Coffee Time Romance reviews

The reviewers at Coffee Time Romance have been busy. In fact there are now reviews up on their site for Enchanted, Magic & Desire and Wildwood - all 3 of which get a rating of 4 Cups (out of 5) - "Outstanding Great Read"!!

Thank you CTR! The lattes are on me!

And in other news - Wildwood (currently out as a paperback in the UK and from next week in the US) is now available as an e-book downloadable from All Romance eBooks, for those of you who (like me) are running out of shelf-space, or have one of those new Sony or Kindle thingies or, like, a computer.

Welcome to this century, Janine...

Website Updates

I've taken a couple of days this week to update my website - something I should really have done a month ago. So now all my books and short stories have separate pages with notes on characters, plot origins, etc - including Wildwood my most recent novel. Just find a cover picture on the main page and click on the Author's Comments button beneath.

There's a fair amount of stuff on the joys of editorial changes too: what has had to be taken out and what been put in after initial submission of the manuscript. Some of it was pretty painful to recall. But, you know, it's not all pink mascara and fluffy kittens being a writer. And not all submission is the fun sort.

Enchanted: Bear Skin excerpt

From my novella Bear Skin:
(NB - You should really read this Lust Bites post first, because this follows directly on from the extract there.)

He kissed me on the lips and then the throat, biting and licking the line of my neck as I offered it up to him. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid of his teeth. I was lost in his kisses in moments, forgetting eventually even to stroke his prick. He didn’t seem to mind; he slid to his knees before me, pulling out of my grasp and setting my bum firmly against the sofa-back. He kissed his way down over my bare shoulders as he eased aside the spaghetti-straps of my slip, and then his mouth was on my breasts and I forgot to breathe. The darkness was total but now my blind eyes were filled with crimson stars as he ate his way in honeyed kisses across my breasts, suckling at my nipples, breath hot on wet skin. I grasped his head, running my fingers through his short hair, raking the nape of his neck. The silk dress ran down my legs like cool water. Then he stooped to the taut line of my belly and he was nuzzling up against my mound and parting my thighs and I had to let go of him to grasp the leather and lean back, opening for him, almost on tiptoe. His tongue was sweet fire. He lifted my left thigh and draped it over his shoulder – all the better to eat me with.

Arailt: a stranger pressed between my thighs in the dark, his tongue taking possession of my clit and my mind. A man whose face I couldn’t picture. A man I’d never even seen. I thought I’d melt on that hot, avid mouth. I thought he’d lick me away like an ice-cream. But I didn’t go quietly into dissolution though I’d lost all ability to construct a sentence; my evocations were half poetry and half blasphemy and all helpless surrender, as the inky darkness turned to pulsing crimson and then the stars in my head went nova.

Almost as soon as I was done he stood, scooped my up bodily and dropped me over the sofa-back onto the padding below. Then he stepped over in one stride and descended on me, urgent now. It wasn’t graceful, our coupling; in the blackness we tangled our limbs and fumbled for access, gasping and giggling and heaving until somehow I guided him into me, and after that he knew exactly what he was doing. He did it hard, just as Lynn had warned - and it was so good. I arched beneath him and bit his shoulder and urged him on with whimpering cries. I had one leg up the sofa-back and one foot on the floor and my head hanging over the side, jerking with every thrust: What after all was the value of decorum, there in the dark? What was there left, here in the dark, when all that was familiar and normal belonged to the daylight? – Certainly no regret or guilt or fear anymore: only his weight and the friction and the smell of our bodies and the need and the pleasure and the igniting fire of orgasm.

The fire consumed us both.

When we’d finished gasping Arailt slid from me and dropped with a thud to the carpet. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, cradling his hot face on my heaving breast. ‘I want to do that again.’

I dissolved into spluttering laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’ His tone was comically offended, but he ran his hand accurately down the length of my abdomen until he could sink his fingers into my muff.

‘If you can do that again I’ll-’ The words caught in my throat as his fingers circled my clit.

‘You’ll what?’ Raising himself, he explored my throat and face with his lips until he found mine and planted a questioning kiss there.

‘I’ll be very very happy,’ said I in a small voice.

He chuckled. He had a rich and deeply dirty chuckle. ‘I didn’t say right now. Or here.’ Standing, he pulled me up. ‘There’s a lot more room on the bed, for a start.’ He slid my arms around his neck. ‘Come on, you wee slip of a thing. I’ll carry you up.’

‘Wee slip?’ I mocked, wrapping my legs around his waist. ‘Oh, the big man reckons he can carry me all the way up to bed…’

He didn’t even catch his breath. ‘No problem. Except…’ He took my bottom lip in his teeth and tugged it gently. I moaned. His hands, which had slid under my bottom to support my weight, took a lascivious squeeze. ‘Except that I might have to stop and put you over the top banister and fuck you there,’ he added.

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Enchanted is in the UK shops now! If you're quick you have a chance to win a free copy by getting over to Lust Bites before Sunday 10th August and leaving a comment on the Bear Skin post. A winner will be drawn at random.