high heat, Latinx, small-town romance about a bad ass Latina bartender who comes home to claim the family bar and finds a head-in-the-clouds-but-hot East Coast professor standing in her way. It’s not uncommon for me to get a review like this:

It took me a while to like Alex, she was just so abrasive.

And this was a review that ended with: I love it when I think a book is just a simple romance and it turns out to be more! ... It was a good read!

They liked the book. They didn't like Alex.

Understanding the cold hard facts of the world we face doesn't free real-world women, or their romance counterparts, of the straightjacket of likability and the limited possibilities that straightjacket brings.

*

“Straightjacket” seems a little harsh, you might say.

Let me give you an example of how this emphasis on women being likeable plays out in the real world: There was a fascinating Twitter thread awhile ago about a woman who got a job offer, tried to negotiate compensation, and had the offer rescinded. Many women on the thread complained about having job offers evaporate if they tried to ask for more money; men on the thread said they'd never heard of that happening to men.

Data backs up this concern that women can appear "less likable" if they're assertive this way -- a Harvard Business School survey found that "women who felt empowered at the negotiation table were more likely to reach worse deals or no deal at all."

There are real world consequences for society’s preference that a woman prioritize being liked over looking out for her own best interests.

When I wrote my first “unlikeable” heroine, self-made Mexican-American billionaire Roxanne Medina from Lush Money, I didn’t set out to make her hard to like. I – like Roxanne – didn’t think about her likeability at all. Instead, I focused on how a woman who had the brains, will, and resources to build a successful company that supported 40,000 people would move in the world.

She went for what she wanted and didn’t apologize for it.

I was shocked how many reviewers said this made her unlikeable. I thought it made her admirable.

My heroines have been called:

ice-cold queen
heartless female
nasty bulldog
emotionally stunted
high-handed

And my particular favorite: “What type of mother is she going to be?

Do you think this question has once ever been asked about a powerful male hero?

 
 

I’ve come to understand that the double standard that exists in the real world also exists in the books we write. Men are bestowed with the right to demand and take and have. Women are not. The myth of the ideal woman is that she's accommodating. She constantly considers others and makes way for them. We've all absorbed this myth, it's been the rhythm and beat of almost every story we've heard. If we see a different step, hear a new note, it feels jarring.

*

Alex “Alejandra” Torres, my bad ass bartender in After Hours on Milagro Street, comes home angry.

She’s had a quit-or-be-fired moment at a Chicago speakeasy that she helped put on the map, and now the only way she can salvage her reputation is to claim and restore the family bar, even if coming back to her hometown of Freedom, Kansas is something she never wanted to do. When she discovers that an East Coast professor also has plans for her grandmother's bar, she's immediately suspicious of his intentions and protective of the family she loves, even if her loves comes off a bit...prickly. The instant physical attraction she has with the professor just makes a hard situation harder.

Heh.

I digress.

If you read through the reviews, no one says they don't understand why Alex is angry and single-minded. They never say it doesn’t make sense.

They just say they don’t like it.

 
 

This blog is not to decry my negative reviews. I am grateful, whether I agree with them or not, for each and every person who’s taken the time to write a review of one of my books.

What I want to underline is that I've never set out to write an "unlikeable" heroine. What I've focused on is writing heroines that are ambitious, powerful, proud of their minds and bodies, self assured, confident in their abilities, single-minded, and goal focused.

We've been drinking the tea that those attributes, in a woman, are unlikeable.

Don't believe me?

Read this sentence: I write heroes that are ambitious, powerful, proud of their minds and bodies, self assured, confident in their abilities, single-minded, and goal focused.

Does your spine itch then? Does that make him unlikeable?

In romance, we are writing fantasies.

But we're also showing a way that women can carry themselves in the real world. Our heroines can portray how a woman can center her own needs, preferences, and desires; fearlessly behave as her true self (even if she's a little grumpy), and go after what she wants. Our heroine's love interests can admire and desire her ferocity, pride, and drive. And the world we create can respect her, can be a better place than one that seeks to grab her and control her.

The simple answer to why I write "unlikeable" heroines?

I don't.


Read about more “unlikeable heroines” getting the good loving they deserve in my steamy short story collection, Give In to Me.


Interested in learning how to write alpha heroines?
Click here to learn more.

Entertainment Weekly calls AFTER HOURS ON MILAGRO STREET a "sizzling summer read"

I'm thrilled to announce that with just two months until the release of After Hours on Milagro Street on July 12, my high heat, small town contemporary romance about a bad ass Latina bartender and head-in-the-clouds-but-hot professor got a recommendation from Entertainment Weekly!

"We tend to associate small town romances with the very twee and white worlds of Hallmark movies, but Angelina M. Lopez is ready to turn that on its head this summer and remind readers that small towns are as diverse as any other corner of America.... Lopez combines her signature steamy approach with a romance steeped in questions of gentrification, family, and what home really means."

Also recommended in this list of steamy beach reads are books by Casey McQuiston, Farah Rochon, Sarah McLean, Tracey Livesay, Ruby Barrett and so many other powerhouse authors. Click below to read the full article -- your beach blanket will thank you!!

Starred review and author interview in Publishers Weekly

I'm thrilled to announce that with just two months until the release of After Hours on Milagro Street on July 12, my high heat, small town contemporary romance about a bad ass Latina bartender and head-in-the-clouds-but-hot professor got a starred review from Publishers Weekly!

"Sparks fly and tempers flare in the passionate, un-put-downable rivals-to-lovers romance that launches a sizzling new series from Lopez....Reserved Jeremiah and ballsy Alex shine as Lopez expertly peels back their layers, and together they make an endearing power couple. Lopez seamlessly blends high-heat romance with discussions of Alex’s heritage and the fascinating history of 19th-century Mexican immigrants to the Kansas plains.

This is a treasure."

You can go here to read the full review!

I also got to talk to the lovely Lisa Martinez about what inspired After Hours on Milagro Street in an article they included alongside the review!

"I think that people who’ve read me more than once know that they need to strap in with my heroines. If you have a male hero, he doesn’t show up on page excusing himself for his strong points of view. I want to write strong heroines the same way."

Go here or click below to read the full interview.

Cover reveal for AFTER HOURS ON MILAGRO STREET

So thrilled to finally reveal the cover you will hopefully see in bookstores everywhere this summer!

After Hours on Milagro Street, available July 12, is my

🌺Latinx
🌺Small town
🌺High-heat
🌺Big family
🌺Opposites attract
🌺Forced proximity
🌺Grumpy vs. sunshine
🌺Story of my heart.

This beautiful cover, hinting at all the fun things inside the book, was illustrated by the phenomenal artist Alex Cabal who's designed covers for Bethany C. Morrow, Lillie Vale, and Nafiza Azad.

This book and series means so much to me. It's my family's story -- of a multi-generational Mexican-American family and the community they love in Kansas -- told with my spin: escapist plotlines, high heat, and lots of fantasy, fun, and emotion.

Guapo pobrecito her grandmother calls him. The “poor handsome man.”

Professor Jeremiah Post, the poor handsome man, is in fact standing in the way of Alejandra “Alex” Torres turning Loretta’s, her grandmother’s bar, into a viable business. The hot brainiac who sleeps in one of the upstairs tenant rooms already has all of her Mexican American family’s admiration; she won’t let him have the bar and building she needs to resurrect her career, too.

Alex blowing into town has rocked Jeremiah to his mild-mannered core, but the large, boisterous Torres clan is everything he never had. He doesn’t believe Alex has the best interest of her family, their community or the bar’s legacy in mind. To protect all three, he’ll stand up to the tough and tattooed bartender with whom he now shares a bedroom wall—and resist the insta-lust they both feel.

But when an old enemy threatens Loretta’s and the surrounding neighborhood, Alex and Jeremiah must combine forces. It will take her might and his mind to save the home they both desperately need.

preorder now

My sexy Latinx short story featured in Whoa!mance podcast

(Author’s note: The Twelve Naughty Days anthology is no longer available, so I’ve made this short story available on Patreon. For just $3/month, you can read a steamy short story from me every month! You can learn more here.)

It may be long past Christmas, but I just discovered this phenomenal 45-minute podcast about my "Twelve Drummers" short story in the Twelve Naughty Days holiday anthology.

Twelve Drummers” is about what happens when a Latinx jewel thief, a Latinx museum guard, and an ancient Mexica drum magically collide on the longest night of the year.

Here's what Morgan and Isabeau of the romance podcast Whoa!mance had to say about it:

Morgan: Very very steamy. I realize it’s been a long time since I read a Sierra Simone-level steam.

Morgan: I’ve become desensitized to pretty run-of-the-mill sex scenes.
Isabeau: I don’t know that I feel that I’m desensitized, but this is certainly something that blows me out of the water. Like I haven’t read this level in a really long time. And I think that’s probably not necessarily unique to this author.

Morgan: I actually read a lot of supremely boring sex scenes. You know, where it’s pulling all the levers and pushing all the buttons. It’s putting the cream in the Twinkie, but this is someone making an eclair and slowly warming the shoe pastry and baking it. This is a whole other level.
Isabeau: It’s a feast.

Morgan: The majority of this story is a sex scene so it is taking up more real estate, but I also feel like it doesn't detract from the character building in this short story. It's rich for twenty pages let alone twenty pages of an erotic romance. The world building was perfect, you had just enough things. Our characters dream or goals, their reason for being in this space, their reasons for doing what they do, are completely fleshed out.

Isabeau: This books gives you something evocative.

Morgan: And I think it’s so fucking keen that you take this pretty Christian-centric content of the twelve days of Christmas and being part of an anthology with that theme and being able to cleverly but not shoehorn in a different cultural tradition that’s kind of a subtle critique. Once again this story occupies just 20 pages of this anthology.

Isabeau: I was mostly surprised by every sex scene. I just walked in to each one like, “What’re we gonna do next?”

You can listen to the whole podcast here.

And you can still get your hands on Twelve Naughty Days, which will only be available for a limited time. Each story is a never-before-seen short from NYT and USA Today bestselling authors: K.A. Linde, Skye Warren, Fiona Cole, Nana Malone, Claire Contreras, Nikki Sloane, Giana Darling, Sierra Simone, CD Reiss, Laurelin Paige, M. Malone, and me!

All of the proceeds go to the Trevor Project, which is a national, 24-hour, toll free confidential suicide prevention service for LGBTQ youth. Twelve Naughty Days is available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook. Just like the ebook, all the narrators on the audiobook are donating their work and time to the project!

12 Drummers now available on patreon

Two sexy stories in upcoming anthologies just in time for Christmas!

(Author’s note: Twelve Naughty Days is now available and was named a #1 Amazon bestseller! Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol. 7 has been delayed until Dec. 21 because of supply chain issues.)

Right before Christmas, I will have sexy short stories coming out in two well-known anthologies. The Best Women’s Erotica of the Year collection puts together stories from some of the best steamy romance writers in the business — I was thrilled to be asked to submit for Volume 7, along with romance greats Adriana Herrera, Holley Trent, Lucy Eden and others! It will be available in ebook and paperback.

The other anthology pulls together incredible New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors to celebrate Twelve Naughty Days. It’s a sexy anthology based on the Twelve Days of Christmas song; I got Twelve Drummers Drumming 😅! I can’t wait to see what the other incredible authors — Sierra Simone, Skye Warren, M. Malone, Nana Malone, and others — come up with!!

One thing that makes Twelve Naughty Days collection very exciting is that all of the proceeds will go to the Trevor Project, which is a national, 24-hour, toll free confidential suicide prevention service for LGBTQ youth. Twelve Naughty Days will be available in ebook and audiobook for a limited time. Just like the ebook, all the narrators on the audiobook are donating their work and time to the project!

What are the stories about?

For the Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Vol. 7 anthology, I wrote HOT POCKETS, a story about a busy married couple with kids who have to squeeze in time for intimacy whenever they can find it. Editor Rachel Kramer Brussel asked us to write about surprise for already established couples. In romance, we usually write about people’s journey to their happily ever after; I loved this opportunity to write about people after they’ve reached it.

The story explores how two people who love and are devoted to each other keep the “happy” in the HEA when real life and all its demands — jobs, kids, packed weekends, errands, chores, tight budgets, aging parents — get in the mix.

A #1 Amazon besteller

For Twelve Naughty Days, I wrote TWELVE DRUMMERS. Discover what happens when a Latinx jewel thief, a Latinx museum guard, and an ancient Mexica drum magically collide on the longest night of the year. It’s verynaughty. I’ve already made my mom swear not to read it (or if she does, she has to swear to never EVER tell me!!!!).

Can I read an excerpt?

I've loaded up excerpts of the short stories on the super secret, newspaper-subscribers-only spot on my website where subscribers get all their goodies! Want a sneak peek? You can sign up to my newsletter here.

Order Twelve Naughty Days with Twelve Drummers
Preorder Best WOmen's Erotica with Hot pockets

Join me online to celebrate the release of Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Vol 7

Why my next book is close to my heart…

654992790.831561.jpeg

I just turned in After Hours on Milagro Street, my first book in a new series, to my editor. It’s about a Mexican-American middle sister and black sheep who returns to her small Kansas hometown to save the family bar and discovers an idealistic East Coast professor standing in her way. It’s a high-heat, small town contemporary with:

  • a huge Mexican-American family

  • two opposites who are irresistibly attracted to each other

  • a just-one-bed scenario

  • and lots of small-town legends and family lore.

A story close to my heart

 
momdadme.jpeg
 

I was born in a small town in southeast Kansas; the Mexican-American side of my family has lived in the same town since the early 1900s. But so often, when I told people that I was from Kansas, they’d answer, “Where are you originally from?”

As if someone who looks like me, with the last name Lopez, can’t be from Kansas.

People think small towns can only look one way. In today’s day and age, that has unfortunately translated to a belief that the United States only looks one way, or was somehow an ideal when it looked less diverse. My family’s story – part of a community since 1908, tortillas at every meal, huge 50-person family gatherings for lunch every Sunday after mass, a Mexican food stand at our town’s annual celebration, piñatas at every birthday – shows that America has been an integration of a lot of people, a lot of cultures, and a lot of ideas for a long time.

The Milagro Street series is finally an opportunity for me to tell that story.

Why I wasn't -- at first -- excited to tell this story

After the ugliness of the 2020 election season, I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell this story. I was embittered about the backwards way we seemed to be heading as a country. Also, my story was about a Mexican-American male bartender coming home.

I realized the core story that I have to tell is about women finding their strength to determine their destinies, so I decided to make the story about three sisters coming home. And that’s when the idea really came alive for me. This series is about three Mexican-American sisters who return to their small Midwestern hometown to revive their family bar and, to their surprise, save the town they didn’t realize they loved. It's got all my standard tropes: bonkers story lines, strong women, supportive men, a focus on life's pleasures, lots of sexy times. But it’s also an opportunity to talk about the magic of brown women. The world is made magical by the strong, diverse women who make an impact on it.

I’ve seen the cover for After Hours on Milagro Street and it’s GORGEOUS!!! I can’t wait to show it to you. The release date is July 12, 2022, but you can preorder it now. Preordering is a great way to show your favorite authors love because it builds hype for the book. Thank you!

Preorder After hours on Milagro Street

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