I’m so excited to have Anna Durand here today to tell you about her book, Tempted By A Kiss!
Tempted By A Kiss
Anna Durand
Mel Thompson just dumped her cheating ex after two years together. Now she’s determined to understand the allure of casual sex by having a steamy fling of her own at a notoriously raunchy underground club. When her best friend, Adam Caras, catches on to her plan, he makes a surprising offer to derail her. If she wants a hot fling, he’ll give it to her.
Who better than Adam, renowned lady-killer, to demonstrate the erotic pleasures of a one night stand? Sex could ruin their friendship, but after a soul-searing kiss, Mel fears one night may never be enough.
Buy Tempted By A Kiss now from Amazon, Wild Rose Press, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, or All Romance eBooks!
Men Are Weird, But We Love Them
Most romance readers are women. Most romance writers are women too. This leads to a big question: How do women writers craft scenes from the male point of view? How do we stay true to the way men think, but also satisfy the fantasies of our readers? It’s a constant challenge, but also a constant source of fun and excitement. After all, each man has his own unique quirks, weaknesses, and strengths.
Though I’ve yet to be married, I’ve known plenty of men in my life—men I dated, men I worked with, men who became friends, male relatives. Each of them taught me something new and different about the male mind. The most common complain women make about men is that they don’t like talking about their feelings. Women are supposed to “know” how they feel. If he gives you a power tool for your birthday, that means he cares. If he buys you a vacuum cleaner, he wants to marry you! I joke, but this highlights a major difference in the way men and women view relationships.
I love to make use of these sex differences in my writing. In my short story Tempted by a Kiss, the hero Adam, a renowned lady-killer, has fallen in love with his best friend Mel. Being a man, he can’t just tell her. He follows Mel to an underground club where she’s gone to look for a hot fling, to understand the allure of casual sex. Instead of admitting he loves her and doesn’t want her to make a huge mistake, he offers to be her fling. For a man, this makes perfect sense. Solve the immediate problem, worry about the rest later. He figures she ought to know his actions mean “I love you.”
I play around with this dynamic even more in the upcoming novel version of this story, Fired Up. In the novel, I amp up Adam’s embarrassment factor by having him muck things up from the get-go, luring Mel into a steamy dance at the club while he’s wearing a mask and she has no idea it’s him. In Tempted by a Kiss, their first sexual encounter is quick and heated, followed up with a slower, sweeter love scene. In Fired Up, the same thing happens at first—but then Adam gets flustered, overcome with guilt over how he tricked Mel in the club. He stumbles. He forgets all his smooth moves. The strong, self-assured ladies man becomes a mess. What he doesn’t realize is his weakness makes him all the more irresistible to Mel.
This is what men don’t get. When they show weakness, especially when we are their weakness, that’s how they prove to us they care. Honestly, guys, vacuum cleaners aren’t the way to a woman’s heart! Never fear, though. You guys are weird, but we love you anyway.
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM FIRED UP
Mel pushed away from Adam, staggering toward the sofa. He reached for her, but she batted away his hands.
“I’m fine,” she slurred. “You can go.”
Leave her like this? Uh-uh. What if Devon stopped by to pester her about taking him back? What if she was so wasted she decided a walk would clear her head and stumbled out into traffic? Every worst-case scenario plagued him as she stumbled into the sofa.
She planted her butt on the sofa’s back and flattened a palm on her forehead. “Ohhh God. Why’s the room spinning?”
He took her shoulders in his hands. “You’re drunk, Mel. You need to go to bed and sleep this off.”
In the morning, she’d probably have a massive hangover. What the hell had gotten into her? If his stupid trick had driven her to this…
All he could do was make up for it. Stay here to watch over her. Sleep on the sofa and, in the morning, feed her his patented hangover cure. It’s all your fault, you raging moron.
Mel angled toward him, her sapphire eyes hooded with a bleary desire. Her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. “Kiss me.”
His heart thudded. “What?”
“Kiss. Me.” She skated her hands up his chest and around his neck, kneading his nape. “You want to. I want to. So do it.”
“You’re stoned.”
She slid her butt off the sofa. Her high heels brought her up to his level, her mouth dangerously close to his.
His hands were still on her shoulders. He fought to keep from slipping them lower, down her naked back. “I don’t want to kiss you.”
Not while she was drunk anyway.
Meet Anna
Anna Durand is an award-winning writer, a freelance librarian, and an audiobook addict. She specializes in steamy romances featuring spunky heroines and hunky heroes, in settings as diverse as modern Chicago and the fairy realm. In her previous life as a librarian, she haunted the stacks of public libraries but never met any hot vampires hunting for magical books.
Hang out with Anna on her website, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, Google+, and at Amazon.
