Tiffany Reisz

“With trembling hands, Zach opened the front cover and flipped to the dedication page. "To Zachary Easton, my editor. Fuck you.”

“I love a whiskey chaser.”

“Tell me something boss. What do you think is the highest form of art?'Literature," he answered without hesitation. 'Painters and sculptors require elaborate supplies and tools. Dancers must have music. Musicians must have instruments. Literature needs nothing but a voice to speak it or sand to scrawl it in.”

“I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It's not. If it's a subgenre of anything, it's horror.Horror? Really?Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear.”

“Love is an open wound that you hope never heals.”

“I’m currently imagining a few creative ways of causing you extraordinary amounts of pain.”Kingsley raised his chin. Mere inches separated their faces.“Stop flirting. You know we don’t have time for that.”

“Nothing. I wanted to hit him but hitting a masochist is pretty pointless. Wesley?” She finally looked him full in his face. For a moment his brown eyes turned silver and she saw Michael’s face floating in front of her. “What if I’m a bad person, too?”“You’re not a bad person. If you were a bad person you wouldn’t be sitting fully dressed in a bathtub with no water in it because you’re terrified you might be a bad person. The devil doesn’t worry about going to hell.”“Only because he’s already there.”

“Nora— Forgive me for copyediting, but it must be said—you have raped the semicolon yet again. Stop it. It wasn’t asking for it no matter how it was dressed. If you don’t know how to use punctuation then do away with it altogether, write like Faulkner and we’ll pretend it’s on purpose.”Bite me, Easton, Nora said to herself as she corrected her sexually compromised semicolon in chapter eighteen. Seriously, bite me.”

“What’s your favourite position?”“I usually play winger.”“Zach, I adore you, but you can’t make soccer jokes during phone sex. It just isn’t done.”

“Keeping me a virgin waiting for him for so long proved he owned me even more than fucking me would have.”

“S&M is as psychological as it is physical and sexual, Zach. Imagine being as deep inside a woman’s mind as you are inside her body.”

“The eyes might be the windows to the soul, but a man's hips were his seat of power.”

“I really shouldn’t leave,” Zach said, terrified what would happen the second he found himself alone with Nora.“Come on, Zach. This party sucks and not in the good way. I’ve had pap smears more fun than this.”Zach covered a laugh with a cough.“I must admit you do have a way with words.”

“My, my, my…” She sighed, affecting a Southern drawl she no doubt stole from Wesley. “I see temptation has come a knockin’ and you have answered the door…”

“Yes, thank God. With a little subterfuge I managed to smuggle him back under my roof where he belongs. He is resting comfortably right now, and I am on cloud ten because cloud nine was full of pompous Englishmen. Wasn’t my scene.”

“Kid, Søren could eat you for breakfast and not even need to chew. Don’t ever fuck with a sadist, Wesley. For Søren, torture’s just foreplay.”“Why did you stay with him?” he’d whispered.Nora had grinned at him, and she saw a new fear in Wesley’s sweet brown eyes.“I like foreplay.”

“Simple game—he’d fill a wineglass with one of his expensive reds and set it on the edge of the table. Then he would fuck me. Hard.” Nora grinned as Wesley flinched. “If I thrashed too much, or fought him and knocked the glass off…then the wine wasn’t the only red that we spilled that night.”

“Pourquoi?" Kingsley demanded. "Why? You take her every way you can, every chance you have. Why her and not me?"Soren hadn't replied, and for that Kingsley had been forever grateful. He knew the answer, but to hear it would have broken the one last unbroken part of his spirit.”