#scintillatingsunday Another yummy taste of DRIVE

Welcome to the weekly Scintillating Sunday Showcase, The Mile High Muses’ permanent blog hop where eight paragraphs, sentences, or words from your romance or erotica novel will elevate reader’s sensual expectations and take romance to soaring heights. This week, of course, I’m offering a taste of my new release, Drive. Make sure to check out all the other participants’ links at the bottom of the page!

At first it was awkward. It had been so long since she’d kissed anyone other than Frank, who had his own style. Not a bad style, sweet and comfortable like the old married folks they were—except that pleasant but tame kisses started when they were way too young to settle for that. At least his kisses still felt affectionate, in his detached, distant way, even after he started with the late nights, the unexplained absences, and the second, password-protected phone she was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to have found.

But she had to reach back into the mists of the early 1990s to remember this kind of kiss, the kind full of passion and possibility and curiosity. The kind that asked all kinds of questions, starting with “Do you think I’m hot?” heading to “Do you want to…?” and then taking a left turn to questions about love, sex and the meaning of life that were impossible to put into words.

She didn’t have answers to those questions. Didn’t even know, anymore, how to ask herself anything that deep and searching.

And maybe it didn’t make sense that she thought she might find the right questions, if not the answers, in the arms of this sexy, much younger cop.

But Neil’s lips reminded her she was truly alive, not just going through the motions of living. His lips and his tongue, the tickle of his rebel scruff, so charmingly at odds with his short, neat cop hair. And oh, those muscled arms around her, pulling her close, making her feel small and soft, but at the same time powerful, desirable. And not powerful because she was desirable. She was both.

Her body filled with almost forgotten hunger. Oh, she remembered desire, felt it often, but for the last few years, even while Frank was alive and well and occasionally having sex with her, desire had grown from fantasies rather than reality. A handsome actor looking buff and commanding on a movie screen, a sexy passage in a book—her Kindle was full of BDSM romances and erotica, some good, some schlocky, but all featuring scenes that set her imagination and libido soaring—a stray thought that sent her mind to dark, delicious places where hard hands and strong bodies and the occasional whip, paddle or toy worked their magic on her.

This wasn’t fantasy desire. This was specific. All about the taste of Neil Callahan’s lips, the way his tongue invaded her mouth…no, not invaded, because invaders weren’t invited in and welcomed with ticker-tape parades, and if her mouth could, it would be throwing a parade right about now. All about the way he smelled like gingerbread in the salt air with its hint of suntan lotion. The way one big hand cradled the back of her head, controlling and tender at the same time. The way his broad chest and back felt as she scrambled to touch as much of him as she could, and if she was making a spectacle of herself, well, it was about time.

She hadn’t thought about it when Frank was still alive, but she’d always been in his shadow, the brilliant man’s pretty wife who stayed in the background. Or was kept there. He was never mean about it, but his work was his life, and his cars were his escape from work, and she didn’t have a role, other than “supportive cheerleader,” in either area. She’d given him the occasional verbal slap down when his confidence veered into arrogance or when he walked over her without even noticing he was doing it, but she let him do his thing because both Mayhew Robotics and the cars mattered so much to him.  Now it was time for her.

Car photo (c) Bodnarchuk/BigStock.com

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