A desperate espresso café owner and a determined coffee franchise rep are on a collision course in Adriana Kraft’s new romantic suspense, I Am Not for Sale. But all bets are off when anonymous threats turn the quiet Midwestern town into a place of danger.

Let’s meet Nadja Petrov from I Am Not for Sale. Welcome to Romance Lives Forever. I’m Kayelle Allen, author and owner of this blog. Happy to have you here! Please tell us about I Am Not for Sale.

I Am Not for Sale by Adriana Kraft

Genre Romantic Suspense

Book heat level (based on movie ratings): R

It’s nothing personal…

It all seems simple enough—Ukrainian immigrant Nadja Petrov is determined to hold on to her thriving new coffee shop, Nadja’s Literary Cappuccino, and Java Beans District Rep Kevin Langley is equally determined to move into her North Iowa town with a franchise and run her out of business.

He scopes her out, she keeps a watchful eye on him, and the sparring begins. But there are other players involved, and the web of intrigue soon threatens Nadja, her shop, and her aunt as well as Kevin, his potential franchise, and his son.

Within this cauldron simmers a sexual attraction between Nadja and Kevin that catapults them to overcome their fears of intimacy and commitment. Their lovemaking is tender and raw. Their love is nearly lost in tragedy—can it survive doubts, fire, and even a death?

When someone dies, we say they “kicked the bucket.” Therefore, a list of things that a person wants to accomplish, places to go, situations to experience, and so on have become known as a “Bucket List.”

Nadja Petrov

Age: 29

Gender: Female

Birthplace: Kyiv, Ukraine

Profession: Café owner

Ethnicity: Caucasian

Please provide a physical description of yourself.

I’m very tall – not quite six feet, but close. I have deep blue eyes, and my hair is naturally platinum blonde; I’d never do anything to change that! I wear it blunt cut, just above my shoulders, easy to keep out of the way when I’m in a rush at my café. I suppose some would say I’m – what’s the English word? – “stacked,” I think. I get a lot of stares. I have mixed feelings about that.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I’m not sure where to start. It’s never occurred to me to make a so-called bucket list—I’m intensely focused on making my café, Nadja’s Literary Cappuccino, a success. I want it to thrive, to contribute to the quality of life in our small town, to be a gathering place and cultural showcase. I never have time to think much beyond that, so I suppose that’s my bucket list wish.

Who is the significant other in your life?

I’ve never had one – at least, not a lover or boyfriend. If you want to know who in my life matters most to me right now, it’s my mother’s younger sister, Ivett. I don’t know where I’d be without her. When Maty – my mother – got sick, it was Ivett who paid for us to come to America for her treatment, and then after Maty died, Ivett helped me open this café, next to her curio shop. She’s more like an older sister than an aunt, I think – oh, and I’d better not tell you what kind of videos she lends me! I’ll just say she really, really wants me to find a man and marry and continue our family line. She can’t have children.

If you haven’t made a bucket list before, perhaps now would be a good time. Who knows? It might inspire another book. While you’re at it, how about telling us about some of your other favorite things? Here are the questions.

What is your birth order?

I’m an only child. Perhaps that’s part of why I feel so connected to Ivett, in addition to everything she’s done for me. I finally have an older sister, a confidante, a cheerleader, not to mention someone to pester and harass me. I know she wants only the best for me.

Tell us about your favorite toy as a child.

It’s still my favorite – well, not counting unmentionable toys. Where I come from, every child has at least one hand-painted doll that opens up to reveal yet another doll inside, sometimes as many as five or six more. As a child, I thought it was nearly miraculous. Now, I import the unpainted dolls from my homeland and paint them myself as a hobby, and Ivett sells them in her shop.

Describe your favorite food and how it’s prepared.

Well, I’m not going to say Chicken Kyiv – that’s too obvious. My very favorite is something we call varenyky. You probably know it as pierogi, just a simple dumpling with many different fillings. The dough is a lot like pie dough that’s familiar to you, but it also has milk, sour cream, and egg. It takes a long time to make because you have to knead it at the end, adding just a little flour at a time until it pulls away from the bowl. Then you cut it into three-inch circles, add your favorite filling, pinch the edges together, and drop it into salted boiling water for about five minutes. There are lots of sauce options, too.

What are two places you would like to visit before you die, and why?

That’s a tough one. I haven’t really travelled since I came to America – first we were taking care of my mother, and then I opened my café. I’m not really sure I want to go back to Ukraine, even though it has many places I’d love to see again. I think I’d like to see the Grand Canyon, and palm trees – someplace warm and tropical and lush and fragrant. A place that takes care of you.

Where is a place you would never like to return, and why?

I’m not willing to answer that question – people tell me you don’t have the kind of spies here in America that we knew of in Kyiv, but you never know who’s going to be listening in.

Who is someone you would like to meet, and why?

We have a Ukrainian hero, a professor and intellectual who almost single handedly enabled Ukraine to preserve its culture during the long era of USSR suppression, where they tried to make us Russians and stamp out anything uniquely Ukrainian. His name is Mkhailo Hrushevsky, and he lived in the early 1900s. In Kyiv there are now statues of him and even streets named after him. He valued education, the arts, history, and honoring what’s good about our nation’s past. I would love to have a chance to just sit and listen to him. He could teach us all so much.

Meet Adriana Kraft

What was your biggest challenge in writing this book?

A wealth of ideas and information. Our book was inspired in part by a work trip one of us took to Ukraine several years ago. We had way too many threads to put in a single story, so we had to work to discern which themes and qualities were most important and let lots of other interesting sidebars go. Perseverance, strength of character, honesty, willingness to take risks for deeply held beliefs are what stood out to us. We wanted to capture that essence, in both Nadja and her Aunt Ivett.

Why did you choose this character for the interview today?

Mr. Kraft and I fell in love with Nadja when we first started sketching out her character. She knows tragedy, she’s proud, full of spunk, determined, curious, and courageous. I was going to say she’s unafraid, but that’s not true. She can get extremely frightened, but when it’s time to act, she doesn’t hesitate.

When writing the book, what did you discover about this character that surprised you?

Nadja was full of surprises. When she’s challenged, she meets it head on. Part way through the story she tells Kevin “I’d do anything to protect what’s mine.” She means it, and she’ll be called upon to prove it towards the end of the book. Because of her single-minded determination, she can say and do outrageous things—but it’s hard to describe them without giving away too much of the story. I’ll just say that we didn’t plan some of them, they just flowed unabashedly from her nature.

Are any sequels planned for this book?

This is a stand alone romantic suspense, so no sequel planned – and we really didn’t leave ourselves any other characters to follow up with a romance of their own.

What would your readers be surprised to learn about you?

We pour snippets from our own life stories into our books. Naturally we haven’t done everything we’ve written, but some of the emotion-laden moments in our stories come from direct experience. There’s one of those in Nadja’s story, and it very nearly costs her a happy ending. I’ll just say everyone – in her story, and ours – came through it safely.

Where to buy I Am Not for Sale

Publisher https://www.extasybooks.com/I-am-Not-for-Sale
Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09L7WQH12/
Barnes and Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1140503297
Kobo https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/i-am-not-for-sale
Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1115419

Adriana Kraft Social Media

Award winning author Adriana Kraft is a married couple writing Sizzling Romantic Suspense and Erotic Romance for Two, Three, or More. Whether readers open our romantic suspense or our erotic romance, they can expect characters they care about, hot sex scenes, and a compelling story. Our suspense stories deliver one man, one woman, danger and intrigue. Our erotic romance is edgier and nearly always includes ménage or polyamory, sometimes with two women and a man, sometimes with two (or more) couples.
Readers can count on our Romantic Suspense line for
warmth, blazing hot sex, and well-developed characters
(Romance Junkies Reviews) as our hero and heroine battle outer threats and inner demons to stay alive and fall in love.
We write our Erotic Romance stories to entertain, of course, but most of all we write them because we believe in happy endings for all who fall in love, whatever their gender, sexual orientation or numerical combination. Here you’ll find multiple partners, three-way, four-way and more, swing lifestyle, lesbian, bisexual, ménage and polyamory, in both contemporary and paranormal settings:
scorching hot…refreshing…something to read when you want straight up hotness
(Long and Short Reviews) Together we have published more than fifty romance novels and novellas to outstanding reviews.
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