The Side Effects of a Good Read

I’ve spent the last week dragging around with a brutal cold. I’m very seldom ill, and almost never ill enough to take to bed. But this time, without full brain function, it seemed the expedient thing to do — lousy timing or not. While I groused and grumbled between sniffles and sneezes, aches and pains, I also made a discovery. I did have enough brainpower to lose myself in a good read. Since I wasn’t sleeping well for the first couple of nights, I took full advantage, binge rereading Naomi Novik’s wonderful Temeraireseries, while snuffling and coughing and feeling sorry for myself. Who doesn’t feel better after quality time spent with a dragon?

 

I’m on the mend now. Though I’m still dragging, still dealing with the after effects. But here’s the thing. Being forced to take some down time and fully indulge in the pleasure of a good read was worth every sniffle and ache. It’s not that I don’t do my best to make sure there’s reading time in my schedule. It’s just that it’s often the first thing to go when that schedule gets tight. It’s sad that it takes a nasty bug to remind me that reading is far more than just my duty as a writer. It’s far more than just a frivolous pleasure; it’s a priming of the pump, a feeding of the creativity, a grounding for the storyteller in me.

 

Creativity cultivates creativity, and being inspired by the works of other people’s imaginations is one of the best ways I know of to be more productive and more creative myself. Sadly that fact is one of the easiest things for a busy writer to forget. I’m willing to bet it’s one of the easiest things for most of us to forget, whether we write or not.

 

I used to read every novel with the idea of learning how to be a better writer – whether the novel was a good one or not. Now I’m way less likely to even finish a poorly written novel. Time is too valuable. More often now I hold out for the really good novels, and I read them for the sheer pleasure of being drawn outside myself into another world, into another person, into an experience far different from my own. Coming off a good read, I’m reminded just exactly why the ancient storytellers in some cultures sat with kings and queens as their equals.

 

It’s far too easy to pick up all of our information in bits and pieces off social media

and the Internet. We’re connected in ways we could have never imagined even twenty years ago. But while all the information we could ever want and, in some cases WAY too much, is available at our fingertips, the magic, the real magic, only happens when we slow down, back away and let the storytellers enthrall us.

Buffy, Anita and Vampire Lurve

It all started with Frank Langella’s 1979 film version of Dracula and the scene of the
seduction of Lucy.  I was a university student at the time with libido through the roof and an imagination to match. Oh, the fantasies! I couldn’t keep from wondering, even back then, just why those vampire seductions, those “turnings,” which were quite often so outrageously sexy, had to end with the turnee becoming the turner’s mindless minion and hideous restaurant. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if the exchange was a little more equitable.

 

The first vampire stories I ever read were Anne Rice’s Lestat novels. I always found it disappointing that, in her books, while those turnings, those makings of fledgling vampires, were often little more than a disturbingly sexy rape, the vampires themselves, once turned, were very sensual but specifically not sexual. I wanted it all. I wanted the turnees fucked, turned and then fucked some more. But finally! halleluiah! Buffy and Anita happened.

 

“Seriously? Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” That was my initial response when I first saw the film at my sister-in-law’s house a hundred years ago. But I her teenage girls were watching it on cable, so what could I do but watch along … with bated breath.

 

“Really? They actually made a television series out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” That was my first reaction when I was bored-channel-surfing one evening a year of so later and came across an early episode. “Are they that hard up for subject matter,” I groused. And then I watched it … all seven seasons of it … some more than once.

 

“Oh you have got to be kidding? Derivative much?” That was what I thought the first time I saw one of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels. “Another vampire slayer? Haven’t vampires been done to death?” No pun intended. But I read them… well not all, but a good eight or ten or so…

 

With Buffy and Anita, at last we had arrived! The vampire slayers were now seducing the vampires, and making them tow the line. While the sex in Buffy had to be soft enough for evening television, not so the sex in the Anita Blake stories. Though in the early novels, the main character is celibate with a tendency toward heavy petting and heavier still neurotic angsting over it. But in both cases, seduction was always only a breath away. That sexy pull of the dark is what we live for, right? The cost for Buffy was devastating. For Anita the sexy vampire was just the beginning of a kinky, steamy and very neurotic paranormal journey. I felt like I had come home.

 

I never thought I’d write vampires. In fact, I balked at writing paranormal in general
until I realized that it was the perfect place to explore the darker side of the erotic without all the rules and regulations that restrict contemporary erotic fiction. But even so it was witches, demons and ghosts for me. I wasn’t brave enough to tackle vampires. And then Alonso Darlington burst on to the scene in Landscapes, which
was not only my first M/M story written for the Brit Boys on Boysboxed set, but Alonso was my first vampire. Back then I never dreamed he’d become so dear to my heart, and that he’d worm his way into being a key player in my Medusa’s Consortium series.

 

I’ve learned a great deal from vampires. Paranormal in general is a great way to explore the dark side of human nature. But I think vampires are the best way of all because they once were human, and they either tend to despise that which they used to be or yearn for what they’ve lost. Both responses are so utterly human and both
are equally fascinating. Vampires provide the perfect place to contemplate that age-old question: Who are the realmonsters? Quite often, they’re not who I think. Quite often the worst of them live down deep inside me. Oh Freud, where are you when we need you?

 

Once I started writing paranormal stories, I found them particularly freeing. No one insists on vampires and shifters and other scary dudes wearing condoms. It’s pretty much a given that there is nothing safe about fucking a vampire or a demon, and if the whole idea doesn’t scare the reader as much as it turns her on, then what’s the point?

 

From long before Frank Langella to Buffy to Anita and to everything since, there has always been a very close relationship between fear and arousal, which in my humble opinion makes the arousal even more arousing. The iconic sex scenes between the young and beautiful couple in a horror movie is always followed by the ghoul, serial killer or other baddie murdering the lovers in a horrible way. A part of what is so arousing about paranormal sex is the breaking of so many taboos, the attraction to something that the world says should horrify us. Oh we’re no less horrified for our attraction, if anything we’re more so. That combination of attraction and repulsion makes us doubt ourselves for feeling things we shouldn’t. Sound familiar?

 

In paranormal stories that boundary between what arouses us and what terrifies us is so deliciously permeable that crossing it can get us into all kinds of trouble and then some. But crossing that boundary also brings with it the possibility of gifts and powers and abilities as well as a tumble into sex raised to something both divine and diabolical.

 

What is forbidden in erotica by most publishers doesn’t apply to paranormal. Some of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever read are of vampires taking blood from or giving blood to their lovers. In fact in some novels the sharing of blood enhances the pleasure exponentially. Blood holds within it life and identity. It contains the magic of who we are as individuals. We don’t have to lose a whole lot if it before we die. It also is the transport for horrific diseases, a river of both life and contagion that terrifies us as much as it fascinates us. That it’s all contained in such a fragile sensitive vessel as the human body only amplifies its preciousness and its power.

 

Vampire stories are the perfect place to explore dubious consent and loss of control. When dealing with vampires, demons, witches and magic, is consent ever less than dubious? Is there any better place to explore safely that total loss of control that comes from giving oneself over to the forbidden? Isn’t that really what the archetypal stories of seduction by the gods is all about? In the arms of a monster, with all our human frailties, there’s no guarantee of survival. And then there’s the terrifying thought of what we will become if we survive. How can we not be forever changed – for good or for ill. How can the resulting story not be intriguing?

 

The truth is that while we might be happy to dabble in the darker side of our sexuality, on a fundamental level, the very act of sex is frightening. It is the losing of self in the other, the opening to the unknown. It is the allowing ourselves to be more
vulnerable than we are in any other act. It is the giving up of control. All of these elements are, by nature, a part of sex — sex that carries at its core both the possibility of conception and of death. The vampire’s tale is an augmentation of all of those elements, a sharpening of their edges to take us into unexplored territory beyond la petit mort.

 

That all we fear and all we desire in sex can be raise to the nth degree when placed in a paranormal setting and examined from the intimately terrifying safety of a book or a film or a television series allows us to vicariously experience the darker side of our desires. I would suggest that there are few better ways to explore our humanity than taking an erotic journey with the monsters in the dark who are more like us, and far closer to us, than we can easily admit.

What Does it Take to Get You There?

Today is a red letter day for me. Three years ago I reached my goal of losing 35 pounds. Three years on, I’ve maintained my new weight and am still enjoying the healthy lifestyle and enjoying the benefits.

 

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve  come to love working out, and that for me it’s always been a creative process. That’s why I joined a pole dance class twenty months ago, and I’m still loving it. Next weekend will be my second pole shoot. I shared the  journey of getting to that first pole shoot with all of you lovelies last year.

 

For me, the fitness journey began as a way to combat depression. I hadn’t expected it to be such a life-changing experience. One of the reasons I do enjoy it is because I consider a workout a creative process. I know how to put together a routine for myself with any equipment or with none at all. And now that I have my own pole at home, I am beginning to make up my own workouts for pole as well. What does it take to get you there? I suppose that’s the big question I asked myself every day along the journey, whether it’s fitness, maintaining my weight, or writing, and I still do. It’s also the big question of my novella In Training. What do you want? How badly do you want it? And what does it take to get you there?  What inspires you enough to make you pull out all the stops and totally go for … well for anything that really matters?

 

My own journey being what it has been, it’s not surprising that my heroine, PR guru Lauren Michaels, has to find her own reason for pushing herself. A gym is the last place she wants to be, but her boss has just made her the ‘get fit’ star in a reality fitness TV show with bad boy personal trainer, Wolf Jennings, who will get her there even if he has to drag her kicking and screaming. At least that’s his plan. But it’s only when she finds her reason to push that Lauren decides she really wants to “get there,” and she wants to do it with Wolf Jennings. Here’s a little excerpt.

 

In Training Blurb:

Getting fit on reality TV is PR guru, Lauren Michael’s, brainchild for gym equipment and fitness company Physicality, Inc. The brilliant PR stunt involves one brave volunteer who wants to be fit badly enough to submit to the not so tender training techniques of personal trainer, Wolf Jennings, whose successful, but non-conventional, methods would make a drill sergeant look like a fluff ball. But when CEO and owner of Physicality, Inc, Claire Amos, decides her PR ace in the hole needs to walk the talk , Lauren finds herself between a kettle bell and a hard place … er a hard trainer. That’s nightmare enough, but for six weeks, 24/7 the explosive chemistry between the two will be sweated out live on camera for the whole world to see. What could possibly go wrong?

 

Wanna Bet? In Training Excerpt:

“On your knees, Michaels! Do it on your knees. You can’t do a full press-up until we strengthen those spaghetti arms. Do it like this.” He demonstrated the modified press-up. “Now I want you to do as many as you can in thirty seconds.” While thirty seconds lasted forever, as many press-ups as Lauren could do didn’t take long at all before she fell to the mat with her arms trembling. “Damn it Michaels, you gotta be willing to push yourself. I can’t do it for you.” He reset his timer. “Do it again.”

 

“Well this isn’t an auspicious beginning, Misty,” Del Allan said as they observed the training session going on in the gym below. “As much as I admire Claire Amos for believing her people should walk the talk, it’s clear to me that Lauren Michaels’ heart just isn’t in it. One has to wonder why the waste of time, energy and money for someone who doesn’t want to be here when there are so many who really do. I’ve said it before, I hope Physicality has a back-up plan because I’m betting Lauren Michaels won’t make it to the end of the week.”

“The real question, Del, is not whether Wolf Jennings can ‘get someone there,’ but whether he can motivate someone to wanthim to. Certainly this is a world away from what Lauren is used to, and apparently she didn’t know she’d be participating until twenty-four hours before.”

 

It was near the end of the fourth day when Lauren finally broke. “I can’t do any more,” she gasped after what seemed like miles of lunge walking back and forth across the gym with a dumb bell in each hand — dumb bells that got heavier with each step. “I need the hot tub. When do I get to use the hot tub?”

“When you’ve earned it,” Jennings growled. “Now do it again.”

“I hate you,” she forced the words out, no longer caring if the ever-present cameras picked up her remark or not. She reckoned that would be one more reason for the ‘sack Lauren and hire me’ faction to tweet nasty things about her. It’s not as if she wouldn’t trade places with them in a heartbeat.

“I’m not here for you to like,” came the reply. “Keep your back straight, shoulders back. Head up!”

She was halfway across the gym when one of the dumb bells slipped from her sweaty fingers, hit the floor with a loud crash, and she tripped over it doing into a belly flop in the middle of the gym.

“Get up. Keep going,” Wolf yelled, jogging effortlessly to her side. “Don’t be a wimp, Michaels. Finish it. I don’t train babies. Stop whinging and keep going.”

“I hate you.” This time she all but yelled it as she hefted the sweaty dumb bell and forced her way forward a couple more steps before she dropped the weight again — this time on her foot. It was only a glancing blow. She jerked away just in time, but it was enough. It was fucking enough! She dropped the other weight next to its fallen compadre and stormed back across the gym.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” He said, “You’re not done yet.”

“Oh yes I am.” She grabbed up her sports drink and her towel.

“What? Are you a quitter, Michaels?” Jennings stepped in front of her effectively blocking her way, “Is that it?”

“What I am is sick of you yelling at me, sick of you treating me like a sub-human.” She hadn’t planned it, but when he didn’t move, it just happened. A quick twist of the lid on her sports drink and she let it fly. Her aim was true, hitting Jennings in the face with a shower of bright orange Lukozade. Then she stomped off toward her room. She hadn’t expected him to follow her, but then there were a lot of things she hadn’t expected about the man she’d met at the pub less than a week ago.

Legs still screaming from the workout, she took the stairs two at a time with him gaining on her fast. At the top, he called after her. “They’re taking bets on how soon you’ll quit. Did you know that, Michaels?”

She stopped, dead in her tracks, as though she were suddenly frozen to the spot. For a second she squeezed her eyes shut, fighting back tears. Then she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and headed back toward the stairs, stopping in front of him to meet his cold glare. “Then they’ll lose.”

Fucking hell! Did she just say that? Surely she didn’t mean it. She would do almost anything to get out of this chamber of horrors, and yet here she was marching back downstairs, picking up the goddamned dumb bells, taking a deep breath and willing her legs to move forward. When she got to the end, instead of stopping, she gave Jennings a defiant glare, from where he now stood at the foot of the stairs, then she turned and headed back across. Somewhere a long way off, she could hear gasps and chatter from Wolf’s mezzanine fan club, but it didn’t matter. The world around her narrowed to the in and out drag of her breath, the pain in her quads and the slow step and lunge, step and lunge, that pulled her forward.

At the end, she dropped the dumb bells and bent over gasping, eyes clenched shut, hands on her knees. When at last she had the strength to stand up, she was surprised to find him next to, hair still dewed in orange. He handed her a bottle of water and a towel. While she drank, he wiped his face on his shirt.

She didn’t look at him, she was still battling the urge to cry. She knew all eyes were on her. After the drama she was now embarrassed to have caused, that was a given. But it was only Wolf Jenning’s eyes she felt in ways that were somehow even more intimate than his kiss at the pub. At last she handed him back the bottle and struggled to meet his gaze.

“That’s better,” he said. “Now drop and give me ten. Pull a stunt like that again and I’ll shove you on the treadmill till your Reeboks wear out.”

She did as he ordered, counting each press-up out loud and hardly feeling the effort, dazed as she was by what had just happened.

In Pursuit of Mr Sands – Free Read

As most of you know, I brought Elise North into A Demon’s Tale because she so intrigued me in her encounters with Mr. Sands, which I plan to revisit at a later date. We haven’t seen the last of him yet. But this little story, first published in Cosmo, gives a glimpse into PI, Elise North’s life before a certain demon turned it upside down.

As you know, from previous Medusa Consortium stories, in Magda Gardener’s world, nothing is ever simple where relationships and sex are concerned. And Elise is no exception. There are always complications. I hope you enjoy Elise’s pursuit of Mr. Sands, and I bet you can guess who has hired her for this little task.

 

In Pursuit of Mr. Sands

Five hot summer nights, I followed Mr. Sands in and out of clubs and bars in Soho. Sometimes it took him the better part of the night to pick up a woman, though he could have had his choice. Sometimes he found the one he wanted in the very first bar. There was no pattern, no rhyme or reason, no similarity that I could see in his choices. He never took them home. He never told them his name. He never fucked them. But he always made them come. Their response was unanimously a mix of ecstatic release and surprise, as though they hadn’t expected it.

He took them in alleys, in stairwells, even once on a crowded dance floor. It was always quick, always intense and it always felt a bit dangerous. He didn’t mind if the women bit or clawed or howled like wolves. They always came, but Mr. Sands never did. I wondered if he practiced some form of eastern discipline that enhanced male pleasure through refraining from ejaculation.

I’m a PI, and monitoring Mr. Sands’ nightly wanderings is my job. The woman who hired me to tail him isn’t his ex or a psycho lover. She claims she’s never met the man. But hey, everyone’s kink is different. If she gets off on my reports, then who am I to judge, as long as she pays me. And she pays me well. In fact she set me up in a posh flat with a view across the street right into Mr. Sands’ posh flat. Though it hasn’t helped much. He keeps his curtains drawn.

Every night Mr. Sands goes out at exactly ten, and every night I follow him. Every night I watch as women flirt and eyeball him longingly until he finally makes his choice. Some nights he wines and dines the lucky girl. Some nights, he simply takes her hand and leads her off to do the deed. Last night, his choice was a porcelain-skinned woman with ginger hair. He led her from the bar without so much as a word. She was breathless, wide-eyed, her full breasts bouncing in her scanty bronze sheath as she struggled to keep up with him in stilettos she was none to steady on. I could almost feel the sense of urgency that might have been hers, might have been his. The dress was tight enough that the lack of panties was evident, a bit too tight for a woman so well curved. But Mr. Sands didn’t seem interested in fashion or conventional beauty.

He pressed her up against a small loading dock in the ally, taking her mouth as though she were his favourite dish, slapping her hands away from his fly, though even I could see his bulge through my binoculars. There beneath the streetlight, he freed her breasts into his hands, thumbing and raking peach gumdrop nipples and heavily stippled areolae.

She sounded like a kitten mewing for its mother as he scrunched her dress until her Brazilian was as bare as her breasts. She gave a little yelp as he hoisted her up onto the loading dock and palmed her thighs wide apart forcing her back onto her elbows. One shoe dropped to the pavement with a muted thud as he cupped his hands behind her knees and pulled her closer to his face. Then he fingered her, studied her, caressed her as though he’d never seen a pussy before. All the while, she moaned and whimpered and squirmed against the hard concrete. “Please,” she begged. “Oh please.” But he ignored her keening.

When, at last, he spoke, his voice was velvet against bare skin, “You’ve been pretending. But you don’t need to for me.” Then he buried his face between her thighs, and she bucked and gyrated against him tugging and pulling at her breasts. Once again, he slapped her hands away and reached up to knead her almost as though he were raising his arms in an act of worship. He pinched and thumbed while never slacking in his efforts between her thighs. Her cries became guttural, like he’d awakened something feral in her, something that could now no longer be caged. He slid his hands down to cup her bum and drew her closer, as though he might crawl up inside her right next to that feral thing he’d awakened. She came with an animal howl that sent shivers up my spine and made the view from the binoculars shudder with the hammering of my pulse. At last he pulled away and wiped his face on the back of his arm. Then he mantled her close, covering her lips with kisses, she all but sobbing into his mouth.

Finally she spoke in little gasps of effort. “I’ve never had an orgasm before.”

“I know,” was all he said, as he bent to retrieve her shoe and gently slipped it onto her foot.

I stood in shock at her revelation, at his. The woman had never had an orgasm? Did he choose his women that way? But then how the hell would he know? I was so lost in my speculations that I had to scramble back into an alcove in front of a service entrance to keep from being seen as Mr. Sands escorted her back to the bar.

And just like that it was over. I knew the drill by now. The woman would return to her friends with a smile on her face, and Mr. Sands would go home.

I followed him, as I always did, then took the lift to my flat. Inside I stripped to tank and panties, wilted from the relentless heat. It was one of the few summer days each year when it hadn’t cooled down much at night. I poured myself a glass of cab. Usually unwinding from a night of tailing Mr. Sands meant a little hands-on. I had a vibrator, but there was something about our nightly rendezvous that gave me the urge to touch myself. Maybe the total lack of penetrative sex in those steamy encounters made me empathetic. My last task every working day was to open my curtains and make sure Mr. Sands was at home. He always was. Though his curtains were perpetually drawn, I could make out the cinnamon glow of lamplight inside. Occasionally I could see the shadow of movement back and forth beyond the drawn drapes. That was my cue for some ‘me time,’ as I fantasized about what he did after he came home late at night unsatisfied.

With wine glass in hand and my mind on the night’s intriguing discoveries, the curtain was completely open before I turned to find that Mr. Sands, for once, had followed suit. He stood looking right at me, wearing only grey track bottoms slung low around his hips, his chest glistening from the heat. I froze gaping, as he sipped a whiskey and brazenly looked me up and down. I’d been compromised. My client had warned me to make sure he never saw me. But I was confident, maybe a little arrogant. I was good at my job. I should have shut the curtains and left. But I just stood there like a rabbit in the headlights, my nipples stiffening beneath my tank top as surely as if he’d stroked them as he had the redhead’s. The quirk of his lips, the trailing of his gaze over my body sent shockwaves of heat core deep. The clench between my thighs, the subtle shifting of my hips wouldn’t have been noticeable by anyone. Hell, I could make myself come on a crowded bus and no one was the wiser. But he knew. I was certain he knew.

I raised my glass for a much-needed drink and miscalculated, dribbling red wine across white cotton and a distended nipple. His gaze was not subtle as he nodded to my breasts. I knew exactly what he wanted. Slowly, I lifted the glass and drizzled the cab across my breasts – all of it, gasping at the shock of it, biting my lip, closing my eyes just long enough to savor the sensation. When I opened them, he slid a hand inside the front of his track bottoms. It wasn’t difficult to tell he was hard, nor that he was substantial. I took in the shape of him as brazenly as he had me, giving my own little nod. But he only shook his head and raised an eyebrow making it clear that it was tit for tat.

Caught in his gaze, I could scarcely breathe, I could scarcely believe the risk I was taking. He knew where I was. He knew what I’d done. And yet I lifted my wet shirt  off over my head, the AC tightening my nipples still further. As he watched, I slid a hand into my panties mirroring his movements. I fingered my way down between my thighs, gasping at the slick swell of me, my tide pool scent filling the room as I began to stroke.

His own stroking had exposed the base of his cock in its nest of dark curls, and my mouth watered. I nodded again, wanting to see that tool he’d kept hidden all these nights, desperate to see him lose that cast iron control.

He gulped the rest of his whiskey and set the glass aside. Then he slid the other hand beneath his waistband to scoop and cup his sac, and I moaned my approval as his efforts revealed just a little more. And then it was a stand-off, neither of us blinking, neither of us flinching, we rubbed and stroked and flaunted ourselves, each in an effort to will the other into that final reveal. He shifted and pumped and moved in such a way that I could make out almost every detail of his heavy package from beneath the tease of fabric. The lust in his eyes was laced with something slightly wicked. Strange I’d never realized fear could be such a turn-on. I wanted to run and hide even as I wanted him to fuck me with his eyes.

I pulled my fingers from my panties and raised them to my mouth, giving him a hungry stare as I tasted my own slickness, then I sucked. He bit his lip and his body jerked. For a horrible moment I thought he’d come without me. But he took a deep breath and nodded. It was time. I slid a thumb into the edge of my panties and, with the other hand, counted down. Three…two…one. We both dropped our drawers. After that things got serious. He stepped closer to the window, as close as he could get to me. One hand cupped, the other stroked and tugged the heavy length of him as though it were seriously in need of taming.

Without looking away, I reached behind me and pulled the Queen Anne chair close. Then I plopped down splaying my legs over the arms so that he could see my efforts, fingers darting and circling, dipping and scissoring, butt raised high to give him a better view. The look on his face was utter concentration. I imagine mine was the same. As his orgasm burst in heavy spurts against the windowpane, I convulsed my own release, nearly upsetting the chair.

Afterwards we just stared at each other, still cupping ourselves, too stunned to think, too spent to move. But at last, he bent, pulled up his track bottoms and tucked his cock. He studied me for a long moment, the hunger in his eyes making me squirm in that place between arousal and fear. Then he waved a finger at me as though I’d been a naughty girl. Finally, he blew me a kiss and drew the curtains. The next morning, to my relief, and my disappointment, Mr. Sands was gone. But I’ll track him down. He has secrets I want. It is my job, after all. And I’m good at what I do.

Dana Ross’ Full Girlfriend Experience Launch Tour and Giveaway

 

Dana is giving away 2 Full Girlfriend Experience ebooks during the tour. Please use the Rafflecopter below to enter. Remember there is a chance to enter everyday so be sure to follow the Blog Tour. You may find the tour schedule and locations here https://goo.gl/4Zd12n

 

About Full Girlfriend Experience:

 

When DC Madam Faith Crawley receives a call from former client, Senator William Drummond, it’s the answer to her prayers. The money the dirty politician offers her to smear his rival Finn Billings will save Faith’s business, her lifestyle, and her girls.

Raised in the shadow of a political magnate, Finn Billings has the credentials to get the job done, but he lacks confidence and wonders if politics is truly the life he desires.

 

Using the façade of her front business, a PR firm, Faith turns Finn into a political powerhouse while obtaining the evidence Drummond needs to destroy Finn’s political chances. But Faith didn’t plan on falling in love with her mark.

 

Now she has the toughest decision ever—give the sleazy senator incriminating photos of Finn to save her business or give up everything for the sake of love.

 

Genre: Romantic Suspense

Publisher: The Wild Rose Press

 

Buy Full Girlfriend Experience Here:

 

 

 

Full Girlfriend Experience Excerpt:

 

In the biz, your word was golden, and there were rules that had to be upheld. White lies were acceptable, but there were certain lines one never crossed. Keep data in code, shield clients’ privacy, and, most importantly, protect the girls. At all costs. I’d always honored these precepts to the best of my abilities. It helped me stay afloat while other madams sank like flat tires in the Anacostia River.

Yet there I was after one free lunch, considering a partnership with a man who didn’t deserve to lick my stilettoes. Why? Was it the champagne? Drummond’s smooth tongue? The fact that creditors were calling on a regular basis? Whatever the reason, I couldn’t dismiss him until I exhausted every option.

 

Unfortunately, I only had one.

 

Even worse, she hated my guts.

 

About the Author:

 

After leaving her career teaching gemology, Caryn DeVincenti, who writes as Dana Ross, moved to the sunshine state to become a full-time writer. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University and is the regional director of the Florida Writers Association, Palm Beach County.

 

When not writing, Caryn nurtures her social media addiction, dances (poorly) to loud ’80s music, and plays chase with her insane Cairn terrier.

 

Author Links:

 

 

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