Ranae Rose's Blog, page 32

Why Kissing Is Even Hotter Than You Realized

  Today's post is all about what a good kiss can do (other than possibly paving the way for even more exciting activities, of course).  Gathered from the far reaches of the internet, here are some kissing benefits you may not have known about (so if you could use an excuse to lock lips with a certain someone, read on!).



   *When you give sugar, you burn sugar. Kissing burns calories, maybe even as much as a jog through the park if it's really passionate! This may help kissing couples to slim down.

   *'French' kissing exercises facial muscles, which may keep you from getting all saggy, and therefore help to retain a youthful (or youthfuler) appearance.

   *Kissing reduces stress and helps your mind to slow down and relax, which is obviously good for your overall mental and physical health. Sort of like meditation, only a lot more fun!

   *Kissing promotes a dazzling smile by producing extra saliva that acts as a natural anitseptic and fights bacteria and gum disease.

    Has anyone else noticed a theme here? Seems like doing enough kissing could make one genuinely hotter. Hmm, maybe that's the fitness secret of all those trim bodies we're always seeing on romance novels. Well, kissing is certainly a lot more fun than most other forms of exercise, though you'd probably have to do it as often as the heroes and heroines in those same novels for it to have such a dramatic effect. Worth a try, I say! And with that in mind, here's Derek and Kelly's first kiss, from my novella Glazed :

He was leaning across the seat, which brought his gorgeousness within a heart-speeding few inches of her own body. "You've got something here…" He raised a hand to his face, pressing a fingertip to the corner of his mouth.She mirrored him, lifting her own hand, meaning to wipe away whatever smudge of donut icing must be there as heat flooded her cheeks.He was faster. His lips were pressed against hers before she even had time to register what was happening. When she did she stiffened with shock. That lasted for a brief moment, and then she relaxed, feeling alarmingly as if her body had been turned to jelly. Was she actually melting? His lips were hot, alternately soft and firm as he worked them against hers, slipping his tongue over them and touching it to the corner of her mouth.She parted her lips in response, inviting his tongue in with a sugar-scented sigh. Sometime during the next few moments she realized he'd wrapped his arms around her and had one in her hair. The other rested on her hip, gripping her through her jeans. It was a good thing he was holding her head, because it was spinning pleasantly, her mind whirling with a myriad of electrifying sensations.The kiss ended abruptly when a vehicle sped by, its horn blaring rudely.
Hope you enjoyed these kissing facts & the excerpt. Never hurts to have more reasons to kiss someone special, does it? ;)

Dominance and Deception - Guest Author Amy Valenti

Today I'm welcoming my first ever guest-author to my blog, Amy Valenti! Amy is a fellow Total e-Bound author and she's put together a really naughty treat of a post featuring an excerpt from her latest release, a BDSM crime-thriller novel called Dominance and Deception. ;) So go ahead and read on - you know you want to! Dominance and Deception debuts today from Total e-Bound, and if this post sparks your interest, you can pick up a copy of the e-book here.

To catch a killer, you have to think a little kinky…
When you read the words 'kinky cop', what's the first image that flashes into your mind? I'm betting it's a guy in a tight yet revealing uniform, with a large 'nightstick'… right?
If that's what you're looking for, then sadly, I'm going to have to tell you to move it along – nothing to see, here! Dominance and Deception is about a plainclothes detective who loves to put his girlfriend in handcuffs – and that's just for starters. Detective Zach Pierce is no porny stereotype – he catches the bad guys, locks them up where they belong, and then drags his forensic scientist into his bedroom by the hair and orders her to her knees.
And she loves every second of it. ;)
But what's it like to have a homicide detective as a Dom? Okay, he never goes anywhere without a pair of heavy-duty handcuffs, which is a definite plus for spur of the moment fun. But when you're putting criminals behind bars on a daily basis, you're bound to make a few enemies.
Faye Tate knows this when she takes Zach's collar, but can she really comprehend the danger she's in? Zach's a responsible Dom, but when certain people find out that Faye's his weak spot, it makes her a target. Dominance and Deception follows their D/s love affair over its first two years, and there's plenty of danger and shadiness to overcome.
Having said that, there's also a lot of intense, kinky fun involved – Faye's a switch, and she'd love to trade places with her Dom every once in a while… not to mention bring another detective into their bed for a sizzling ménage encounter. Zach might have collared more than he bargained for!
Check out a little excerpt from the novel:
***
"Try to get free."
Obediently, Faye writhed on the bed, tugging at the handcuffs that restrained her wrists and the silk scarves I'd used to tie her ankles to the bedposts.
"Can't, Sir," she said, half smiling, half apprehensive, as if she was unsure whether the response would lead to reward or punishment. Hell, with Faye, the punishment usually was the reward.
I didn't keep her in suspense. "Good."
When I brought the riding crop up into her line of sight, her eyes widened and she bit her lip, a shiver of anticipation thrilling through her body. I paused for a second, giving her time to back out if she needed to, making no attempt to hide the way my eyes swept over every part of her.
"Are you ready?"
She swallowed hard, her eyes on the crop. Shaking a tendril of damp hair from her cheek before answering, she nodded, her words just barely whispered.
"Yes, Sir."
The way she submitted, unquestioning, to my authority made me want to throw aside the crop right then. I needed to be inside her, needed to hear her beg for release, needed to lose control completely. But not yet. The scene had yet to be played out.
Faye looked from the crop to my face, and from the slight upward quirk of her eyebrow I could tell she'd caught on to my train of thought.
"Or we could just…" she said softly, shifting seductively against the mattress.
Snapped back into my role, I stared her out until she stilled and broke eye contact.
A flicker of amusement remained in her voice as she conceded, "I'm sorry, Sir. I was outta line."
"You're damn right," I said, and without warning cracked the crop down onto her breast, just below the nipple.
She yelled with combined pleasure and pain, attempting to suppress the grin on her face.
I paused to let the blow register, knowing she was hardly even trying to be properly submissive. Most of the time, she let it wash over her, sinking so far into the state that it took time for her to come back from it. Tonight she was in a playful mood of a completely different kind—cheerfully insolent and willing to take all the punishment I could meter out. I already knew she'd let me whip her until she was sore all over, then defy me for just a little longer, setting her tolerance for pain against my willingness to give it.
I've never been one to back down from a challenge.
Faye looked down at the red mark rising on her flesh, then up at me. "That the best you can do, Sir?"
I raised the crop, never letting my pissed-off façade slip. "I haven't even started—"
Faye's phone rang, the unexpected sound disorientating us both. She groaned, scowling at the offending object as if it was sentient.
"Damn it! Not now!" She tugged expectantly at her handcuffs. "Okay, let me out of these."
I stood there, impassive, and she rolled her eyes.
"Zach, seriously. Someone's probably dead and we'll have to go to work."
***
Thanks for hosting me today, Ranae! :)
Bio: Amy Valenti is a tarnished tease, and her mind has lived in the gutter since the day she realised what sex was. She hails from England, which she doesn't find quite as exotic and sexy as the average US citizen seems to, but if people want to compliment her on her accent, that's all fine with her! Her muses are many, fickle and very demanding.
She has a degree in creative writing and currently works as a proofreader/copy editor. In her free time, she reads, writes and plays videogames. On the rare occasions she doesn't have a laptop on her knee, she loves to curl up with friends and pets – and chocolate – for TV show and movie marathons.
You can learn more about Amy and her writing at her blog: http://amyvalenti.wordpress.com/

Six Sentence Sunday - Eternity and a Year

The dust and coolness that surrounded her were real enough, and when she glanced out of the hole in the wall she could see the moon, almost full and mottled with blue craters. The only surreal thing about the situation was Brendan. "You're not dead?" she asked, her voice cracking slightly.
Brendan hesitated for a moment before answering. "No," he finally said, "I'm not dead."
"Then where the hell have you been?"


And there's plenty more where that came from for anyone who's interested. Past Six Sunday excerpts from Eternity and a Year here, here, here, here and here.

If I Could Be Anyone I'd Be... Chun Li!

 I'm joining in Talli Roland's Watching Willow Watts release party by blogging about who I'd be if I had to choose another extremely awesome identity! So it should come as no surprise to anyone who spent the 90's gathered round an old Super Nintendo that I chose the undisputedly most fabulous video game heroine of all time, Chun Li.




  Why would I want to be Chun Li? Well, just look at her. She's beautiful, and she could probably crush three grown men at once with just her ridiculously fit legs. Ok, well, I'm not sure I want my legs to be that fit, but if you've played Street Fighters you know that her leg bursts into blue flame when she does her signature kick - more than worth the trade off, if you ask me. Anyway, my point is that she kicks ass and looks great while doing it.

   Just as I was the only girl among my cousins and brothers, she was the only female Street Fighters character. And together we were a (mostly) unstoppable force of female destruction!


   I know what you're thinking now - Ranae, if you really loved Chun Li, you would have a replica of her costume that you had professional photos done in. And how right you are. I present to you, me in my Chun Li costume:



I had this photo done last year, and as you can see, I photoshopped myself into a screen shot from the Street Fighters Turbo game of my childhood so that I could kick pixelated man-butt just like my heroine.

  Well, between this and my Ninja Turtle/Peter Pan crush post, you're really beginning to get a pretty dorky awesome picture of my personality, aren't you? And you have Talli Roland to thank for that, who made this post possible by hosting her 'If I Could Be Anyone Blog Party'. So hop on over to her blog to find out more about her new book Watching Willow Watts. It's a fun read - almost as fun as annihilating your brothers and cousins at Street Fighter Turbo. I know because I've done both.

  What about you - if you could be anyone, who would you be?

Six Sentence Sunday - Taken Hostage

She had nowhere to run, and there was probably no one to hear her scream if she tried and he caught her. She dared a glance at her captor, who'd tucked the gun into the front waistband of his jeans. The bulge of the barrel beneath the denim reminded her of the similar protuberance she'd felt there when he'd pinned her against the Mustang in the bank parking lot. She no longer felt horrified by the memory – a fact that sent heat flooding into her face.


Once he'd finished packing the Saturn he opened the passenger door. 'Ladies first,' he murmured in a tone she'd heard already in her fantasy.

Ideas I Probably Shouldn't Tell Anyone About... (Like Shape-Shifting Dolphin Pirate Male Ballerina Heroes)

...but am going to anyway for the sake of amusement.

I have a very active imagination that never fails to provide me with more ideas than I could possibly use. Some of those ideas become books almost immediately. Others are pushed to the back of my mind, where they ripen until they're ready to be realized as fully-fledged stories. And still others.... Well, I contemplate them for a few moments for my own amusement and then forget about them.

Except sometimes when I don't... Like times when I think it would be funny to mention a silly story idea on my blog. And then I think - 'Hey, a little paragraph or two from this non-existant story would really add to that post!' And then before I know it I've, uh, written the beginning of a story about a would-be male ballerina who's a monstrously fearsome pirate who - oh yeah! - is cursed for his cruelty and shape-shifts into a porpoise at night.

Well, I don't really know what else to say. And I can't not post the beginning of that story after putting all that time and work (which surely could have been better spent) into it, can I? So here you go...



The wafting notes of a mellifluous tune drifted across the waves to where Captian Daniel Dorsal watched the foreign ship in secrecy. The melody would have -- should have -- assaulted his sensibilities, had he been himself. He did not enjoy such music. He prefered a rough, manly tune played on a rusty accordion by a scurvied sailor or nothing. As a young woman appeared on the strange ship's deck, his resolve wavered. With a squeaky sigh that sprayed mist through his blowhole, he gave in and let the music wash over him.

The girl danced beautifuly. No, more than beautifully -- perfectly. Daniel watched, rapt, and felt the blood tingle in his veins in response. As she twirled gracefully over the deck, the single sentinel who played the flute her only audience besides himself, he felt as if his heart might burst. The tingling in his veins became liquid flame, and at last he could stand it no longer. He rocketed up and out of the water, spinning through the night air in a porpoise's approximation of a pirouette.

Unable to resist a second leap, he moved with a grace that mocked his usual form -- his human form. As a porpoise, he could leap three times as high as the waves that rolled around him. But he could never manage such dancing feats as Captain Daniel Dorsal, commander of the Starfish and terror of the seven seas. There was a part of his pirate self that would rather die than do so. And then there was his peg leg.

Perhaps things would have been different if he'd never left London as a boy. Perhaps if he'd spurned the siren's call of the sea and stayed in the city, he could have found a happier existance. He could have taken up an apprenticeship to a blacksmith or perhaps a leather-worker to disguise his true ambitions from his misunderstanding peers. And then, whenever he could steal a moment, he could have returned to that blessed crack in the wall of Madame Bessette's ballet school. Perhaps one day he would have even worked up the courage to enter, to take his first tentative step toward the future he'd craved since he'd seen his first cabriole at age five. He'd never wanted to be anything other than a male ballerina. Out of cowardice, he'd flung himself in the opposite direction, becoming a sea-faring criminal so brutal that he'd quickly surpassed the man's man image he'd sought and become something more -- a monster. And he'd paid -- he'd been cursed for it. Ironically, it was in this animal form that he felt most comfortable.

As he mourned what might have been, a shiver of awareness started in his dorsal fin and raced down his spine, all the way to his tail. He'd been seen. Someone was watching him bob among the waves, had seen, no doubt, his leaps. He turned slowly, already knowing it was the ballerina who watched him.

     ....I made myself stop at this point.

Six Sentence Sunday - Glazed

Maybe he could browse the local real estate offices' websites and see if any of them had her listed as an agent. Or was that too creepy? He didn't want to scare her off a second time, but God, he wanted to see her again.Trying and failing to push all thoughts of Kelly and her ultra-kissable lips from his head, he slid out of the truck, hoping the feel of solid asphalt beneath his feet would help ground him in reality. It didn't have much of an effect, so he resorted to forcing himself to think about more mundane subjects, like what a pain in the ass replacing his condo locks would be, and how his assistant-manager-in-training Jason might be doing back at the shop, where he'd left him in charge. Subjected to these decidedly unarousing thoughts, his hard on eventually subsided, leaving an ache in its place that wouldn't quite let him forget about Kelly.

Real-Life Southern History + Irish Legend = Spirited Away (my newly contracted book)

When Europeans came to America, the area where I currently live was settled largely by people of Scotch-Irish descent. (I beleive the term 'Scotch-Irish' is an Americanism, so, for my non-American readers, basically: alot of them came from Ireland.) So this got me thinking - what if Irish settlers came to the American South, and brought Irish legend with them?

That's where I got the idea for Aaron and Caitlin's story, Spirited Away.

Nothing can kill Caitlin's love for Aaron O'Brien – not being whisked away to the spirit world by the legendary bean sidhe of her homeland – not even death...

When Irish settlers gather from miles around to celebrate Beltane at the O'Brien family's North Carolina estate, Caitlin McCarthy finds herself unexpectedly in the arms of the family's striking heir, Aaron O'Brien.  But will they ever share more than a single kiss?  When a flood traps Caitlin on O'Brien property and leaves her at Aaron's mercy, it seems so.  Their sensual whirlwind courtship quickly escalates, but just as Aaron approaches Caitlin's father to request her hand in marriage, Caitlin finds herself whisked away into the spirit realm.  Can she reunite with Aaron again, or does being Bean Sidhe mean leading a loveless existence?

Banshees in North Carolina? Well, immigrants to America did bring a few banshee tales with them. In fact, some beleive that a banshee haunts the Tar River in Edgecomb County, NC.

But I also got ideas for my story from some decidedly more factual aspects of local history. The O'Brien manse in my story is a large, stately brick structure that was shipped brick-by-brick from the Emerald Isle and rebuilt on American soil. It's also haunted by Aaron's great grandfather. This house was inspired by a local mansion that was - you guessed it - deconstructed and shipped across the Atlantic from Ireland and painstakingly rebuilt. It's also widely beleived to be haunted! In fact, I don't think I've met anyone around here who doesn't beleive it is. I've been inside a couple times myself and I didn't encounter any ghosts, but I'm certainly not ruling out the possibility. ;)

Anyway, I recently contracted Spirited Away to Total E Bound, and it's due out on March 19th. I'm proud to present a story with a pinch or two of local history...and a liberal helping of imagination!

Six Sentence Sunday - Glazed

 Excruciatingly aware of the erection he'd popped under the table, he forced himself to reply instead of leaning across the worn wooden surface to pull her into another kiss. "You know those donuts we ate in the truck this morning?"


 She nodded, the tip of her tongue poking out to barely touch her lip in apparent memory. He didn't think she even realized she'd done it, but beneath the table, it gave him a jolt.


 "They came from my store," he continued. "The Blue Mills Donut House."

The Best Kind of Vamp

  Vampire mythology dates back to 4,000 B.C., where one of the earliest accounts was found in Babylonian and Summerian myth. Over the millenia, vampires have been portrayed as everything from vicious albeit shapeless bags of blood to thirsty vegetables (apparently) to sparkling teenage hearththrobs.


  But what's the best kind of vamp?




  I like modern, sorta-wish-I-was-still-human-vamps. Unlike the vamps from old horror films, they're not evil. More like humans at heart with cool powers (and some weaknesses). Brendan, the hero from my novel Eternity and a Year is this kind of vampire. He may have super-human strength, but all he really wants is to be with his human bride-to-be. I'd take this kind of vamp over a creep like Dracula anyday! (I've never liked horror.) I like vamps with a human side.


  Of course, vampiric pumpkins are a close second. There's something to be said for a monster that can be vanquished by turning it into a pie. And then there's that cutie Bunnicula. But over all, I think I'll take my vampire romance heroes.




  What about you - what kind of vamp do you like best? Romantic vampires, or scary vamps maybe? Vegetarian vamp bunnies? Thanks to Hollywood and some pretty bizarre legends there are a lot of possibilities.