Best Erotic Romance 2014 Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Kristina Wright.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, Inc.,

  2246 Sixth Street, Berkeley, California 94710.

  Cover design: Scott Idleman/Blink

  Cover photograph: Juhasz Peter/Getty Images

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-022-3

  CONTENTS

  Foreword•LAUREN DANE

  Introduction: A Perfect Combination

  The Shortest Day•NIKKI MAGENNIS

  A Competitive Marriage•VICTORIA BLISSE

  Professional, Knowledgeable and Very Thorough•ANNABETH LEONG

  Rules•EMERALD

  More Light•LAILA BLAKE

  Stay with Me•CRYSTAL JORDAN

  A Singer Who Doesn’t Sing•JEANETTE GREY

  Show Me•D. R. SLATEN

  A Perfect Place•CATHERINE PAULSSEN

  Something New•GISELLE RENARDE

  Over a Barrel•TAMSIN FLOWERS

  Tuscarora•ANJA VIKARMA

  Big Bully•A. M. HARTNETT

  Going It Alone•LUCY FELTHOUSE

  Closing the Deal•KELLY MAHER

  Whatever It Takes•KRISTINA WRIGHT

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  FOREWORD

  I write those books.

  So often we see things that are created overwhelmingly by women mainly for the enjoyment of women—especially those things that tell women their sexuality is beautiful and absolutely okay—referred to in insulting and patronizing terms. As if by being mothers we are sexless robots only suited for ferrying children from place to place and folding laundry. As if being a wife or a partner means we’re incapable of that slice of desire and heat when we catch their scent in the bathroom after they’ve left for work, or when we daydream at the office. As if we simply do not exist as sensual, sexual beings because as women we are not allowed to be or we risk being mocked and ridiculed.

  We end up in a cultural catch-22 where if we are sexual we’re nymphos, and if we are not sexual we’re frigid. We cannot win in the world created by those who coin terms like mommy porn because those terms are laden with fear at the very idea that women are capable of being more than one thing, that we enjoy having sex more than folding laundry.

  Which is why I think erotic romance is wonderful and revolutionary in the best sorts of ways.

  I write those books—meaning erotic romance—because I love to write about connection. Because I believe women are worthy of stories where their strength and sexuality are described in positive terms. Because being in love and being connected to a partner is wonderful. I believe the heart of any real story worth telling or reading is about the connection of the people on the page. Be it thrillers, science fiction, romance, whatever.

  To me, there is nothing more wholly female positive than a story where a woman opens herself up to the delights and annoyances of entering into a sexual and emotional relationship with a partner. I love to write about (and read about) emotion and yes, I love to write about sex and women who are smart and in the driver’s seat when it comes to their sexual agency.

  Erotic romance throws open the bedroom doors absolutely, but that’s not the only hallmark of the genre. Erotic romance delves deeply into the physical and emotional connection between the people on the page and how their relationship progresses. Sex is a huge part of that and when it’s done right, sex is the map of their romance.

  I often hear people say things like, “You could just take out the sex and the story would still be great,” and I think, “Oh, but who wants that?” I want to read a story where every bit of the potential is used. I want that bedroom door open and I want to see into the hearts and minds of the characters on the page. I want to be along with them on their journey to their Happily Ever After.

  In this anthology you’ll find sixteen stories of sex and love between all sorts of people. Because all sorts of people deserve sex and love. Playful, dark, fun, serious, rough and fast, slow and intense. It can be gentle, a breath of a kiss against a shoulder blade. Sometimes it’s about finding your way back after being a bit lost, or the brand-new spark as you first meet. It’s all hot. It’s all sexy and emotional and it’s all about connection.

  Enjoy Best Erotic Romance 2014 in all her guises—I know I did. And remember what E. M. Forster said in Howards End: “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.”

  Lauren Dane

  INTRODUCTION: A PERFECT COMBINATION

  Love and lust, that’s what I need—what I crave. Love and lust: they belong together. Like peanut butter and jelly, like strawberries and champagne, like cookies and milk. Love and lust just go together. And while one is certainly fine, wonderful even, the combination is…incendiary. It’s the magic combination of elements, with the planets aligned just so, that poets and songwriters have long attempted to capture in rhyme and meter. But it is erotic romance authors who invite us into that world of desire and longing, capturing those relationships that are so powerful they defy all odds.

  This is the third edition of the Best Erotic Romance series and I believe I have selected stories that perfectly capture the combination of love and lust. Whether it’s new lovers, as in Annabeth Leong’s “Professional, Knowledgeable and Very Thorough,” or familiar lovers such as the married couple in Victoria Blisse’s “A Competitive Marriage,” the passion is palpable on the page. Nikki Magennis writes about lovers who are also parents in “The Shortest Day,” two people scraping by with so little alone time it feels as if their desire for each other will never be quenched. But they find a way. They always will.

  Those who love and lust for each other will find a way, whatever it takes. And that’s the theme of Best Erotic Romance 2014—lovers in love finding a way to be together no matter what the odds. It’s idealistic, but not unrealistic. If you’ve ever known that kind of heart-pounding love and toe-curling desire, you know you’d be willing to do almost anything to hang on to it. And why shouldn’t you? That kind of magic doesn’t come along very often and when it does, when it’s so right that even people on the street comment on how happy you are together, it’s worth fighting for. The cynics will scoff and say it doesn’t exist, the kind of passionate love found in these stories, but the authors represented here are romantics, not cynics. They believe in love—erotic, intimate, connected love—and so do I.

  As I sit here in my usual corner at Starbucks drinking my iced coffee and writing about love and sex and what it all means, two texts just came up on my phone. They’re from my husband. The first one says: We need bread for dinner. Could you get some on the way home? The second one says: Smile! I love you, sexy. Twenty-three years of marriage and he still loves and desires me—and the best part of it is, it’s mutual! I believe in what I write because I live it. I hope you have the love and passion you want in your life—if not now, then soon—and I hope once it arrives you will hang on to it and never let go.

  Whatever it takes, right? That’s what we need.

  Kristina Wright

  In love in Virginia

  THE SHORTEST DAY

  Nikki Magennis

  The alarm went off like a robotic bird chirping.

  “No,” Lucy said, slapping at John’s arm, “please don’
t let it be morning.”

  A dim gloom was turning the curtains semitransparent. In a few hours, the light would be failing again. She rolled over and curled into John to breathe in his warm, familiar smell. But he was already swinging his legs out and staggering to the door.

  Five minutes later, when he came back in still wet from the shower and threw a towel at the pile on the floor, the shock of his nakedness made a light flare in her. Then the kitchen broke out with bleats that the cereal box was full of milk and someone screamed and she blinked and John was gone, tugging on jeans and grabbing for a shirt, his wet blond hair still dark with water, sticking to his skin like painted streaks. He could have been an apparition—a figment of her imagination.

  She didn’t even get one of the fleeting, distracted smiles he threw her way sometimes. Especially after one of the nights when they’d had sleep sex.

  * * *

  “Sleep sex? He attacked you, you mean.”

  Charlie said this precisely and immediately, with her strawberry-red mouth perked inquisitively and her bright blue eyes focused sharply on Lucy. Across their shared desk, between file stacks and pots of mini-crocuses and the leaning tower of ring binders, her words spread like a coffee spill.

  “No! We both did it. I mean, neither of us was more…we just…I was dreaming, and then we woke up…”

  “Fucking?”

  George at the window desk lifted his disheveled head and Lucy gave Charlie a kick under the table.

  “Yes. If you want to call it that.”

  “Well, darling, it isn’t crochet. So tell me. How often.”

  “Two, maybe three times. Is it bad, do you think? Should we see someone?”

  “A doctor, you mean?” Charlie shrugged. “A counselor, maybe. I don’t know. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  She raised one very well-plucked eyebrow and bit the end of her pen with small, square white teeth. “Was it any good?”

  The question was immaterial, but Lucy didn’t quite know how to say so. Sex with her and John wasn’t good or bad, something to award three and a half stars to—one for technique and two for effort and a half for the pillow talk afterward.

  When she—well, when she and John crocheted—it was a communication. Not a performance. It was how they talked to each other. Or used to, before life got so tangled up and frazzled. They were trying to reach each other, his cock in her and his fingers on her and her hands in his hair—she didn’t know if Charlie would understand. The sleep sex wasn’t like that. It started in unconsciousness, with deep and dark and hot, meaty dreams, and she woke to find her body screwing John’s, yes fucking it, like animals, silent and eyes shut, their hot mouths pressed together and the sheets pushed roughly aside.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said to Charlie, throwing a blue folder onto the pile where she put things she didn’t know where to file. “Yes. Better than nothing, I suppose.”

  “Ah. Bit of a drought?”

  “Not a drought. Some other kind of natural disaster. A long, complicated one with dementia and packed lunches and laundry and shouting.”

  “Oh, those. I think they call them life. Always done my best to avoid it.”

  Charlie smirked, but Lucy caught the seesaw in her voice and noticed how she put her pen down carefully beside her keyboard, her lipstick slightly smudged.

  “I’m not complaining. I know I’m lucky,” Lucy said.

  “So lucky it makes you want to weep?”

  Lucy looked up. She shrugged. “Only if I could do it somewhere soft and dark and quiet with no interruptions for around three weeks.”

  “You need a break,” Charlie said, shaking her head.

  “Yes.”

  As Lucy watched, a soft stripe of sunlight grew slowly stronger and crawled across the desk.

  “When did we last have sex?” John had asked, about six months before when the summer was spoiling outside and they were juggling chores in the falling-apart house.

  “Sex?”

  “Yeah, you know. When a man and a woman like each other very much…”

  “Shut up.” She threw a leek at him. She was cooking lunch, soup, because it seemed wholesome and soothing, even though nobody ate much of it and it made such a mess. Her mother was sitting next door watching a video with the kids and nobody was screaming yet. She’d almost thought she could breathe. And then he hit her with his absurd question.

  “John.”

  “Lucy.”

  “It’s the last thing on my mind. You know, things have been difficult.”

  “Since the dawn of time. And yet.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t have to work.”

  “And maybe if we didn’t have to feed the kids.”

  “Not this again.”

  “No. Not again. Not anymore.”

  He walked away, his broad shoulders a little rolled forward, his head bowed. She stood there with a knife and a celery stick in her hands and the horrible feeling that something had snapped, something irreparable.

  When she first met him, she could hardly believe he’d go for her—an awkwardly tall, mousy-haired girl. She was allergic to the spotlight, and he was so at ease, so bright and strong and vivid, with that dirty-blonde hair and that dangerous smile.

  Now, she wondered again why on earth he had chosen her—out of the women that seemed to flock around him, the prettier ones and the richer ones, the clever university girls and the laughing, fast-moving crowd that he hung out with.

  And now, years later, she’d watched him that morning taking his tool case out of the van and shifting boxes of cables around. There was a new slackness to his cheek she hadn’t noticed before. Shadows under his eyes. His aging shocked her even more than her own. For the first time, the thought hit her with a bump—even he won’t live forever.

  She wiped her hands and looked at the clock. Time for work.

  That had been six months ago, and since then, she’d started to avoid looking at him as much as she avoided the mirror. What was the point? She focused on what had to be done.

  Later in the afternoon, as the winter day leaked the last of its meager light into the kitchen, she slipped into a half-formed daydream. Stacking glasses in the dishwasher she thought of being stretched out on a beach somewhere, lying in the icing-sugar-soft sand, nothing but the sound of waves and the sun, her skin slowly turning golden.

  “Mum, Nanny’s outside.”

  “Oh?”

  “She doesn’t have any shoes on.”

  Stephen, still chewing one of the sweets that turned his mouth lurid pink and rotted his teeth, was looking over the wreckage of the kitchen table. Outside the window that framed their frozen back lawn his grandmother stood in a long, white nightgown that was bobbled under the arms and wet at the hem. The old woman’s bare feet were shining with melted frost, and she was reaching to the bird table with an enraptured look on her face.

  “Oh, shit,” John said, barging past so fast he sent Lucy spinning. “Are you just going to stand there?” A frown was digging its way between his eyebrows and already he was outside, letting the door slam behind him. Lucy stood and gazed out at the garden.

  Like watching a film. John took her mother’s arm and turned her toward the front door of the granny flat. Sometimes the old woman mistook him for her long-dead husband, sometimes her own father. Now, she was taking tiny steps and frowning at her feet, as if she’d just realized that the cold was hurting. John suddenly bent and scooped her up, lifting her as if she was as light as a cat. Her hands clutched his shoulders, the blue veins and fine bones showing through paper-white skin.

  “Daddy’s carrying Nanny back to her house, look!” Robin pointed at the scene and knocked juice into her lap.

  “Watch what you’re doing, Bobbin.” The child’s tiny, pink face started to crumple. “Damn it. I’m sorry. It’s okay. It’s okay.” Lucy leaned over to lift things away from the spillage, stroked her daughter’s glossy hair, apologized.

  John opened the back door, knock
ed the snow off his boots. A draft of cold air blew in with him. Once, she thought, he might have laughed, shivered, rubbed his hands. Turned it all into a silly adventure.

  “Close the door, Daddy,” Stephen said.

  “Give me a minute,” snapped John, and before she could say anything, Stephen had scrambled down from his chair and run full tilt to his room, high spots of color on his cheeks.

  While the kids argued up and down the stairs and Mother went to bed early with a book—she read the same hardback poetry collection over and over—Lucy moved across the kitchen to touch her husband. She reached for his neck, and he flinched.

  “It’s only me,” she said, pretending to tickle him.

  “Not now,” he said, shrugging her off. She felt a blush rise. Ridiculous. How could she blush, this man she’d lived with for a third of her life, who’d seen her give birth twice, who’d dealt with the aftermath? Besides, he had his back to her.

  “Can’t I touch you?” she asked.

  “Seems that way.” His voice was low and quiet. This was all wrong.

  “John?”

  He stopped brushing the dirt off his boots and let his hands rest on the edges of the sink.

  “I can’t do this, Lucy.”

  “Do what? Clean your shoes? What next—you want me to blow your nose for you?”

  She was trying, but her voice was failing.

  “This. Us. What we’re doing. Or what we aren’t.”

  She forced a laugh.

  “Is this about the sex again?”

  He looked down into the sink, at the chips and flakes of mud and grit. His jaw worked.

  “It’s…just for now. Things will change.”

  “That is true,” he nodded, still looking into the sink like he was reading tea leaves. “Lucy, life goes by.”

  He looked up at her, then. His eyes, blue as a willow-pattern plate, flecked with gold, his long lashes. Even then, when her heart was starting to hurt quite badly, the beauty of him was stunning.

  “Mummy, where are my shoes?” Robin ran into the room and slammed against her mother, hanging from her shirt.

  “Not now, love,” she said, pushing her daughter back toward the stairs. “Look in your room.”