It's only a scandal if people know what you're reading.
That's the tagline for Mischief. Cool, right? Whaddaya think?
After Fifty Shades of Grey seems to have blown open the erotic ebook market, I would say it's a good time to be writing, and therefore reading!, smut. Today HarperCollins launches Mischief and so my little ol' short story "The Game" is available for you to download. Get it here!
Want to know if you're gonna like it? Well, okay! How about an excerpt?
I remember the first time he asked me how often I masturbated. There we were, sitting in Starbucks looking for all the world like perhaps a daughter discussing course selection with her father. Maybe a car loan. In fact, Bill smiled wide and asked me how many times a day I brought myself to orgasm manually. Like he was asking after my health. Like you might ask someone how often she drinks water or brushes her teeth.
The weird thing was that it didn’t seem weird. He could do that. Make the extraordinarily intimate seem everyday. It was in my mind for a couple of moments to lie, to feign surprise or even disgust at the suggestion that I would engage in such an activity, much less on a daily basis. I was about to. But something in his face made the words stick, stop at my mouth. I stammered a bit and finally admitted that it was something I did at least twice a day; usually in the morning, sleepily, still half in my dreams, and then again at night, in order to fall asleep.
His response was enigmatic. At the time.
Taking a sip of his coffee he swallowed slowly, smiled again, then tsk tsked his disapproval. ‘That,’ he said softly, ‘will never do.’ Which was in complete contradiction to what that smile said. What that smile said was, That will do. That will do very nicely.
Had I understood at the time it would have been prophetic.
During this conversation he was the picture of calm authority. It was this Svengali-like aura that led me to divulge such private leanings. Later though he told me how his heart was racing in anticipation of my response, how desperate he was to know if he had guessed correctly, if he had accurately read all the signs indicating that I would be such a perfect playmate. Signs? I’d asked. He gave me another of his enigmatic smiles in response. I can’t describe it, he’d said, almost to himself. It’s something in the way you walk, in how you move, how readily you laugh. It’s how you tilt your head, the tone in your voice. I could tell.
