Velvet, Leather & Lace
Here’s the thing I get asked the most where do my ideas come from. This is hard to pin down, but they do not, contrary to popular belief, come from a warehouse in Toledo. Though sometimes I wish that were true.
For my novella in Velvet, Leather & Lace, a Harlequin release out this month, it wasn’t complicated. I’d been thinking of doing a blue collar, hard working hero. Someone who’d worked their way out of the gutter by strength and grit and sheer will. I wanted this hero to get his hands dirty every day and not be ashamed of it.
And so Jake was born. He’s a general contractor who straps on his tool belt and is damn proud of it. I pictured him as tall, with a body built from long days in the sun, sweating and tolling from hard work, a real body, not one gym made.
As for who would be good enough for him, this became a problem. How about a woman who was strong in her own right, who helped run a company with her partners, a woman who maybe had never really found sex worth all the hoopla. That might work.
I decided that Jake couldn’t be easy. In other words, he was not the type of guy to fall in love at the drop of a hat. He’d had that rough upbringing after all, and though women were fun and sexy, he’d never been much interested in keeping just one.
And then he and Mia became neighbors. Friends. Yeah, that dreaded f-word, the friend relationship that meant they shared everything but their naked bodies…I figured Jake would hate that, and the closer they got, they more
he wanted her.
Good start, right? But now I needed the catalyst. The event to change the tide. It took me awhile but finally I came up with it.
Mia needed a favor. A big favor. One that would mean Jake putting off his own job for her.
And in return, what would he ask for? LOL, that wasn’t too hard to figure out. After all, Jake is a guy, right? He wanted a whole night with Mia, you know, to prove sex might be messy but definitely worth the hoopla.
Too high a price? I don’t know, desperate times and all…
Here’s an excerpt about Mia’s desperate times:
She caught his hand in hers because she’d just discovered she couldn’t think when he was touching her. “Jake…”
“Let’s go cool off.”
“I know what you’re thinking, and you’re going to be disappointed.”
“Really? I’m talking about going swimming. What are you talking about?”
She felt herself blush.”You know what I was talking about.”
“Ah.”
“I mean it, you’d just be disappointed.”
“Right. Because you don’t like sex.”
Damn him, his mouth quirked when he said it. He was making fun of her.
And it didn’t help that she’d lied to him. She liked sex just fine, more than fine.
What she didn’t like was how none of her sexual relationships had ever worked out, not a single bleeping one of them. Maybe that was her own cynicism, maybe not, but fact was fact.
Once she slept with a guy, he waltzed right out of her life.
She cared about Jake, deeply. Watching him walk away would hurt, too much. So she’d let him think she didn’t like sex. So what. It was an easier explanation than the truth, that she wouldn’t screw their friendship up for a Jake-made orgasm, no matter how promising said Jake-made orgasm might be. “Look, it’s no big deal. I just don’t get what all the fuss is about.”
Now he let out a full-fledged grin and stroked her temple with his finger again, tracing her hairline. “You have no idea what you’re missing, do you?”
“Let me guess. You’d be willing to show me.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
Her engine revved. Yeah, he definitely could show her. She needed a cold shower just thinking about it. “Go home, Jake. The heat is going to your head.”
“Is it getting to you, too, Mia?”
Was he kidding? He couldn’t see that her nipples got happy at just the sound of him, or that she broke out into a sweat thinking about how he could ‘show’ her to like sex?
Yes, hell yes, it was getting to her. “No.”
“Liar,” he chided softly, and pulled her out of the sun, to the side of the stage, around a set of curtains and into a small alcove where they were protected overhead by staging, but also from anyone happening to walk by.
They were still on stage, with hundreds of empty seats facing them, and yet not a soul could have seen them. It gave the air a shocking intimacy, and every sensual nerve ending hummed with anticipation.
Then he stepped close. Their toes brushed. His breath mingled with hers, and his eyes, good Lord, those eyes. “Jake, honestly.” Her laugh sounded a little breathless even to her own ears and she hoped he didn’t take it as an invitation. “If this is how you think I’m going to repay you…”
He was slowly shaking his head. “No ‘repaying’. What I do for you, what you do for me, comes without a price. Always,” he said, and then backed her against the wall and leaned into her with that hard, perfect body. “This is something else, something separate. And it has to be done.”
And then he kissed her.
