When a Man Loves a Woman

By Chelle Cordero (Guest Blogger)

Although I may embarrass my offspring with moderately explicit sex scenes in my novels, I do not write about sex. I write about making love and the two are not necessarily in the same league.

Having sex is physical – it’s intercourse, it’s the exchange of bodily fluids, it’s touching in private places… Sex can be hot, get a participant (observer or reader) breathless, screaming from the “Big O”, drooling, sometimes stupid.

Making love is emotional, it’s more than your bodies and nerve endings getting involved, it’s your souls caressing. Making love can be the passionate kind of love or it can be the love of a deep friendship. Making love can be all of the above goodies of sex, all of the turn-ons and mind-altering orgasms, but it Is so much more.

When you are making love even if it is only for a fleeting period of time, making love will stay with you for ever – the satisfaction of sex only stays until the next time you get horny. And (please insert a big, audible sigh here) when you can successfully combine mind-blowing sex AND making love – Wow! If I could only have one though, I would choose making love every time, even if it didn’t involve sex.

What?!

So how do I turn the explicit sex that shame my (grown) children into scenes of passionate “making love” that hopefully thrills my readers to their toes? I usually start with an oversexed and hunky male and then I throw in generous doses of patience, trust, desire, selflessness and care. To be perfectly honest, I have many more “making love” scenes than I do scenes involving sex.

In my novel Bartlett’s Rule playboy Lon falls in love with a rape survivor. Thanks to his patience and caring he makes love to her on many nights long before they actually consummate with the act of intercourse; he holds her while they sleep and lets her learn to trust him. To me that is more of a turn-on than all of the sexual abilities he built his reputation on.

A woman can make love, without sex, to a man as well. In Hostage Heart Ryan is injured on the job and there is a possibility he may suffer permanent and total paralysis from the waist down. He worries that he is not “man enough” to keep her happy. She lets him know that he is the man that she wants to spend the rest of her life with. They marry.

On the other hand Tom Hughes, undeniably a Gamma male, doesn’t wait to make love, intercourse and all, with Alli. And he definitely makes love. Alli admits to him that she never knew what it would feel like to be so cared for and Tom makes it a point to show how much he cares. The first morning that Tom and Allie wake up together after making love, he notices she has a scar that crosses her hip. She’s embarrassed and self conscious, he is mesmerized and tender.

In the bright sunlight that streamed into her bedroom, Tom woke Alli with kisses. He started at her neck and worked his way down as he slowly pulled the bed sheet off of her. At first she seemed self-conscious about him seeing her completely naked in the daylight, but the sensations he was causing were enough to make her feel anything but rational. He kissed her belly and ran his fingers over crisscrossed scars she had on her side and hip.

“What’s this?” His lips touched a faded scar.

She ran her fingers through his hair. Alli hesitated as she caught her breath. “I had an accident.”

"What kind of accident?” He tasted the area around the puckered skin.

“We went rock climbing.” She was breathless. “I fell.”

His tongue traced one of the scars.

“They’re... ugly.” She was nearly panting.

“I don’t know... I’m kind of turned on by them right now.” He put his lips on her scarred hip and lathed her scars with his tongue. When she could stand no more, he made love to her.

Her scars certainly didn’t distract from her beauty. The minor imperfections only made her a more perfect being as far as he was concerned. They were a part of her just as much as hair color or the gentle curves of her body. She had called them ugly, but there was nothing about Alli that was ugly.

I like it when my heroes, in fiction and in real life, understand that pure lust and sex can be one-dimensional, but making love is all encompassing. When a man loves a woman THE RIGHT WAY it is fantastic – it’s the stuff that romance novels are made of.

I love being a woman.

***

Chelle Cordero is a multi-published novelist with seven Romantic Suspense and one Murder Mystery all published by Vanilla Heart Publishing; she is currently working on a second Murder Mystery. Chelle also has short stories in anthologies from Vanilla Heart Publishing and Mandinam Press.

She is also a journalist and has been published in several regional and national newspapers and magazines. Chelle authors the Amazon Kindle Blog LIVING, BREATHING, WRITING http://bit.ly/pILcG , a weekly writing lesson available by subscription.

Chelle has been married for 35 years and lives with her husband and family in the scenic Hudson Valley in New York. In her spare time, Chelle volunteers as a NYS-EMT and is the current President of her local volunteer ambulance corps. She is very proud to say that her entire family volunteers in emergency services and her daughter and son both work professionally in the field.

You can find out more about Chelle Cordero and find her buy links at her website http://ChelleCordero.com or her publisher’s author site at her publisher’s author site at http://www.vanillaheartbooksandauthors.com/Chelle_Cordero.html.

Chelle enjoys hearing from her readers at ChelleCordero (at) gmail (dot) com

Children Are Our Future

By Chelle Cordero (Guest Blogger)

I touched on the subjects of orphans and foster care in both of my latest releases, A Chaunce of Riches and Common Bonds, Tangled Hearts. In Chaunce both Samantha and Ben had grown up together in the same foster home; in Common Bonds the heroine Layne was orphaned young and made a ward of the state when her ailing grandmother couldn’t care for her.

In Common Bonds, Tangled Hearts Layne wasn’t nearly as fortunate as her predecessors who found warmth and comfort with loving foster parents. Her fate was much more dreadful and she wound up walking into a bad situation because she had no guidance to steer her. If just one person had been able to take her hand and help her… But then what would my book have been about?

As Dennis got ready for bed, Layne thought of her own childhood. Her parents had died in a car accident when she was just a toddler, she didn't even remember them. Her grandparents raised her; grandpa died when she was six, her grandmother had a stroke which left her in a coma when Layne was almost eight. Layne was put into a foster home close by so she could visit her grandmother in the hospital. Grandma died the day Layne turned eight. She figured it was because the state had never been able to trace down any of her mother's relations that she was kept in the foster care program rather than put up for adoption.

Some of the foster homes weren't too terrible, the parents were friendly and her foster siblings were nice to play with. But as Layne grew into a teen-ager and her tall lanky shape developed into a womanly figure, Layne found herself in a dangerous situation. She had been put into a home where the parents had two teen-age boys of their own. Her foster parents called her ungrateful when she complained that the boys were sneaking peeks of her while she showered or changed in her room. Layne tolerated it until the night one of her foster brothers climbed into her bed and touched her in ways he had no right to. She ran away before dawn broke.

The next few days she literally lived on the street with no money, no food and no bed to sleep in. That was when she met Charlie. He found her in the alley outside of his gallery and he invited her in to warm up, use the shower in the back of the store and sleep in the stock room; it was the first solid sleep she had in days. When she woke up, she found a tray laden with juice and milk and cereal and fruit. She was so grateful to him.

After she was rested and clean and the hunger pangs in her stomach were gone, he invited her into his office to chat. She told him what had happened and thanked him for his rescue. He asked her how old she was, she told him sixteen; he was forty-nine. He offered her a permanent solution, one which the frightened teen-age girl saw only as a fairy tale come true. He had money, he lived in a big house, he owned an international art company and he was willing to marry her. Because of her age, he handed her money and travel directions to a nearby state where the age of consent was even younger and he told her he'd meet her.

They met at the hotel and went to the justice of the peace where Elaine Cowan became Mrs. Charles Harris. That night he took her to bed and when she cried from the pain he caused her, he told her that the first time was the worst and it was a small price to pay for all the comfort she now would be living with. They went home the next day.

Layne got used to Charlie taking what he called his husbandly rights, but she never looked forward to them. She learned quickly that any refusals she made only made things worse. He wouldn't be denied; he didn't care what her reasons were. After the second month of their marriage, Charlie demanded that Layne take a pregnancy test. It was negative. He demanded another one every month after that and with each negative response, he became angrier and more abusive. Charlie told Layne that he "bought her" so that she should give him an heir. He told her that horrifying fact the very first night he beat her.

Recent news reports have been filled with the terrifying accounts of the earthquake aftermath in Haiti – among the many, many tragedies are thousands of children, many orphaned, who have no shelter or loving arms to hold them. Some of the orphans, in the system before the quake, were in the process of being adopted and sadly the paperwork is now buried in rubble so the delight of the children and their parents-to-be has to be put on hold until governments can sort through myriad details and red-tape.

This poignant plight leaves me so saddened – I wish I had space and money to house scores of these children, I would have the love. There have been many hopeful parents who have opened their hearts and arms just to be told that paperwork had to be filed and visas had to be issued. Current estimates say that these processes could take up to two years. Even opening our homes today will be met with delays and unfortunately children who were already being adopted will continue to take up bed space from many new orphans.

Hopefully governments throughout the world will help by making special emergency plans to push through the adoptions that were already in process. We must each ask our governments to consider refugee status for these orphans so that they can go to loving homes as soon as possible. If the paperwork waits to be done – it’s just paper. The children are our future.

Visit Chelle online at http://ChelleCordero.com

Common Bonds, Tangled Hearts is available now in print and e-book.