Winners of the “I’ll Change My Name to Wendy or Tammy” Contest are listed at the bottom of this post! Stay tuned for the announcement of the next contest! ~DD

Hello, Delilah fans. I can’t believe I get to be one of Delilah’s guests. Cool! I LOVE the scenery here, great covers, too. I have been writing for a long time, a very long time. While I don’t have manuscripts under my bed or in my closets, (well, a few still hide in both places), I do have novels, novellas, and short stories on blue floppy disks and now flash drives. I have romantic suspense books not yet published, women’s fiction stories and even stories with paranormal elements. While the characters and the plots are different, one thing is true of all my books. I LOVE to tease characters and my critique partners and make them beg me to let my characters actually have sex. It’s important to the romance for the sex to happen when the characters can’t wait any longer.

In The Gift I broke one of my own rules. My characters had sex before the story began.

Excerpt from THE GIFT

Deke fell asleep thinking about that night and that woman. He dreamed of her as he often did lately.

The woman against his body fit like she’d been made for him. Her soft breasts against his chest sent messages to his groin. The strawberry fragrance of her shampoo made him think about her. She was past the bloom of youth, no twenty something, but still fresh, unsophisticated. Her loneliness called to his need for the warmth of another human being. He needed her as much as she needed him and their bodies were certainly willing.

He kept his tone gentle. “Please let me look at you.”
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If you saw last week’s post about my sister, Myla’s new release, That Voodoo You Do, you might have guessed something is in the works with my Alluring pals. And there is. Every week until Christmas, there will be a new release from every member of the Allure Authors. Be sure to check us out!

Here’s this week’s release from the wonderful Cathryn Fox! Is this cover not the most beautiful thing you’ve seen in a while? Click on the cover to purchase!

When a mermaid saves a drowning man she unleashes a tidal wave of passion that could destroy her very world.

Ella, a mermaid from Dualii, a kingdom deep below the sea, has returned to the quaint coastal town of Crystal Cove, Nova Scotia, a place where she’d once saved a drowning boy. Except when she sees the teenager from her past, she knows he is anything but a boy. He is a man, one who taunts her body and heart in the most inexplicable ways and has her questioning her very future.

As he stands naked beneath the full moon Ella knows she must have him—before she returns home and succumbs to her arranged marriage. Despite the rules set in place for her kind, rules to protect the identity of her people, she decides a blatant seduction is in order. With her body beckoning his touch, Ella lays herself bare as everything inside her urges her to experience his personal brand of lovemaking—just once—before she wipes his mind of their encounter and returns to her underwater world forever.

Except when the heat they generate hinders her abilities to strip his memories and everything in his touch stirs her soul, Ella knows she wants to turn fantasy into long term reality. But when she finds years of research papers, she understands that not only does his study of mythical creatures threaten their future, he is the one man who can destroy her very kind.

Waves of Seduction, Excerpt

After replenishing her life force, Ella returned to the boat house to climb back into the oversized shorts and t-shirt she’d borrowed from a stranger’s clothesline earlier that morning. Even though she hated to take things that didn’t belong to her, she couldn’t very well walk around town naked.

Once dressed she made her way back to the private dock, to await the handsome man from her past. Nervousness invaded her stomach when she finally spotted him coming her way, returning to his ocean-side cottage after a long, hard swim out to sea. Her mind raced with questions while her skin prickled with uneasy anticipation.

Would he recognize her after all this time?

Steeling herself she stood back and observed him as he gripped the dock and lifted his long lean torso from the sea. Water dripped from his magnificent body and when his glistening eyes locked on hers, she sucked in a sharp breath, the pull between them every bit as powerful today as it was all those years ago. Ella watched him and waited, anxious to see how he’d react to her.

He slowly climbed to his feet and when he reached his full height, towering a good foot over her, his brow furrowed in bewilderment, clearly taken aback to find someone on his dock.

Surprise on his face, he reached for his clothes. “How…who?”

“It’s been too long,” Ella murmured under her breath as she gazed at his nakedness. It made her want to shed her own clothes, to return to her natural form.

With his hand hovering over his pants, confusion clouded his eyes and he glanced at the distant houses dotting the dark cove. “Do I know—” then suddenly, before he even completed his sentence, his head spun back to her, his clothes forgotten as awareness dawned on his face.
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The “I’ll Change My Name to Wendy or Tammy” Contest ends tomorrow!
Be sure to comment to enter! ~DD

Thanks so much for having me, Delilah!

I’m Jasmine Haynes, www.jasminehaynes.com, author of classy contemporary erotic romance and also the Max Starr series, www.jbskully.com. I also write humor as Jennifer Skully, www.jenniferskully.com. My latest novel, What Happens After Dark is the second book in my sexy DeKnight trilogy, the series continues with the characters from Past Midnight, this time giving you Bree Mason’s story, the accountant for DKG, my make-believe company. The third book in the trilogy, The Principal’s Office, will be out next February.

Bree’s is a dark story, seething with emotions, about love, sex, life, death, illness, and tragedy. Though a novelist’s stories are, by definition, make-believe, a writer can’t help but put bits and pieces from his or her own experience. That’s what makes every story unique, even when it has exactly the same subject matter. In my college creative writing class, the teacher challenged each of us to write a story using exactly the same premise and setup (basically a back of the book blurb). You would not believe how different they all were. It was amazing. So, some of the things that happen in this book were influenced by events in my life. I lost my father twenty years ago this Thanksgiving. He died of lung cancer. It was a very difficult time. This is where my experience with hospice comes from, which you’ll read about in the book. Hospice is an amazing group made up of professionals and volunteers who provide support, both physical and mental to the dying and to their families. I can’t say enough about what the people from hospice did for my mother, myself, my whole family—and especially my father—during this time in our lives. Their kindness made each day just a little more bearable. I think I’ve wanted to write a story involving hospice ever since, to show what a great organization it is. But the right novel has to come along. For me, it was Bree’s story, where she has to deal with the illness of a loved one. She relies on the love of one good man to help her through. I hope that I have done hospice justice in this tale.

Here’s a blurb on What Happens After Dark, A DeKnight Novel, Book 2.

By day she’s a mild-mannered accountant.
After dark, she’s a willing slave to his wildest fantasies.

Bree Mason longs to be a successful career woman, but secrets keep her chained to the past, afraid to take that next step. And at night, her frustrations are released by the domineering Luke Raven, who gives her what she asks for and more in a sensuous game of master and slave…

But to take control of her life, Bree will have to look within and face the demons of her past. Luke knows the ins and outs of Bree’s body, knows what makes her gasp and sigh and beg. But now he’s willing to push their relationship to the limit—to stand by her side in the light of day and take the greatest risk of all…for love.

You can find an excerpt on my blog, www.jasminehaynes.blogspot.com. I’m also doing a free read on the blog so I’ll hope you’ll want to stop by each week for a new chapter.

PANTY RAID

What’s in your panty drawer?

Anything new? Daring? Yummy? Edible? (Hmm, yes, panties are now eco-friendly, and one brand even says, EAT ME!)

I adore great lingerie.

Today, I wanted to share with you a peek at where my research has sent me for a new series, titled KNIGHTS IN BLACK LEATHER for EC.

My heroine, Cara Ford, is about to open a new shop in a tiny Texas town where the men are good and plenty~and the women wear only smiles. Cara wants to spice up the sedate little clothing store on Main Street where her auntie has presided over the women’s fashion for more than fifty years. Auntie Bree has a few outdated ideas about what the females in this town should have.

Cara Ford has a few modern ones!

Here, so that you can “shop” with Cara (and empty your wallet!) are a few of the great websites and blogs:

https://www.kikidm.com/shop/Instruments-of-Pleasure/
https://www.tangafinelingerie.com
https://www.lingerie-paris.com/
https://www.funfactory.com/ sex toys–fingerballs/smartballs

I started buying great (let that read, daring and expensive) lingerie more than 10 years ago. It goes a long way to interest your lover!

Some of these are very pricey~into the thousands! And you can see why.

But nothing says luvin’ like something from a French shop or two.

What’s in your closet? Got any item that your significant other just drools over?

Tell us!

Psst! Remember, the “I’ll Change My Name to Wendy or Tammy” Contest and Promo Ho Contest continue! Click here for details—and be sure to post a comment! ~DD

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

I had a brainstorm of an idea about writing some erotic shorts about sex toys, and vibrators, in particular. Here comes the confession: I’d never used one until about a year ago. Okay, I’ve said it. I feel better.

I read a blurb on someone else’s blog about a Rabbit, and I didn’t know what it was. So I emailed the author off-loop and she told me. Embarrassed initially, I started to get curious and Googled the Rabbit and it provided me a link to several sites. I picked one, and voila!

There were colorful vibrators of every size and shape. I mean, it looked more like the advertisement for Jelly Belly there was so much pink and blue and purple latex “shimmering” like gummy worms of a different sort.

I noticed a little chat box in the upper left corner of the site and clicked on customer service online. I got connected to a nice lady who answered several of my questions—things I had never told a living soul before, including my husband. She made a recommendation, and I bought it.

What happened when I received the product is another story for another time. Needless to say, it has become a happy companion of mine, and my husband, something I never expected.

So I decided I would write a story about ordering from an online catalog, like I did, and used the chat/customer service help as one of the key ingredients. Except the outcome was vastly different from my experience.

And I decided to call it The Stimulus Package.

I have never promoted this book much, and used my erotic pen name, Angela Love, instead of my real name. With all the blogging I have done on guest sites for my Heavenly Lover, the Angel book, this short has sold three times more than anything else I have written without any promotion. And here’s why.

Timing.

I get to hear the title of my book every night on the news. Hear some pretty important people using that term every day. It tickles me to death.

I kept to my theme, and wrote Buzz Words about a voice-activated vibrator. And then Road Rage, which was based on a partially true story told to me over breakfast at a women’s retreat. And yes, we were all spitting out our eggs and OJ.

After all, girls just want to have fun.

Hope you enjoy the excerpt. Heed the warning!

Content Advisory: Explicit M/F sex scene, frank language. Do not try this online.

Candy wanted to stop her fingers from hitting the hot pink button that read, “Live Support” on the Garden of Delights Sex Toys website, but they had a life of their own. They lurched forward, and the familiar help screen popped up.

She’d been here two or three times before. Kate was the customer service rep she chatted with online, someone she liked and trusted, and who asked her all the questions she didn’t know to ask: How dry are you? Do you like warming gels? Do you like clitoral stimulation, or anal penetration with your sexual partners? These were all things she began to openly discuss with Kate—the only other person in the whole world who knew her most intimate secrets.

JOSH: Hi there. This is Josh. How can I help you?

She hesitated, and then typed, “Where is Kate today? Don’t see her avatar on the site.”

JOSH: She’s off. Who am I speaking to, please?

Her fingers were frozen. “I’d like to speak to a woman, please.”

JOSH: I am truly sorry. We have a wedding and several of our customer supports are out today. I would be happy to pass along your questions, or would you prefer to log in tomorrow?

Yes, that would be better. Candy looked at Josh’s avatar. A cartoon character of a perfectly geeky computer nerd with large glasses. Harmless. And she did need to get her question answered and place her order quickly. She needed it for Friday night.

CUSTOMER X: No offense, Josh, but I’d feel more comfortable talking to a woman. Sorry.

JOSH: I understand completely. Well then, if I can’t answer anything for you, have a good day.

He disconnected.

Candy needed the item in time for her sister’s bachelorette party. And then there was that dare, that $100 bet she had with her sister. Candy logged back into the website.

JOSH: Hi there. This is Josh. How can I help you?
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Addiction can come in many forms. A domino effect can ripple and ruin an entire family. Many times there are such faint warning signs, that they are missed or masked by the addict who’s filled with shame, self-loathing, and fear. This loved one will go to any length to perfect a façade of nothing being wrong. And there are times when the person who’s failing to succeed has no idea why or has suppressed pain and trauma so deep down just the thought of dealing further compounds the situation. Almost every family has one member who has an addiction or an addictive personality. We see it all the time. No one knows until an autobiography is written or a documentary is done. The fallout is immediate, but putting back together the broken pieces is a long painstaking process that takes strength, courage and the will to live.

Whatever the addiction be it alcohol, drugs, food, sex, etc. There is always help.

The Price of Defiance is about a young woman who self-destructs by choices she makes. Her choices have a cataclysmic effect on those around her. Much like a heroine junkie, she’s gets off on a rush that is created by her own body. No external drug but an internal receptor in the pleasure center of the brain gives her a high that is equivalent to a heavy street drug dosage. She’s an adrenalin addict and unlike professionals her amateur and illegal hobby—her dark hunger doesn’t care what gets in its path. There are no safety measures, no emergency personnel, just a bunch of young men and women in the dead of the night playing Russian roulette with their lives and those in the crowd watching them for social status and a purse full of cold hard cash. The cash is a secondary win. The major win is street credit and notoriety. She needs an intervention before death knocks at her door or manslaughter.

America Patterson loves living on the edge. Car model by day, illegal street racer by night, she’s known as the best. Except underneath her flawless façade lies a young woman filled with turmoil. When her hobby lands her in hot water, she finds herself handcuffed and bailed out by the one person who’d abandoned her….

MMA Fighter Alejandro Escovedo is summoned home after a tournament that had left him sore and questioning his career. Expecting a nice welcome home, he instead finds himself rescuing his best friend’s sister out of jail. This time he’s had enough.

Their explosive past gives him all the rights where America is concerned, and he is more than ready to take her on. By ending her daredevil ways and finding the trigger to her self-destructive behavior, will he convince her he’s back to stay or drive her further away?

Genre: Erotic romance, BDSM, contemporary

Warning—Adult Excerpt:
The shrill of her cordless phone disrupted her peace. Against her better judgment, she ducked inside to grab it and returned to her perch on the cushioned chair. “Hello. No, I’m not interested in commenting.” She hung up and frowned. On impulse she dialed Jayshaun’s number. “Hey…been worried ’bout you.”

“Yeah?” She sighed into the phone after hearing his voice. “I found out you went to jail, and Vincent said he sent Alejandro to get you. You good?”

“I’m fine.” She tipped her head back.

“You’re all over the net. I can’t believe you drove into a building. I almost died watching in slow mo. So how are things? Lover boy looked pissed fending off the piranha scumbags and their microphones.”

“Yes, Alejandro is back, and it’s complicated. Of course, he was angry—is angry. I’m not sure. He’s not here right now.”

“Good. Listen, there’s news of another race in a few weeks. Get well so you can win the purse. It’s double what you lost last race. You’ll want in on this. Drivers will be using escorts and scouts via Bluetooth. No one wants a repeat of this week.”

“You’ve got to be joking, right? I went to jail,” Amy hissed quietly into the phone. “Jay, I don’t even know if I have a job, or if I’ve lost my modeling contracts yet.” Once she heard the purse price, temptation hit her. She chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Look, let me think and get back to you.”

“Get back to who for what?” Alejandro cleared his throat to announce his presence.
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Why I Love Science Fiction

Many thanks to Delilah Devlin for letting me ramble on her blog today! Kithra is my debut novella with Samhain Publishing and I couldn’t be more excited about working with them. I’ll give away one e-copy of Kithra to a commenter.

My love for science fiction began early. I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Star Wars, but I remember the incredible excitement I felt through the whole movie. I also remember slapping up posters of Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker right next to the one I had of Shaun Cassidy. (I liked big-eyed blondes apparently. Shaun Cassidy earned my sincere admiration for other reasons when I grew up and discovered he wrote American Gothic, which was a fantastic, spooky show.)

But, I will never forget the first time I watched Alien—glued to the screen for the entire movie, thinking Ripley was the coolest heroine ever. I loved Ripley even more when Aliens came out. Terminator and Terminator 2 were huge favorites. Around that time, I discovered Star Trek, The Next Generation and I raced home daily to catch the six o’clock episodes. Other favorite shows were Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Stargate, Alien Nation, Farscape, Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Sliders, and of course, Doctor Who.

I find the idea of our future exciting. I wonder what the important issues will be as we continue to discover more in science and medicine. I wonder if we will conquer space travel and find other worlds with life similar to our own. I hope so. I also sincerely hope things like sexism, racism and homophobia disappear. Yeah, yeah, my idealism is showing. 😉

When I sat down to write Kithra, I wanted to write a future world that featured alien races living along with humans, with societies where any loving relationship is the norm… and my heroine sprang to life and no matter how many times I tried to curb her language or move her into the background, she stomped forward and took over. The story started out in 3rd person and I quickly realized it could only be 1st. Once I made that decision, her story just flowed. Yeah, Lux is foul-mouthed, but she’s also fiercely loyal and she has this soft, mushy center you’d think she’d try to hide, but she doesn’t. As I wrote the sequel, Replicant, her mouth and her compassion showed up to take over a few scenes—even as a secondary character. I’m on the third volume in The Kithran Regenesis series, and she’s showed up a few places and surprised me.

The heroes of Kithra, Kol and Egan, couldn’t resist her and I hope readers feel the same way. And if you like Kithra, Replicant is scheduled for March. Thanks again to Delilah for having me!