Sizzling Sunday: Gray Christmas -- #SeniorSex #Rockstar #99cents

Greetings! It’s Sunday again—Sizzling Sunday, which means it’s time for me to serve up a super hot excerpt for your enjoyment.

My snippet today comes from my holiday romance Gray Christmas. This 8K word story only ninety nine cents at Smashwords and Amazon. I guarantee it will put you in a festive mood!

You’re never too old for some holiday naughtiness

Widowed author Emma Granger has reconciled herself to spending Christmas Eve in snowy Boston, with a nice bottle of Pinot Grigio and her cat Vronsky. Her daughters have their own lives on the West Coast. Emma knows she can’t expect them to visit every holiday.

A loud crash from the apartment above her overturns her plans for a quiet evening at home. When she investigates, she meets Nick North, an energetic iconoclast with a gray ponytail, a silver earring and bright blue eyes that kindle feelings she’d thought were gone forever. Nick is her own age, maybe older, but his lean body and impish grin affect her as if she were a horny teenager.

Although Emma makes her living writing spicy romance, sex with a stranger seems ludicrous when you’re an arthritic grandmother in your sixties. Still, the attraction she feels for her charismatic upstairs neighbor appears to be reciprocated. A Christmas fling might be just what Emma needs to brighten her holiday.

Sizzling Snippet

Despite how horny I was, I was still too shy to tell him what I wanted. In the old days, I’d been brave, even brazen, but it had been so very long since I’d been with a man. I still couldn’t quite believe Nick wanted me. I’d never been beautiful, but back in my sex goddess days, I knew I was sexually attractive. I knew how to use my assets, my curves and my hollows, to please my partner and myself. Now, though? That was ancient history. All that formerly taut, responsive flesh sagged and bulged. How could he look at me without disgust?

“You have such beautiful breasts,” he murmured, almost as if he’d read my mind. Bending at the waist, he took one nipple in his mouth. I moaned at the sudden bliss, humping his butt, writhing as he bit lightly into the engorged nub.

“And so sensitive, too…” He swiped his tongue across the other nip, then swallowed it and sucked hard.

“Oh…oh, Nick! Oh, God! I can’t stand it.”

He looked up, into my eyes. I lost myself in the blue.

“You want me to stop, Emma?”

“No, no—oh, I’m so embarrassed, but I want…” I couldn’t bring myself to go on.

He brushed his lips across mine. “Yes? What do you want, sweet lady?”

A hot blush spread across my cheeks, and my chest too. Inside my panties, I was melting.

“I—you know, Nick. I want you to fuck me. Please, Nick.”

His grin grew broader. “Of course. But not quite yet.”

Hooking his fingers under the elasticized waistband, he inched backward, pulling my pants and underwear down until my grizzled pubes were half exposed. “Lift up. Yes, that’s right.” The baggy sweatpants followed the sweater into oblivion.

The tidal scent of female arousal rose from my bared pussy. Nick filled his lungs. “Oh, sweet Jesus, you’re gorgeous!” He rolled to the side, off my body, then eased my thighs apart and positioned himself between them. “I’ve wanted to do this since the minute I saw you.”

Review Tuesday Moved to Thursday: Taking the Lead by Cecilia Tan #review #bdsm

Taking the Lead by Cecilia Tan

Forever, 2016

Heiress Ricki Hamilton has it all, or so it would appear: designer gowns, Ivy League degrees, a house-sized wing of her own in the family mansion, a chauffered limo, dozens of staff at her beck and call. She’s as renowned for her icy self-possession as for her intelligence and beauty. But it’s all a mask. Ricki is juggling all sorts of issues. There’s the secret BDSM club in the mansion basement, which her recently deceased grandfather requires she maintain—the global media company she owns but, according to the will, isn’t yet allowed to run—her grandfather’s lecherous, power-hungry second-in-command, who wants to control both her and the corporation—her irresponsible, alcoholic father—the lingering pain of her mother’s death two decades earlier under mysterious, possibly kinky circumstances. Ricki responds to all this pressure by keeping a tight rein on her feelings and shunning publicity.

Then she’s kidnapped by rock star Axel Hawke.

It’s a media stunt, not a real kidnapping, at the Grammy Awards show where Axel’s band The Rough performs their hit “Kidnap My Heart”. Ricki isn’t even supposed to be the victim. When Axel catches sight of her, though, he can’t resist his sudden urge to change the script. Something about the lovely, untouchable heiress speaks to his dominant side. Going purely on instinct, he coaxes Ricki to pleasurable surrender that astonishes them both. The connection between them is too strong, too real to ignore, or so Axel would like to believe. However, despite the way he has touched her—both physically and emotionally—Ricki believes she can’t afford to have the impulsive, media-hungry rock idol in her already-too-complicated life.

This is, of course, a classic romance scenario. No one will be surprised to discover that Axel eventually wins over the reluctant heiress, as well as opening her to her latent submissive urges. It’s so much fun, though, to be taken along for the ride.

Axel is a fabulous hero. The world sees him as a sex god, but in fact he’s a surprisingly humble and down-to-earth guy, who, refreshingly, acts his age (mid twenties). He takes his music seriously; it’s a fundamental part of who he is. Fame is new to him, though he’s having fun with the perqs. He’s astonished when his group wins a Grammy.

After many enjoyable but fleeting encounters with fans, his enduring need for Ricki both surprises and thrills him. As a Dom, he’s delicious, both challenging and cherishing Ricki. I loved the fact that he doesn’t always know what he’s doing, just following his intuitions.

I know BDSM takes people to a lot of places in their heads. There’s no guarantee it’ll go where you want it to, though. It’s like jamming with other musicians. You know basically how the song goes but you get ideas while you’re playing, and you try them out, and if you like how it sounds then you and the people you’re playing with can chase after it. Sometimes the chase takes you down a rabbit hole and sometimes it takes you right back where you started.

This is one of the best comments on how kink works that I’ve ever read.

Ricki’s a bit harder to believe in. I suppose this is partly because I haven’t met many twenty-four year old millionaires. Still, given that she’s a child of the digital age, her fear of the media struck me as somewhat implausible. After the transcendent, cleansing experience of her early encounters with Axel, would a woman in her position really push him away so resolutely? I wouldn’t!

Of course, the plot of a romance requires obstacles. In Ricki’s case, there are so many that it’s difficult to keep track of them—though mostly they reside in Ricki’s mind.

These are quibbles, though. What set this book apart, for me, are the love/sex/kink scenes. Ms. Tan’s descriptions of Axel’s and Ricki’s encounters are more than just incredibly arousing. They’re full of insight, emotional nuances, truths to which I can vouch from personal experience. Ms. Tan understands how power exchange works and she brings that knowledge to the page. She also manages to communicate how dominance and submission can offer not just incandescent pleasure but soul-deep healing. Ricki requires the surrender Axel coaxes from her, to balance the warring factions in her personality and claim the strength to manage her complicated life.

I might not have fully believed in Ricki’s character, but I had no doubts about her connection with Axel. Love, lust and imagination align to provide both characters exactly what they need.

I’ve read, and loved, many of Cecilia Tan’s works in the past, mostly in the speculative fiction, LGBTQ and fantasy genres. Taking the Lead proves that Ms. Tan is equally adept at writing erotic romance.