Tag Archives: Migrations

Launch, Lust and Self-Love

Lots of Lakeland Heatwave News!

Body Temperature and Rising has been out in paperback and eBook in the UK since October and in eBook in the US as well, but tomorrow is the official print launch day of Body Temperature and Rising in the US! I love book launches! And I LOVE the chance to celebrate. I’m very pleased with the positive response BTR is getting, and the closer I get to the completion of all three novels in the Lakeland Heatwave Trilogy, the more excited I get.

In more Lakeland Heatwave news, Body Temperature and Rising is being discussed all this month over at Coffee Time Romance. I’ll be talking paranormal erotic romance, what makes it work and what makes it hot. I’ll also be sharing some juicy excerpts, talking about what inspired me to write it, talking about sex magic, sharing a few snap shots of the glorious English Lake District, where the story is set, and just generally chatting about witches, demons, ghosts and all things paranormal and sexy. Do stop by and chat. Leave a comment for a chance to win your choice of either of my novels, The Initiation of Ms Holly, or The Pet Shop.

Even MORE Lakeland Heatwave News

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve just finished the first draft of book three of the Lakeland Heatwave Trilogy, Elemental Fire. You may have remembered that I had just finished the first draft of book two, Riding the Ether, in February. I decided to write the last two books back to back so I could get the best overall view of the powerful events that lead to the grand finale. Plus, I had less chance of suffering from empty nest syndrome that way. I have to admit there were a few twist and turns that even I didn’t expect, and I can hardly wait to make all three novels available to my readers! Riding the Ether will be published in October, and there’ll be much partying and dancing in the streets.

Novellas                                                                              

Last month I was all excited about the release of my two new novellas, Surrogates, published with Harper Collin’s new erotica eBook imprint, Mischief, and Migrations,  which included in the brand new Xcite Books line of anthologies, The Secret Library, in the Traded Innocence anthology. I’m happy to announce that both are doing well and enjoying good press. I’m doing my best to have as many of the authors from the new Secret Library line as guest on my blog as possible, so please check in to see what hot, romantic offerings are deliciously hidden inside those very elegant velvet covers. I’ll also have some exciting guest authors stopping by from the new Mischief line as well, so do make sure to check out A Hopeful Romantic for all the latest heat.

Garden Porn

Any of you who have read much of my work know that I’ve got a reputation for writing garden porn. Surrogates is a very hot romp through the veg patch, and some pretty stunning formal gardens as well. My short story, Vegging is packed full of veggie naughtiness, and my story, Allotted Views is a voyeuristic romp through the allotments.  I’ve always found working in the veg patch inspiring, and it has just got a whole lot more inspiring for me, as my husband and I just got an allotment after three long years on the waiting list. I think our patch alone is big enough to feed half of Surrey. And that means, of course, LOTS more inspiration for writing hot garden porn.

The Merry Month of May…er National Masturbation Month!

Okay, how could I possibly NOT end this little update with a happy, touchy-feely mention of National Masturbation Month? The celebration of May as National Masturbation Month started in 1995 in San Francisco as a response to the forced resignation of then U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, for remarks she made that masturbation should be taught as a healthy part of human sexuality.

The comment ended Elders’ career. National Masturbation Month came about as an act of protest against Elders’ ouster and a celebration of the safest sex of all. I’m definitely planning to do my part to celebrate in solidarity! And I intend to start by giving you a few very hot excerpts of the self-loving kind throughout the rest of the month – my contribution to the celebration of solo-sex. I hope you find them inspiringJ

Since all the latest news is Lakeland Heatwave, I’m going to start the self-love lit with a hands-on scene from Body Temperature and Rising. Enjoy!

Excerpt:

(in which much naughtiness ensues. Not for the delicate of disposition)

Marie woke to the awareness of a man sitting on the bed next to her, a man who, from the looks of his clothing, must have been at the same costume party as Anderson. His fly was open and he was stroking a substantial hard-on. Instead of being frightened, as would have been the normal response to a stranger rubbing one off on her bed, she simply admired his pale hair and the way his large hand moved over heavy equipment. She liked it when she conjured sexy men to visit her in her dream world. Better yet she had conjured one obviously ready to play.

She watched through half closed eyes as he shoved his trousers open further and worried distended balls free from the press of his underpants. With one hand, he caressed the length of his cock, with the other he cupped himself and stroked with his thumb.

‘I heard them talking about you.’ The man said. ‘They didn’t say how strong you are.’ He groaned out loud and shifted to slide his trousers down so that his pale ass settled onto the duvet, allowing easier access to himself. ‘Even if they had, I would not have believed them.’ His voice was a harsh whispered. ‘I long to know what you look like beneath the duvet, beneath the nightdress. Please let me look at you.’

So far this dream was shaping up well. She was happy to play I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours. Strangely Dream Guy sounded like he’d studied the same romantics Anderson had. Who’d have thought antiquated poet-speak could be so damned hot? She eased herself into a sitting position against the head board and pushed back the bedding. The night shirt lay high against her thighs, barely covering her cunt.

She was amazed at how well she could see in the moonlight drifting through her window. She could see the shape of him, the anxious rise and fall of his chest, the parting of his lips. She could feel his gaze on the hem of her night shirt. She scrunched and raked at it until her hand rested against her pubic mound obscuring his view, and he groaned his frustration. Slowly, carefully she raised her bottom and shifted until the night shirt was out of the way and her bare buttocks pressed against the smooth cotton of the sheet.

His gaze on her felt almost physical, as though with his eyes alone he could gently nudge her open. ‘Please let me see,’ he whispered.

She had played the voyeur with Anderson and Tara earlier. Now it felt wonderfully wicked to play the exhibitionist, as she shifted her ass again and slowly, teasingly opened her thighs, still nestling her hand in her curls, stroking and caressing, making herself wait until that magical moment when her fingers first slipped between the swell of her lips.

‘I can smell you,’ he said. ‘The scent of your sex is intoxicating, please, please let me look at you.’

This time, she moved her fingers down over the hard rise of her clitoris and in between the pout of her lips, her breath catching, her hips jerking with that first electrical touch. Then she spread her labia as wide as she could manage with two fingers and opened her legs still further until she was certain Dream Guy could see every detail of her dilating pussy, every fold of her slippery landscape.

He gasped at the sight, and she could see his balls tighten and jerk with the intake of breath. He shifted a fisted hand down the length of his penis, lingering for his thumb to caress and circle the head, its slit opening and closing with each stroke. She could feel the gentle rocking of the mattress and wasn’t sure if it was from her dream lover, who was now grinding his ass against the bed with each stroke, or if it was from her own bearing down.

‘Touch yourself for me,’ the man said. ‘I want to watch you pleasure your lovely womanhood.’

There was a strange man sitting on the foot of her bed watching her masturbate. The very thought made her juices run thick and hot.

*****

Wishing you all a very merry, touchy-feely month of May! And here’s a lucious link to The Center for the Intimate Arts and some fab visual stimulation.

Shshsh! It’s a Secret: Okay, Not Any More: The Secret Library and Road Trips

There’s something about being in the closed environment of a car moving down a long stretch of highway, watching the landscape change right before your eyes that’s a little bit magical. One of the best parts of a good road trip is that everything is in flux. I’ve always found it hard to doze when it’s not my turn to drive because I know every second my eyes are closed, an amazing landscape is passing me by.

I was fresh out of Uni and had worked a year in a small market television station in Montana. It was my first holiday. I was sort of on again off again with my landlady’s son, Lynn. He was making a cross country move and invited me to travel along as far as Missouri, where my friends and family were expecting me, and where I had planned to spend my holiday. It seemed like a good way to save money and have a great time, so we headed off across country on a crisp May morning.

We were planning to drive straight through, but ended up having car trouble somewhere in Eastern Montana in the late afternoon. Help came from a truck driver, whose CB radio handle was The Weatherman. We never learned his real name. It was only a temporary fix until we could get to a place that had the part we needed for Lynn’s truck. Lucky for us, Lynn’s truck was equipped with a CB, and he was well-versed in the protocol. When we headed back down the highway, The Weatherman was keeping an eye on us.

We travelled with him, bantering back and forth over the radios almost like we were really travelling together. The three of us had dinner at a truck stop en route. I don’t remember anything we talked about now, and nothing specific about the Weatherman and his life outside the closed environment of his truck. We travelled on through the night, across South Dakota, cosily tucked in our separate vehicles, only the soft crackle and pop of the CB connecting us. Sometime in the wee hours, we stopped at some little all-night diner on the edge of an Indian Reservation for coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls. Just after dawn, The Weatherman left us at some town that had a decent garage and continued his journey. I don’t even remember the name of the place now, but I do remember our sojourn with The Weatherman. For the biggest part of a day, our travels paralleled each other, and we were companions on the journey. Then The Weatherman went on his way, and so did we.

I never saw either of them again. Lynn settled in the DC area, where he had a job waiting. We stayed in touch for a while, then drifted apart. And who knew where The Weatherman ended up at. But for a little while he made our journey a whole lot more interesting.

The view from part of Val and Hawk's sexy road trip in Migrations.

The unexpected journey with The Weatherman is, to some degree, what inspired my novella, Migrations – that and a family trip from hell, which involved my mother, an adult niece and endless miles of whiny country music and audio romance novels. Somehow the two inspired one, steamy, romantic road trip of a novella, which is now in Xcite Book’s fabulous new Secret Library Collection in the Traded Innocence anthology. Each anthology contains three steamy, romantic novellas by some of erotica’s best authors. I feel very honoured to be included in such nasty, romantic, delisious company.

In the following few weeks as The Secret Library anthologies are released, I’ll be featuring some of the fabulous writers of those novellas on my website. The novellas are sexy and romantic and all done up in lovely discrete velvet covers. You can take them anywhere, and no one will ever guess your yummy little secret.

Here’s a little except from my novella, Migrations.

Blurb:

VAL HASTINGS, assisted by her do-gooder cousin, SALLY CLINE, is shanghaied into driving their AUNT ROSE across the US to visit her son. What begins as the trip from hell turns into a sexy adventure when they find themselves sharing the interstate with a mysterious, leather-clad biker. Aunt Rose and Sally are convinced he’s up to no good. But after Val catches him mid-wank at a rest area, and he offers her some steamy help to make her journey more enjoyable, she’s convinced he’s her nasty saviour.

Is HAWK, the biker, a murder, a free spirit, or something else? Whatever he is, animal attraction wins out over caution, as he joins the ladies for a cross country romp that keeps Sally and Aunt Rose nervous and Val hotter than her overheating engine.

Excerpt:

Val nipped the tip of Hawk’s thumb playfully and looked around at the feeding cranes. ‘Bon appetit!’ She called, uttering a startled gasp when he pulled her down onto the grass, his mouth covering hers as he engulfed her in his warmth and his scent.

‘Is this payment for what I owe you?’ She whispered when he pulled away.

‘Only the first instalment.’ He pushed the jacket off her shoulder along with the straps of her tank top and bra and bathed the sensitive hollow of her collar bone in warm kisses and nibbles, causing her to squirm against him.

‘It’s a big one then? The debt I mean.’ She was finding it more and more difficult to think in coherent sentences as he cupped and caressed.

‘You could be in the hotel room with your auntie and cousin watching movies on demand.’

‘Enormous then,’ she groaned, pressing up against him.

‘Mmm. I doubt if you’ll ever be able to fully repay it.’ He insinuated one knee between her legs and wriggled and nestled until his groin pressed against hers, until she could feel the hardness of him through the rub of jeans against jeans. Then he went back to work on her mouth, his tongue dancing over hers and lapping at her hard pallet, as they rocked and shifted against each other, until the friction was exquisite.

He pulled away enough to shove her tank top up until her belly was bare, then he  kissed her just below the waist band of her bra where her ribs came together, causing her to inhale in tight little gasps. He licked and nuzzled his way down to her navel, while he opened her zipper and slid a hand inside the low waist band of her panties, clearing the way for his hungry mouth. She arched up to meet his kisses, as he slid her clothing down over her hips.

It felt as though she’d been waiting forever for this moment, as he caressed and suckled the landscape of her, exploring with his fingers, with his mouth, with his eyes, like Lewis and Clark discovering a new land, like Darwin discovering a new species.

The little moan that escaped his throat against her clit might have been from the feel of her so engorged and open and receptive, or it might have been from the feel of his heavy penis pressing through his jeans. Whatever the cause, she returned the moan and curled her fingers in his hair holding him to her undulating groin. The cranes were all around them, so close she could almost touch a feathered neck or a slender leg. She felt their singleness of purpose as though it were her own, and Hawk felt it too, she was sure he did.

He nuzzled and nipped and licked at the split of her, burying his face in the warm wetness of her, caressing her fullness with deep, expressive lavings. And when she was practically in a frenzy with the want of him, he pulled away and looked up into her eyes, his face glistening with her juices. ‘I don’t want to play this time, Val. I want the real thing. I want all of you. I want to be inside you.’

Buy Links:

eBook

Xcite Books

Print

Amazon UK
Amazon US
Waterstones
Xcite Books

Spring Forward! Fun, Filth, and Fiction!

Every once in a while I get out of my cave for a little fun and entertainment, and Wednesday last was one of those times. The delectable Rubyyy Jones was able to secure tickets for the Erotic Meet folks to see a performance of the critically acclaimed show, Burlexe. I love burlesque! I love the costumes, I love the women, I love the glitz, I love the music and I love the delicious, saucy bawdiness of it all. I especially love that burlesque is very much a woman’s world. Women make the rules. Women run the show.

Burlexe is unique in that it isn’t just an amazing burlesque show, but it’s also a series of short vignettes between the performances in which women tell their stories of how they got into burlesque. The stories are diverse, and in some cases very surprising. They range from the story of a banker by day, burlesque performer by night who gets outed, to a young widowed mother who needs to support her children, to a woman with bi-polar disorder who discovers burlesque balances her. The performances were bawdy funny glitzy burlesque at its best, and the monologues were gritty, moving and often disturbing. If you’ve not seen this fabulous performance yet, then get thee to the Shadow Lounge in Soho and do so!

Filthy Mouths and Evil Tongues

Friday night brought another trip into London for my first reading with the talented, amazing and sexy women of Filthy Mouths and Evil Tongues. I don’t mind telling you I was a little bit nervous sharing the floor at Sh! Hoxton with the likes of Elizabeth N. Spire, Molly Moor, Lady Grinning Soul, Mia Lee, Annie Player, Sarah Berry, The Dragon King’s Daughter and the incomparable Mel Jones. Oh, the evening was so naughty! The place was heaving, fizz was flowing, many choccie cupcakes were eaten. As always, the Sh! Ladiez were fantastic, and the shopping was as yummy and filthy as the performances.

Novellas

Next month I’ll have my first ever novella released. In fact I’ll have two novellas released almost at the same time. I’d never written a novella before, and I was intrigued and excited to try my hand at writing something in the 20-40 thousand word range. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed the paciness the shorter length provided, and yet the space to explore characters and plot more thoroughly than I would have been able to in a short story. Novellas are a happy medium, indeed, and a lovely change. I hope I have the opportunity to do it again. In the meantime, I’m getting very excited as the release dates draw near.

The Secret Library

I’m very proud to be included in the debut volume of Xcite Books ground-breaking new collection of books called The Secret Library. Each volume has a gorgeous, very discrete, velvet cover. Inside each cover are three very naughty novellas. I’m very honoured to have my very nasty road-trip story, Migrations, included in The Secret Library volume called Traded Innocence. Also included is Toni Sands’s title story, Traded Innocence and Elizabeth Coldwell’s story, Cooking Up Trouble. Deliciously sexy stories in gorgeous, discrete covers written by some of the hottest erotica writers in the field are bound to be a big hit. I’ll be talking more about The Secret Library, Traded Innocence and Migrations very soon.

Mischief

I’m also very pleased to have my novella, Surrogates, included in Harper Collins’s brand new eBook line of erotica, Mischief. And very aptly named now that the cat is out of the bag, and the list of writers creating Mischief are among the nastiest and the best in the business. I’m very pleased to be in such filthy company. As for my novella, Surrogates, well it’s a garden porn ménage at its nastiest, and just in time for spring.

My Other Babies

With Body Temperature and Rising being my first paranormal erotic novel, in many ways it feels like The Pet Shop and Body Temperature and Rising are contemporaries in my writing timeline. While Body Temperature and Rising keeps getting great reviews and is the main topic of my guest posts on other sites at the moment, The Pet Shop continues to get fab reviews and grow in popularity alongside Body Temperature and Rising. Of course I’m very glad to see this, as I love all my babies and the release time was short between The Pet Shop and Body Temperature and Rising.

In writing news, I’ve finished the first draft of the second Lakeland Heatwave novel, Riding the Ether, and have begun book three, Elemental Fire, which is stalled at the moment due to a much-needed catch-up on PR and admin. I hope to return to my efforts next week. As the two novels are set only a few months apart in the timeline, I have decided to write them pretty much as though they were one continuous narrative, which will give me a good sense of continuity with the two and also, maybe even more important, keep me from feeling too much empty nest syndrome in between the finishing of one and the beginning of the next.

That’s the week in a nutshell. And a busy week it’s been. Here’s wishing you all a fabulous Spring Forward!