Two years.
It’s been two years since HARD AS STONE, the first SoulShares novel – and my first book – debuted on Amazon. And a lot of other places. Two years since I first fell victim to “check Amazon sales rankings every two minutes” syndrome – fruitlessly, as it turned out, since somehow HARD AS STONE had been classified as horror >> occult, and I at this point didn’t know enough to double-check the categories. To this day I wonder what might have happened, if a customer had sought SALEM’S LOT and found instead a very randy bad-boy Fae…
A lot of things have changed in two years. For one thing, my publishers now know where my books go. *winks* Basically, I’ve turned into one of the magicians I spent most of my life watching with awe…. an extremely junior sorcerer’s apprentice, mind you, but still a member of the same lodge.
Just for fun, I thought I’d share something with you that shows just how far this journey’s taken me. HARD AS STONE grew out of a very short story I wrote for a role-play writer’s competition on Facebook. “The Door” is how HARD AS STONE, and all the rest of it, started…. and here’s how “The Door” started, three years ago.
“Kevin, what the fuck are you doing?”
A low, throaty purr was all the answer I got, as my lover’s hand continued to twist itself into my long blond hair and draw my head back. Hell of a way to wake up, and I groaned as the other hand improved on it by gliding down my chest until it found my gold nipple ring and twisting. “Say the word and I’ll stop.” His breath was hot in my ear, his tongue hotter.
“Is the word ‘fuck you’?” I tried to turn my head, managed to catch a glimpse of dark eyes, sleep-tousled black hair, and a sexy smirk before my head was wrenched back around. I sucked in a breath as he flicked the ring with a fingertip. This was so not like my human…not that my cock had any objections, it was begging for someone to get a grip on it. I reached down, curled my hand around the rigid length, and started a slow stroking, rolling my palm over the head on the upstrokes.
“It kills me to watch you do that.” The hard tip of his tongue traced around my ear. “That’s why you do it, isn’t it?” His chuckle was low and rich; on the rare occasions when I heard it, it always reminded me of dark chocolate.
“No, that’s just a bonus, it’s really all about the orgasms.” My mouth curved up in a smirk of my own, one that became a gasp as Kevin twisted the ring again, harder this time. What the fuck was going on? One of the things I truly loved about this human was the way there was always a hint of reluctance when I took him in my arms, hesitation before every kiss. I’d been his first male lover, after all.
And what a piece-of-shit coincidence it was that the delectable arsehole virgin had held the other half of my soul. If I hadn’t been unable to resist a perfect arse and a sensual mouth that night, I’d still be both immortal and invulnerable, as a Fae evicted from the Other Realm should be. But no, I’d had to see all that Armani as a challenge, and now I had to live with the result…
“Well, fuck me blind.” Kevin was rolling me onto my back, kneeing my legs apart, with a grin that said I was going to need serious recovery time in the hot tub.
“Are you a mind-reader?” Kevin smiled…
And for an instant, there was something else in those dark eyes. A plea, wild, desperate –
But it was gone, whatever it was, as quickly as I thought it had come. And Kevin’s warm hand was wrapped firmly around my shaft, his mouth was busy at my throat, and the smooth hot head of my human’s cock was making preliminary inquiries between my arse cheeks. “Shite,” I breathed, my head falling back. Unusual my lover’s behavior might be, but fuck if it wasn’t perfectly suited to my mood.
“That’s in, lanan, let me in,” Kevin crooned, using the Fae word for “lover” that I favored as he gripped and positioned himself. “Let me in…”
I relaxed – as best I could when my whole body was tensed in anticipation of pleasure – hissed as the thick head of Kevin’s cock forced its way past my ring, dry except for a few of his own warm drops. My eyes tried to roll back in my head, but instead I looked up, meeting my lover’s dark eyes.
Too dark. Black. Flat, sullen black. And I was falling into them. Losing myself.
I was… someplace else. A sense of near infinity, and yet a prison cell.
Before a Fae’s instinctive reaction to imprisonment – blind panic – could take over, I heard a soft sobbing. Kevin. What the hell?
Now I could see. And it was obvious where I was. If I had given any thought to what the inside of Kevin’s mind would look like, I might have conjured something like this; a comfortable study, the walls lined with bookshelves, both law books and the lameass fantasy shit my lover kept trying to get me hooked on. Like that was ever going to happen.
But… there was an air of decay hanging over everything. As if the fabric of the place was rotting, and any minute now a shelf or a chair or the floor would split apart and reveal the corruption underlying the façade. And the sound again… I turned, and a shudder ran through me. Kevin sat huddled in a wingback chair, arms wrapped around himself. His skin was grayish and clammy, his face drawn, his eyes sunken, his dark hair matted. And he wouldn’t meet my eyes, turned resolutely away. “Kevin…”
A laugh came from the area of the fireplace, a cold dead laugh. “Your toy is brave, Tiernan Guaire. He thought he could fight the Mhionbhrú.”
Rory Ni Coileain 