The moment I laid eyes on Penny, her innocent, submissive nature called to my dominant side. I immediately volunteered to guide her exploration into my dark and decadent world.
I’m also playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with an obsessed psychopath whose goal is to destroy me. When my worlds threaten to collide, I’m forced to call it quits between us.
Soon I discover I’m too late, and she’s caught in the crossfire. Now, I’ll do everything in my power to protect the woman I’m falling for.
“Who do we have here?” A deep, gravelly voice at my right drew my attention. My breath hitched and my body heated when I spotted the sexiest man I’d ever laid eyes on. I’d always been a sucker for a man with salt and pepper hair. Damn, he filled out that navy t-shirt nicely. My eyes traveled his full length before returning to his face. I flushed at the amused half-smile he wore at my perusal. It took me a moment to remember he’d asked me a question.
“Pe-Penny,” I stuttered, almost breathless as the heat in my face intensified. I don’t remember blushing this much before in my life. Fake it ’til you make itwas my mantra. I stood a little taller and attempted to gain the confidence I typically displayed with chauvinistic surgeons.
“I’m Marcus.” His secret smile remained as he reached out to shake my hand. When I placed mine in his, he squeezed it firmly, and I thought I felt his thumb gently caress mine, but he pulled away before I could be sure.
“Nice to meet you.” The words came out a little shaky.
“So, what brings you out to play with us today?” His voice dropped suggestively.
Maintaining my barely-there confidence, I answered his question. “I’m curious about domination and submission. I figured this was the best place to gain some knowledge.”
“Knowledge about what?” Marcus asked, showing true interest.
Everything. I wanted to know what it felt like to give up control.
To just feel and not have to think.
To be dominated.
To have someone fulfill needs I didn’t even know I had.
I wanted to find my happily ever after, damn it. Sadly, I didn’t know how to express any of this.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Whatever someone will teach me.”
“Sweetness,” he murmured, “I’d be happy to teach you anything you want to know.”
LK Shaw is the bestselling author of the sexy, sinful suspense. She resides in South Carolina with her high maintenance beagle mix dog, Miss P. An avid reader since childhood, she became hooked on historical romance novels in high school. She now reads, and loves, all romance sub-genres, with dark romance and romantic suspense being her favorite. LK enjoys traveling and chocolate. Her books feature hot alpha heroes and the strong women they love.
Want a FREE short story? Be sure to sign up for her newsletter and download your copy of A Birthday Spanking, a short story set in the Doms of Club Eden world! http://bit.ly/LKShawNewsletter
Travel writer Dayna Benning tours Europe to write a feature story for a travel magazine. Along the way, she helps her bestie scatter her husband’s ashes. When Dayna accidentally sprinkles Alex Mendes with dried rose petals intended for the deceased, she senses a chemistry with the silver fox airline pilot. Just one catch—he wears a wedding band. Embittered by her divorce, Dayna refuses to be a homewrecker, like the woman who ruined her marriage. Alex and Dayna go their separate ways, but she’s mystified when serendipitous signs point her toward him at every turn. Determined to find out why, she learns Alex is a widower. Dayna hopes for a second chance at love…but her resentful heart stops her. Can she forgive those that broke her heart the first time? And for that matter, can she forgive herself for her failed marriage? Unless she finds a way to piece together her fragmented heart, Alex will forever remain a fantasy.
Romance was the last thing Dayna trolled for, but if it rolled in her direction, she wouldn’t rule out a casual fling. But not with a married guy.
Mariko elbowed Dayna. “I’ve heard a lot of hot older guys hang out on this side of the Atlantic,” she murmured, eyeing another tall, juicy morsel passing by on his way out the restaurant door.
Dayna wrinkled her nose. “Alex is married, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, I noticed. No law against enjoying eye candy.” Mariko grinned. “You should write a sidebar for your magazine article, ‘How To Meet Cute Guys on a Beach.’ Tessa would love it.”
“Ha, that’d spice up my travel piece.” Dayna’s editor would love it.
“Sprinkling a handsome guy with dead rose petals would be a fresh angle,” reasoned Mariko.
“You think?”
“You’ve had a sniper dot on Alex the whole time. You may as well write about him.”
Alex strolled toward them, and Dayna fantasized a slow-motion movie scene: Arms swinging, he moves toward me, wind teasing his hair, with an I-Want-You-So-Bad expression on his face. His arms scoop me up and he plants a hot, moist kiss on my quivering lips, dissolving me—
The seating hostess snapped Dayna back to reality. “This way, please.”
“Oh!” In her haste to follow, Dayna’s foot caught a chair leg and she tripped. After a sloppy recovery, she limped after the hostess with heated cheeks, to a table for three.
Mariko jerked her head toward Dayna, smiling sweetly at the hostess.
LoLo Paige is an award-winning author who has a passion for writing romantic comedies after decades of theatre experience acting in stage comedies. While comedy is her first love, she also writes the pitfalls of falling in love in the action-packed, perilous world of wildfire. As a former wildland firefighter who married her hot firefighter husband, she lives her HEA, spending glorious Alaskan summers at her oceanfront cabin on Kachemak Bay, with her husband and two golden retrievers.
In the Kingdom of Kaloma, a woman is forced to rely on a man to “keep her” and is forbidden from maintaining anything of her own. It’s the law.
In the remote village of Sevens, at the northernmost point of the kingdom, there lives a family with four daughters and a son, toiling day in and day out together, hopeful a treaty with the boarding kingdom of Jast might change things.
When one daughter—at risk of being imprisoned for fighting back—hides away in the Whitling Woods. She stumbles upon a dying man and despite the risk to herself, chooses to save him. Only who he is has the power to change everything…
Tarley Fareview, idealistic and stubborn, does what she can to support herself in spite of an unjust Kaloma law. When she fights back after being attacked, she flees into the woods disguised as a boy. While in hiding, she discovers a dying man and must decide if she risks her life to save him. Unable to walk away, Tarley chooses to intervene and works to save the stranger, only little does she know that by doing so she’ll also risk the heart she promised herself she’d never give to anyone.
When the Crown Prince of Jast, Lachlan Nikolas—forced by the king to attend treaty negotiations with the kingdom of Kaloma in disguise—is attacked, his horse bolts, and they both careen over a cliff, falling to their deaths in a raging river below. Only, miracle of miracles, Lachlan doesn’t perish, and instead is given a second chance at life, but at a price. When he wakes, he’s not only been stripped of his clothes but also his identity. Saved by a strange woman—in a terrible disguise because she looks nothing like a boy—Lachlan must learn very quickly how to survive in a world where he isn’t a prince anymore and with zero skills other than his entitlement and his charm. Unsure who to trust, Lachlan must reinvent himself, learn how to survive, open his heart to discover the truth about worthiness, and discover what it means to sacrifice one’s self for true love.
It was nearing sunrise on the fifth day. The twilight teasing the flap of the tent. The birds were only beginning to sing, and though the music of the birds waking and the river beyond were usually her salve to get her moving, her eyes were so heavy, and her body weighted with exhaustion. Her mind and senses lulled toward sleep by the sound of Ollie’s clear breathing and the song of the birds, so she shut her eyes.
Just for a moment, she told herself. Ollie’s safe. I’ll rest. Just for a moment, she thought and slipped into the rest of the darkness.
“Tarley?”
She stretched her body, uncurling it, and basking in the gloriousness of warmth and rest. Her hand dropped against something unforgiving, her head pressed against a wall. She moaned, disoriented, and grabbed hold of the mound under her quilt trying to figure out what had crawled into bed with her.
“I’ve always enjoyed a good fondling, but I prefer it being reciprocal.”
Tarley’s eyes snapped open at the foreign sound—a man’s voice with just the hint of an accent with which she wasn’t familiar. Skin. That’s what her eyes focused on. Lots of it. An arm. A shoulder. A scruffy jaw in need of a shave as she raised her gaze. Full lips arched with a smile, the bottom slightly fuller though the pronounced arches of the upper. He was grinning, and his eyes—a myriad of colors—were darkened with a ring of deep green at the edges.
Realizing she was flush against him, holding him, Tarley jerked back, scrambling to the opposite side of the ten, only there wasn’t enough room to maneuver. She regretted the quick movement, her body protesting with aches and pains of not enough sleep.
“Ollie. I–” She couldn’t meet his gaze.
“You were asleep.”
Her cheeks heated realizing she’d been holding him in her sleep. Holding onto him the night she’d been trying to save him flashed in her mind reminding her she’d held him before. To save him, she snapped at her inner self.
Her eyes danced across the quilt until she found the bravery to meet his gaze.
Maci Aurora has been writing stories since she was a child. When she was eleven, she fell in love with reading Sunfire Historical Romances about girls who made a difference in their lives and still fell in love. In high school, a friend introduced her to Lavyrle Spencer and Judith McNaught, and from there, her writing journey was cemented in telling stories about love. Having already published many novels (all of which are threaded with romance as upper YA and New Adult titles) under the pen name, CL Walters, Maci Aurora wanted to write stories that offered the same attention to story and characters but with additional steam.
Maci writes in Hawaiʻi where she lives with her husband, their children, and their fur-babies.
