“It’s great,” Mav said, really meaning it. It really was, too. All the amenities were wonderful and there was even a pool in the complex. Of course, they were never going to use the fireplace since they lived in Florida but it was nice to have one anyway. He turned over to face his lover and leaned forward to brush a kiss onto Duke’s lips. “You were right,” he whispered.
“About the apartment? I know.” Duke smiled smugly. “It’s fan-fuckin’-tabulous if I say so myself.”
“No, not just about the apartment. About everything. About us.” Mav cupped his cheek in one hand and stared into his lover’s eyes. “We belong together. And as a hell of a lot more than roommates.”
“Have to agree with you there, Mav.” Duke grinned and kissed him. “Damn, it’s good to be able to do that without playing a game of gay chicken first.”
“You and your fucking gay chicken.” Mav laughed. “You got me there, man. Both of us are so competitive we’ll do anything on a dare. Even fuck.”
“Mmm.” Duke kissed him again, more aggressively this time. “That sounds kinda like an invitation to me, Mav.”
“Maybe it is.” Mav scooted closer so that their bodies were pressed against each other. In the month they’d been together officially he’d done things with Duke he never would have believed possible. Including playing the catcher to his lover’s pitcher. It had been a strange experience but not a bad one, getting fucked. Duke had been really slow and gentle, taking it easy until Mav had begged him for more. “I want you,” he whispered roughly, caressing Duke’s cheek. “And I don’t care who’s on top—just want to be close to you.”
Duke sighed happily. “You know, there were times in the past four years when I almost gave up—thought I’d never hear you say that, Mav.”
“What? That I want to be close to you? Or that I want to make love to you?”
“Either one.” Duke smiled.
Mav smiled back and then got serious. “You know, sometimes I feel like we wasted all that time when we could have been together. I’m sorry you practically had to knock me over the head with a brick to get me to see what we could be to each other.”
“No, Mav, that’s okay. And it wasn’t wasted time. I’d never consider any time I spent with you wasted,” Duke murmured.
“Especially time doing this.” Mav grabbed him suddenly and rolled them both over so he was straddling his lover’s thighs. “So what do you say, roomie? Are you up for it?”
Duke’s brown eyes were half-lidded with lust. “I’m always up for you, Mav.” He pulled Mav down and kissed him again. As their lips met, Mav had time to reflect that he was one lucky sonofabitch—his best friend was his lover and lifetime companion and he couldn’t have been happier, not even if he was still one of the straight boys.
About the Author
To learn more about Evangeline Anderson, please visit www.evangelineanderson.com. Send an email to Evangeline at
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Look for these titles by Evangeline Anderson
Now Available:
Swann Sisters Chronicles
Wishful Thinking
Choose your weapons.
ePistols at Dawn
© 2009 Z.A. Maxfield
Jae-sun Fields is pissed. Someone has taken the seminal coming-out, coming-of-age novel Doorways and satirized it. He’s determined to use his Internet skills and his job as a tabloid reporter to out the author as the fraud and no-talent hack he’s sure she is.
Kelly Kendall likes his anonymity and, except for his houseboy, factotum and all-around slut, Will, he craves solitude. There’s also that crippling case of OCD that makes it virtually impossible for him to leave the house. He’s hidden his authorship of Doorways behind layers of secrets and several years’ worth of lies—until he loses a bet.
Satirizing his own work, as far as he can see, is his own damned prerogative. Except now he has an online stalker, one who always seems several steps ahead of him in their online duel for information.
A chance meeting reveals more than hidden identities—it exposes a mutual magnetic attraction that can’t be denied. And pushes the stakes that much higher, into a zone that could get way too personal…
Warning: This book contains large Korean men; Will, the houseboy, factotum, and all-around slut; hot sexy manlove including oral sex, and serious ass play. (Jae’s note to self: OCD + socks + mouth = BAD.)
Enjoy the following excerpt for ePistols at Dawn:
Kelly stood looking at the clock tower. Jae broke the silence. “Originally, I thought maybe we could go to the observatory.”
“Oh, that would be—”
“We don’t have to.” Jae took his hand. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to, I don’t know, gird your loins to come and see me. I don’t want you to dread coming up here.”
Kelly quirked a small smile that was genuine and dazzling and then whispered, “I think it far more likely I’m going to dread going home.”
“Yeah?” Jae used his remote, but instead of entering the car Kelly leaned against the door and smiled up at him in invitation.
“You make me feel like a doll,” Kelly said on a breath, his eyes on Jae’s. For all Jae had been thinking about Kelly’s eyes, he found things in them he hadn’t noticed before, tiny gold and orange flecks inside the hazel irises and coal-colored rings around them. Long, dusky eyelashes caused smudgy shadows when they swept down, either to blink or to hide his thoughts. Kelly lowered them right then and a delicate flush stained his cheeks.
“Do I stand too close?” Jae asked. “Loom too much?”
“No.” Kelly swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. The first pleasant rush of arousal flooded Jae’s body. For once he didn’t want to act on it immediately. He didn’t want to shatter the delicacy of the moment.
“I can think of someplace to go. Someplace quiet.”
Kelly smiled. Jae could see what he thought. He thought Jae was suggesting someplace where they could act on what Jae was sure they both wanted.
“All right,” Kelly murmured with an expression that defined surrender. Jae opened the door for him and helped him in, sliding a hand down his arm and around to help him buckle up in a gesture that became an excuse for brushing touches on skin that rippled and got gooseflesh with anticipation. Kelly made the most of the opportunity to touch him back.
“I have just the place.” Jae closed the door and walked around the back of the car. While Jae drove, Kelly kneaded his shoulder. Jae had placed his coat in the back of the car. With only the thin fabric of a black T-shirt between his skin and Kelly’s fingertips, he felt the warmth of the man’s hand as it caressed him. He pulled into the parking lot of the Kyoto Grand Hotel, and to his surprise, Kelly asked no questions, just allowed himself to be led.
It was as if Kelly didn’t look at anything but him. That unnerving and frank gaze was serene as he waited for Jae to tell him—to show him—what was going to happen. There was a waiting stillness in him that Jae was willing to attribute to wisdom, to age, to tranquility, to fear. To anything, really, but indifference. When Jae put his hand on the small of Kelly’s back and led him from the elevator out into the garden, he felt the heat coming off Kelly in waves. Not indifference then, far from it. Submission.
Jae had a moment’s regret that he hadn’t taken Kelly straight home to his apartment.
“Wow,” Kelly breathed.
“Yeah.” Jae began down a path rich with mounds of blooming pink azaleas and sprays of ornamental grasses, dotted by bonsai trees. They walked slowly, savoring the scents of late summer flowers and soil and water, which fell in sheets from a waterfall and collected in placid pools.
“Oh, good, good place.” Kelly seemed to examine each and every plant and rock eagerly as he passed the large chunks of rosy-colored stone imported from Japan. Beds
of sand had been meticulously combed into swirls and patterns, like south sea island tattoos, evocative representations of the ocean. “You could hardly believe anything like this existed if you were simply down on the street looking up.”
“I come here when I need to think.” Jae didn’t mention that he’d come here once or twice to think about Windows, and how to draw out the writer and expose what he’d thought was the woman who’d mishandled his sacred text.
“It’s wonderful.” Kelly let him lead the way. “I like to garden. At home, I have a kind of gazebo in the middle of mine, where I like to sit. I’ve found over the years that it’s important to me.”
“You garden?” Jae couldn’t equate the act of gardening with the seeming grab bag of phobias that manifested themselves in Kelly. “Isn’t that kind of…”
“Dirty? Messy?” Kelly laughed. “I had a friend growing up whose mother had a crippling case of OCD. She had to bleach anything, and I mean even my friend, before she could touch it. It was actually kind of sad. But for some inexplicable reason she used to eat at fast food restaurants whenever I went to visit.” Kelly shook his head. “It was as if whatever made her phobic about germs hadn’t quite presented itself logically and said, here, germs are everywhere. She would go for miles to avoid touching a child’s toy, but drove through a chain restaurant for lunch without giving it a second thought.”
“So what you’re saying is it makes no sense?”
“Yup.”
“How do you stand it?”
“The very fact that it makes no sense is how I stand it,” Kelly explained. “It’s like…being allergic to something, only you don’t know what it is…or maybe it changes every day. You go through all the motions, and you think, well, crap. Here we go again.”
“You’re very well adjusted for—”
Kelly barked a laugh. “For someone who is so obviously not.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jae said, taking Kelly’s hand and leading him along the path beside the sand ocean.
“It’s all right. Sometimes I feel so old. I didn’t always have this, but it didn’t happen overnight. The panic attacks came on gradually, and at first…well. I don’t want to talk about that. I just got some help dealing with the physical manifestations and worked on trying not to avoid or anticipate the events.”
“That’s almost…heroic.” Jae stopped him. “I doubt if I could be that sanguine about it.”
Pain flickered briefly in Kelly’s eyes and Jae wondered if he’d accidentally said something wrong. It was there and gone so quickly he might have believed he’d imagined it if Kelly hadn’t tightened his grip on Jae’s hand.
“That’s the joke. Everything extraordinary that I’ve ever done has occurred entirely in my head.”
Jae touched the back of one of his fingers to Kelly’s cheek. “Surely not everything.”
“Well—” A loud cough from someone on the path nearby caused Kelly to begin moving again, and Jae was sorry Kelly never finished his thought. They spent the rest of the early afternoon sitting in the rooftop garden, and then they wandered over to the section of Little Tokyo where they explored the shops and found another Japanese garden next to a community center. They walked around that for a while. Kelly sat on a stone bench near a lotus pool. Jae joined him there, enjoying a lengthy companionable silence.
Eventually Jae’s stomach rumbled loudly and they both laughed.
“Hungry?” Kelly watched schools of tiny fish darting back and forth in the water.
“I am.” Jae sighed, getting up.
“What a spectacular place to spend time, thank you so very much.”
“It wasn’t the most exciting afternoon.” Jae took his hand again and began to lead him back the way they’d come. “I’ve been known to show a date a better time.”
“Different,” said Kelly. “But I doubt better.”
“Thank you.”
Kelly turned to him, looking up. He had to shade his eyes as the afternoon sun slanted over them. “Well. Not if you didn’t think so. It might have been less than exciting for you. I’ve been known to bore more outgoing people to death.”
“I don’t ever think I could find you boring. You take such interest in things. It’s fun to watch.”
Kelly smiled as Jae led him back to the car. In the dark and isolated cool of the parking garage, Jae pulled Kelly in and kissed him, smoothing down the crisp white fabric covering the smaller man’s torso. He didn’t stop until his hands cupped each of Kelly’s tight ass cheeks. He lifted Kelly up to his toes in an incendiary embrace, from which they eventually broke apart, dazed and panting.
“It’s official, I will never find you boring,” Jae stated shakily, taking Kelly’s hand. To his surprise, he felt a sharp tug of resistance. He turned. “What?”
“I don’t know.” Kelly glanced back the way they came.
“Problem?”
“Kind of.”
“Can you tell me?” Jae put his hand on Kelly’s shoulder, experiencing a protective surge somewhere in his chest, which felt tight and expansive all at once.
“I just…” Kelly’s eyes rose to meet his. “I wanted to freeze that. Get it right here.” He fisted the front of his shirt. “So I would never lose it.”
“Kelly…”
Kelly began moving toward the car again, catching Jae’s hand as he went. He shot Jae a smile over his shoulder that was at once sweet and sheepish. “I wanted to hang on to that a little longer, is all.”
The road back to bestsellerdom can be deadly.
Somebody Killed His Editor
© 2009 Josh Lanyon
Holmes & Moriarity, Book 1
Thanks to an elderly spinster sleuth and her ingenious cat, Christopher Holmes has enjoyed a celebrated career as a bestselling mystery writer. Until now. Sales are down and his new editor is allergic to geriatric gumshoes.
On the advice of his agent, he reinvents his fortyish, frumpy, recently dumped self into the sleek, sexy image of a literary lion, and heads for a Northern California writers conference to try and resurrect his career. A career nearly as dead as the body he stumbles over in the woods.
In a weirdly déjà vu replay of one of his own novels, he finds himself stranded in an isolated lodge full of frightened women—and not a lawman in sight. Except for J.X. Moriarity, former cop and bestselling novelist. The man with whom he shared a one-night stand—okay, maybe three—long ago. The man who wants to arrest him for murder.
A ruthless, stalking killer, or a hot, handsome ex-lover. Which poses the greater danger? It’s elementary, my dear Holmes!
Warning: This book contains a washed-out bridge, an isolated hunting lodge, desperate writers, guilty secrets, a killer on the loose, and one very hot ex-cop who wants his former lover in handcuffs—for all the wrong reasons!
Enjoy the following excerpt for Somebody Killed His Editor:
Someone was howling—a thin, breathless cry that was, in fact, more breath than cry.
Me.
Far from splitting the night, my bleat barely carried three feet, so I had no trouble hearing my attacker’s exasperated, “What. The. Fuck?”
I knew that voice.
I bit off the rest of my screech and sat up, wincing as pain shot up my spine. I was sitting in a puddle, ice-cold water soaking through my trousers. The last time I remembered being decked had been a playground rumble at Our Holy Mother. I’d been thirteen. My bounce had been better back then. Now I felt like I’d wrenched every muscle in my already worn-out body. And my back…I’d be lucky if I wasn’t crippled for a month. I wiped the mud off my face.
“I am so going to sue your ass,” I spluttered.
“Well, what the hell are you doing out here?” J.X. demanded.
No apology seemed forthcoming. Also, I couldn’t help noticing, neither was help from the lodge. Were we too far away to be heard? Not a happy thought.
“What do you think I’m doing? I’m going to my cabin.”
“Crawling on yo
ur hands and knees?”
“I wasn’t on my hands and knees till you knocked me down.”
“You sure as hell were skulking in the bushes.”
“I heard something—you—and I was making sure it was safe.”
He continued to stare down at me. I wished I could see his face. His motionless outline caused my scalp to prickle. Then he reached down a hand.
His hand was warm on my chilled one. Again I was aware of his wiry strength. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he was in a hell of a lot better shape. He pulled me to my feet and dropped my hand.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked, uneasily rubbing the twinging small of my back.
“Grabbing a log for my fireplace.” He reached past me and picked up a nice stout sawed-off limb. “It’s going to be a cold night.” He picked up another log. “Here’s one for you.”
“Thanks.” I stepped out of range, trying not to be too obvious about it. Not that I didn’t appreciate the gesture, but there was something unconvincing in his manner. What had he been looking for out here?
J.X. still held out the log. I took it gingerly.
“I’ll see you to your cabin.”
I followed him down the dirt path that cut across the open field toward the cabins. The sodden clouds had parted and a lackluster moon gilded everything in unnatural light. In the absence of the rain and wind, the stillness seemed uncanny.
Mostly to fill the uncomfortable silence between myself and J.X., I said, “There’s something eerie about the stillness.”
“It’s the eye of the storm.”
“You mean there’s more rain on the way?”
“Oh yeah. We’re a couple of hours away from another downpour.”
“Great.”
“Which is your cabin?”