Review Tuesday: Her Lover's Secret by Portia Da Costa - #ReviewTuesday #EroticRomance #Billionaire

Her Lover’s Secret by Portia Da Costa

Amazon KDP, 2018

Rachel Harding has a weakness for older men, a weakness that she knows she has to conquer if she’s ever going to find happiness in love. Her last relationship with a “mature”guy came close to breaking her heart. She’d been so sure Richard was the one — until she discovered he had a wife and kids. She’d sent him packing, but the experience left her damaged, wary and insecure, afraid to trust herself or her emotions.

So Rachel reacts with alarm as well as embarrassment when she collides with a gorgeous, silver-haired man at her co-worker and friend Sarah’s fancy wedding and splashes her wine all over the both of them. Lawrence is everything she knows she should avoid: tall, lean and devastatingly handsome; sophisticated, polite and funny; and more than a decade older. When he flirtatiously invites her upstairs to his lavish private suite for a shower and a bit of kinky fun, though, she can’t resist. After all, the hotel her friend has chosen for her nuptials is well-known as the site of BDSM sex parties catering to the well-to-do. As a fairly lowly employee of Freeman-Brady Finance, she doesn’t exactly run in those circles. How can she turn down what might be her only chance for an erotic spanking?

Though he’s the consummate gentleman, Lawrence Brady works hard to keep his relationships casual. He has a secret that rules him out as husband material, or so he believes. Still, he can’t help wishing for more than just a friends-with-benefits arrangement with the feisty, experimental younger woman he literally runs into at his employee’s wedding. Despite the difference in their ages and their social status, he and Rachel share more than just exquisite sexual compatibility. Where else would he ever meet a female who loves repairing vintage cars as much as he does?

Both Lawrence and Rachel try to be civilized and sensible—to the point that they almost lose their chance at true love. However, since this is a Portia Da Costa romance, you know they’ll eventually come to their senses and work around their obstacles. Meanwhile it’s great fun watching them.

As always, Portia Da Costa writes with verve and wit. Rachel’s a delightful character, tough and practical, sensual and sexually assertive. She’s definitely no shrinking violet. I had a bit harder time feeling close to Lawrence, partly because I’m immune to the appeal of billionaires, but also because I felt his anguish over his secret (which of course I’m not going to spill!) was overdone. Still, he’s very likable, ultimately not afraid to show his vulnerability to the woman he loves.

Compared to some of Ms. Da Costa’s books, this one goes light on the kink, but that fits the characters. Certainly there’s plenty of passion. As always when I’m reading a Portia Da Costa story, I was impressed by the way she ramps up the heat by showing us what’s in her characters’ heads. She demonstrates that fantasies have as much power as the physical when it comes to sex.

If you’re looking for a quick, sexy, feel-good romance that doesn’t insult your intelligence, I can recommend Her Lover’s Secret.

More Secret Pleasures from @PortiaDaCosta - #EroticRomance #sexy #secretpleasures

[Anyone who follows me knows that I am a huge fan of Portia Da Costa. It was reading one her books that got me started writing erotica and erotic romance. Here's a delicious new book from Portia's pen! ~ Lisabet]

HER LOVER’S SECRET - Portia Da Costa

Secret Pleasures #4

 

When twenty-something office worker Rachel spills wine all over herself and a devastatingly handsome older man at her friends' wedding reception, she little realises that it's the beginning of a heart-stopping journey of emotional discovery. Or that the gorgeous hunk she’s just dowsed in house red is the owner of the very company she works for!

Lawrence Brady is stunned to discover his state of weary ennui shattered by the beautiful woman who upends her glass of wine all over him. Rachel seems bold and eager for a sensual adventure… and he’s just the man to show her new horizons, in a thrillingly intense but short-lived no strings affair.

But what if their fling becomes more? Will Lawrence's secret sorrow destroy their chance of happiness and a future together? Or will Rachel’s troubled past make it impossible for her to give her heart to him?

Excerpt

Chapter 1

‘Oh no! I’m ever so sorry! Your beautiful suit. Please forgive me!’

Oh bollocks, there was splattered wine everywhere! Mainly all over her front and surely far more than one medium glass could ever hold! Why on earth hadn’t she stuck to champagne instead of trying the house red?

Rachel Harding stared up at the man she was trying to apologise to—the tall, grey-haired, scrumptiously broad-shouldered man who was the most stunning piece of crumpet she’d set eyes on in a long time. Clad in an expensive-looking mid-blue linen suit, this imposing hunk was now adorned with a selection of tasteful red blotches that matched the ones that also decorated her own front.

But wine or no, he was a dish to tempt all womankind. Handsome in a weathered, slightly craggy mode, he was even more of a lure with every second that passed. And that hair.

Under closer scrutiny it was iron grey at the base, heavily frosted with purest white and cut short but with a slight curl. A bit of a Roman emperor style, which chimed well with his confident, imperial bearing.

Uh oh.

Luckily most of the wine in her glass seemed to have landed on her. Her rather nice wedding guest outfit, a rose-coloured lacy number, was a total mess, but it was almost worth it to invoke the glorious amused grin that lit the face of this fabulous silver fox.

‘I… um… I’m so sorry,’ she burbled on, feeling pleasantly gobsmacked by him. He was turning her to jelly and he hadn’t said a word yet.

‘No, no, no, it’s my fault. I jogged you.’ His broadening smile revealed dazzling white teeth. He was like an amiable, edible predator, an edifice of sexy male pulchritude.

HER LOVER’S SECRET is a sequel to His Secret [#1], Their Secret [#2] and Her Secret [#3].

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About the Author

Portia Da Costa is a British author of romance, erotic romance and erotic fiction. Published since 1990, she’s written more than 30 novels and novellas, plus many short stories. In 2012, her saucy, library-set erotic romance IN TOO DEEP reached #5 on the SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERS list, outsold only by E L James & Sylvia Day.

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Review Tuesday: Wild in the Country by Portia Da Costa #eroticfantasy #classic #vintage

Wild in the Country by Portia Da Costa

Latest edition, 2017

Leggy, creamy-skinned redhead Flora Swain longs for something new—something more exciting than her well-paying but tedious job and her well-meaning but prudish boyfriend Ian. While Flora has daring fantasies and longs for sexual variety and kinky exploration, Ian is strictly a missionary-position, don’t-make-too-much-noise sort of guy.

When she unexpectedly inherits a chunk of money, Flora throws caution to the winds. Handing in her resignation, she moves from the city to the picturesque country village of Marwick Magna, where she takes possession of charming Pennyroyal Cottage and its resident feline Arnold. Little does she know that she has joined a community of libertines whose salacious activities far exceed her wildest dreams.

As she starts to meet her neighbors, including the seductive and mysterious Morwenna Carfax and Declan McKenna, a renowned artist who lives next door, every social encounter seems to turn intimate. Flora has never been with a woman before; she’s never masturbated in public; she’s never been spanked, or been bound and teased. With the eager assistance of the attractive denizens of Marwick Magna, Flora rapidly expands her repertoire of erotic experience. Meanwhile, almost every day, she receives explicit letters from someone who signs himself (or herself) “The Scribe”. The Scribe seems to know about all her naughty adventures, almost as if he (or she) were constantly watching Flora’s experiments with pleasure. Who is her secret admirer? It could be any of the village’s outrageous inhabitants—anyone, that is, except sweet and sexy Declan, who is illiterate.

Wild in the Country is pure, vintage Portia Da Costa, the sort of erotica that first inspired my own writing. The book was originally published in the nineties, in a more innocent time. It gleefully includes a huge variety of sexual situations and activities, including M/M and F/F interactions. Set against the lush background of a bountiful English summer, the novel brings Flora, her desires and her not-terribly-effective doubts to vivid life.

I love women like Flora, women who aren’t afraid of their own carnality. That’s the way I was, during my “sex goddess” period, so I really identified with her. Meanwhile, the author populates her fictional village with distinctive and likeable characters, each one attractive in his or her own way. There’s the deceptively prim shopkeeper Lucy, bare-bottomed under her ankle-length skirts and buttoned-to-the-throat Victorian blouses—intellectual, middle-aged author Marshall Fox, with his predilection for kink—Lord and Lady Rawnsley, the local gentry, who excel in the arts of discipline—Jack the handyman, with his hairy limbs and unlimited horniness. And of course there’s Declan, who seems to want more from Flora than just her body.

Eventually, Declan and Flora fall in love and commit to one another, but honestly, I can’t call Wild in the Country a romance. It breaks every rule of the genre.

You’re probably not surprised to learn that didn’t bother me at all. I adored the novel. It took me back to a simpler time, when desire was magic, and all you had to do was imagine what you wanted in order to have your wishes granted.

Channeling the Cat

It's almost a joke – the common association between authors and cats. I haven't done a systematic survey, but I would estimate that at least 75% of the authors I hosts as blog guests mention feline companions in their bios. I'm no exception. I currently have two cats who traveled with us from the United States to southeast Asia ten years ago, and who have settled in quite comfortably. Here's a photo of polydactyl Mr. Toes as a kitten (you can see where he gets his name!).

And here's our elegant Blackness.

Of course, many famous writers (of whom I have hosted very few) were renowned for their close relationships with their felines. There's Colette.

Papa Hemingway

Jean-Paul Satre

Ray Bradbury

I sympathize with Alexander McCall Smith. Mr. Toes loves to climb around on my back, often with his oversized claws embedded in my clothing – or my flesh!

The woman who inspired my erotic writing career, Portia da Costa, is a huge cat lover – that's one of the things that forged a bond between us – but she's so shy I couldn't find a picture of her and her cats together.

Many explanations have been offered for the feline-author affinity. A cat doesn't need to be walked, so we can spend our time at our desks as opposed to trucking around on the street scooping up their business. Cats are mysterious creatures with many layers of personality – rather like effective characters. Cats have an elegance and precision of movement we writers might use as a model for our prose. Many authors have cited their felines as sources of inspiration. Noted Canadian writer Robertson Davies once said “Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reason.”

The other day, I was suddenly struck by a new theory. I was thinking about the fact that so many authors report hearing “voices”. “I just listen to my characters, and write down what they say,” one of my guests commented. Writing sometimes feels like something driven from outside, beyond our conscious control. Well, what if that's true?

What if it's not our characters who are dictating the story? What if it's our cats?

Ridiculous, right? But Mr. Toes sits behind my monitor most days I'm writing. He pretends to be asleep, but if I should get up for a bathroom break or a drink of water, he stirs and gives me a look, as it to say, “Where are you going? The story's not done yet!”

I grew up with cats. I grew up writing fiction. When I went off to college and then grad school, I left the felines behind, and although I wrote lots of poetry during that period, I didn't pen a single story. Then I met my husband, a confirmed ailurophile, and filled my life with felines once more. Next thing you know, I was a published author.

Ever tried to write when your cat was sick? Tough to concentrate on the tale, isn't it?

And wouldn't this explain why our characters are larger than life? Why they have so much vitality, such powerful passions, such intense adventures? How could a mere human imagine such creatures? Cats, though – they have superhuman abilities. Just ask them.

Of course to really test this, we'd all have to get rid of our felines and then see if we could still write.

That might be informative. It might restore our self-respect. But it's simply too painful to contemplate.

If I'm channeling my cats, I'm okay with that (though they have surprisingly dirty minds). As long as they don't want their names on the cover.

The Bookworm

All my life I've been addicted to words. My parents taught me to read beginning around age four. I haven't stopped since. Even before then, they read to me and to my brother, stories and poems. My father made up rhyming songs for us, about dancing goldfish and clarinet-playing cats. Very early I became attuned to the rhythms of poetry and prose, the way words breathe, the way they sing.

I was the kid who lay on my bed reading, even on the sunny days, ignoring my mom's injunction to “go outside and play”. I was playing, tripping through the worlds of wonder between the covers of my books. I still remember the places I visited. Eleanor Cameron's mushroom planet. Evelyn Sibley Lampman's and Honore Valintcourt's city under the back steps. Nancy Drew's sleepy town full of secret doors and underground passages. I toured ancient Egypt and revolutionary America, met Betsy Ross and Helen Keller, Juliette Gordon Low and Sacajawea. I recall spending days in the Chateau D'If with poor, suffering Edmund Dantes. I wandered the red planet with Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein and journeyed through Middle Earth with Frodo and his band.

As I read, I also wrote – my first poems around age seven, my first stories no doubt even younger (although unlike my poems, none survive). I wrote plays about the Beatles and the 1964 U.S. presidential election. I wrote part of a novel about woman who falls in love with a ghost in a haunted mansion by the sea. Delighted by the music of the language I was studying, I wrote verse in French.

All through school I was the bookworm, the egghead, the shy girl with the coke-bottle eyeglasses who got all As but few dates. This really didn't change much until I got to graduate school and “blossomed”. In the interim, I wrote dozens of angst-ridden poems about my unrequited loves.

It's surprising to me now, but I never really planned on being an author. I was going to be a famous scientist, like Marie Curie. Aside from some work published in my high school newspaper, my writing was mostly private. As my career goals morphed and I became a computer scientist and software engineer, I continued to write – research papers, proposals, specifications, manuals, marketing blurbs -- interspersed with more creative work. I tried my hand at a romance but foundered, not really knowing the genre. Under the tutelage of the primary man in my life, I began to read erotica, including quite a lot of BDSM. I wrote fantasies for his pleasure. I penned a couple of science fiction/erotica tales and toyed with the notion of a collection.

Still, I didn't actually write anything for publication until I was in my forties. I happened to pick up a copy of Portia da Costa's Black Lace classic Gemini Heat while I was traveling. I found it intelligent, imaginative and above all arousing. Then I thought, “I'll bet I could write something like that.” About eighteen months later, my first novel, Raw Silk, was published by Black Lace. The rest, as they say, is history LOL. (My full publishing history is available at http://www.lisabetsarai.com/pubhistory.html.)

Since then I've published six novels and dozens of shorter works. I love to write. I began in the erotica genre but now I also write erotic romance. My earlier works tended to be realistic and contemporary, but as I gain more experience I'm starting to experiment with paranormals, historicals, thrillers and other sub-genres.

Nevertheless, my first love is still reading. There's nothing like thrill of finding a book that takes you over completely. I recently had that experience with Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale. Both the language and the story held me spellbound. Of course, I probably appreciated the novel more because it is about the magic of the written word, about stories and the difference between literal truth and emotional truth.

Words have power. They can inspire. They can wound. They can crystallize entire new worlds out of mere thought.

These days I'm proud to be a bookworm. I consider myself fortunate to have discovered the joy of reading at such an early age. I look forward to the many books waiting for me in the years ahead.