Maggie Blackbird

Book Hooks is a weekly meme hosted by Marketing for Romance Writers as part of the MFRW Authors Blog. Readers can jump from one author to another who share hooks from their current WIP (work in progress) or any previously published books.

For this week’s edition of Book Hooks, I give you a teaser from Born Like This, book two in the Maizemerized series, a time-travel, historical romance. Be sure to check out other participating author posts here.

She went back in time to rescue him.  She never counted on falling in love…

Alma Whitecrow prefers hunting and fishing with men, not romancing them. But hearing about the roguishly handsome coureur de bois, who saved her sister from the Dakota, haunts her thoughts and dreams. Well-versed in surviving the wilds, Alma resolves to travel to the mid-eighteenth century, as her sister once did, to save the man from impending death.

Charlot Baudelaire thumbs his nose at society’s expectations, content living as a loner, trading with people he calls the Saulters. If he needs a woman for the night, there is always a willing maiden. What he doesn’t expect is a spunky and stubborn female warrior to challenge him.

Charlot is not the man Alma dreamed about, and Alma is not the kind of woman Charlot pursues. But the longer they are together, the more drawn to each other they become, until Alma faces the biggest decision of her life. Stay with a man who may never reciprocate her love, or return to her Ojibway home and bland existence.

Genre(s): Time Travel, Historical Romance, Contemporary Romance, First Nations Romance, Paranormal Romance, Adult.
Heat Rating: Level 3
Publication Date:  October 31, 2025
Publisher:  eXtasy Books

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Alma had expected to step into a battle. Reality set in. The only killing she’d done was animals when hunting with Grandpa. But if she didn’t shoot, she risked her own life and Theodore’s as she faced six Dakota sporting arrows.

Theodore growled, waiting for her command.

The Dakota didn’t fire at her, though. They seemed to fire everywhere else, hollering in a language she couldn’t comprehend. The fear in their eyes indicated she’d terrified them.

Maybe they assumed she was a ghost when she’d emerged through the flickering flames.

As the Dakota scattered, she tracked their moccasin footprints, but one set stood out. Grandpa had told her about the spread of the toes, and these toes weren’t spread. They came from a person who walked in shoes or boots. Someone who later in life had switched to the footwear of the Indigenous people.

She followed the footprints with Theodore beside her, sniffing. She used the end of her rifle to move aside the thick brush, which was why her homeland was called the bush at her reserve. There was nothing to call a forest or woods about Northwestern Ontario.

The thick underbrush kept trying to snag her clothing. Clothing she longed to remove. When she left home, she’d donned an outfit for a cold Halloween night. But summer bloomed here. She could remove her jacket since she had a sweater underneath, and beneath that a tank top.

A groan came about ten feet from her, and she aimed her rifle in the direction of the sound. She moved through the many twigs and branches but didn’t spot a blood trail. Whatever lay beneath the berry bush had been hit there.

Another groan.

Whoever was hurt wasn’t an animal. That was the sound of a human being. Maybe one of the Dakota?

She edged in closer until she caught the moccasins sticking out, along with breeches. This wasn’t a Dakota or warrior from the village under attack.

Her heart held its beat.

Had she found Charlot?

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