Unpublished Excerpt From THE VIRGIN BILLIONAIRE'S WEDDING

I wanted to post an unpublished excerpt from THE VIRGIN BILLIONAIRE'S WEDDING so people who are thinking about buying it can have more info on which to base their decision. I don't like the idea of people spending their hard earned money in times like these without knowing what they are getting. Readers e-mail me all the time asking about books, and I'm more than happy to reply to them. Like all the books I write for ravenous romance, this one is a m/m romance that has a happy ending. I try to distinguish between the m/m romances I write and the m/m erotic fiction I write. And if it's being published by ravenousromance.com, it's going to be a romance.

I also like to recreate story lines that have been done before. I don't do this all the time (none of my erotic male fiction stories with lyd or other gay publishers are recreations...Missing Jackson's Hole, Kevin Loves Cowboys, etc...) but I will do this with romances because I like recreating the plot lines with gay characters that have already been done with straight characters. Most of the time the dynamics change drastically, and I rewrite scenes and dialogue to fit with the characters. I've posted before about how I believe there are only really seven original storylines out there and almost everything else is a recreation. TV shows do this all the time. They take past story lines and redo them in different ways. Some authors mask it more than I do, which is fine. I applaud them. However, I think that since the lgbt community has been so starved so long for any story lines (you can only take so much of those serious, artistic, literary gay books out there, with all those depressing characters riddle with guilt and angst), it's interesting to recreate some of the more classic pop culture stories and gear them toward the lgbt community and those straight people ( a growing number of readers, male and female) who like reading m/m romance. I think that if Truman Capote had been able to write Breakfast at Tiffany's with gay characters he would have. But he didn't have the choices lgbt authors have today. In the early l960's that would have been taboo and no one would have read it. Actually, they would have laughed at him.

I've taken some heat for recreating stories from the serious, snide literary types...even within the lgbt community. But as long as people...readers...keep reading these books and asking for more, I'll keep writing them. Actually, I wanted to stop a while ago, but I receive so many e-mails from readers asking for more I don't want to let them down.

The scene below is from a chapter where Luis and Jase's mother and grandmother go out for lunch, to a male strip club of all places, and Luis runs into Jase's old "friend" who is now openly gay, too.



By noontime, they walked back toward the docks and stopped in front of a long, flat wooden building with a sign that read, "Dawson's." The wooden siding had been left unpainted and it had aged into dull, dishwater gray. The red tin roof had buckled over the years and the outside lamps were all crooked. It appeared to be a restaurant, but Luis couldn't be sure because the windows were all dark. It reminded Luis of a gay bar back in Tennessee on the edge of town where so-called straight guys used to sneak out on their wives.



Isabelle rubbed her palms together and said, "Here we are. I've been looking forward to this all morning. We're gonna see some hot stuff today!" Her pupils were dilated; she rocked back and forth in her white running shoes.



Mary sighed. "Just don't get too excited, Mom. The last time we did this you almost fell and broke a hip. I don't want to spend the rest of the day in the emergency room."



She smiled at Luis, but her tone was exasperated. Isabelle raised one eyebrow and smirked. "I'm a grown woman. I know how to behave, thank you. And for your information, I was talking about the fact that I'm starved, not the surprise we have planned for Luis." Then she poked Luis in the ribs and giggled.



He looked to Mary for help and she just sent him a hapless glance with half-closed eyelids.


When they entered Dawson's, Luis noticed a long bar at one end of the room and tables scattered around it. The main room wasn't very large and the tables were so close together you had to squeeze through chairs to get around. The walls were dark pine, the windows were covered with dark shades, and the lights were dim. And almost every table was filled with women of all ages in groups of four to six. As they passed the bar, Mary and Isabelle stopped to say hello to a young man sitting on a stool at the far end. Other than a few employees, he and Luis seemed to be the only men in the place.



"Long time no see," Mary said. She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.



Luis recognized the man. It was Trey, Jase's old friend from the party. He was wearing a tight black shirt and tight low-rise jeans. Though he'd moved back to Alaska for good, Trey still dressed as if he were living in Los Angeles. Though weren't many men in Dawson's that afternoon, Trey stood out from the other men there. He was thinner and more toned than the other guys. He had a slicker hair cut and a sharper look in his eyes.