Red
Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless
Blurb:
“Maybe
you’ll be lucky. Maybe he’s not human. He’ll take you in his arms and you’ll
feel his strength – a strength that makes it impossible to fight him. But
you’ve already lost the will to resist, that moment he looked into your eyes
and showed you all his hunger and his promise. You knew then. You knew that
this is what you are for – what we are all for – with our warm beating hearts
and our aching sexual needs.
We
are for them.”
There are six vampires in the city.
Ageless, terrifyingly beautiful and always hungry – not just for blood but for
the other pleasures the human body offers. Sadistic chanteuse Estelle; feckless
Ben; Roisin, the mirror-ghost; Wakefield, haunted by his own damnation; Naylor,
the most feral of them all.
And Reynauld is the Good Shepherd, the one
who holds them all in check. But his grip on his own humanity is fading, and
when Wakefield accidentally kills a woman and Naylor gets the blame, a
power-struggle erupts between the city’s immortal undead.
Red Grow the Roses tells of bloodlust and
sexual desire; for vampires the two are indistinguishable. These transgressive,
startling stories draw the reader down the darkest and most seductive paths of
pleasure – to where the monsters are waiting.
*****
Excerpt
‘I
don’t feed from humans,’ Wakefield hissed, trembling.
‘That’s what I heard. I just find it
hard to believe.’ Rolling onto her knees, she reached for the discarded rose
he’d cut for her. ‘Nasty sharp thorns these things have got,’ she mused, laying
the stem across her bare breasts. With a twitch she drew it down, scoring her
flesh with half-a-dozen needle-pointed thorns, shuddering as the pain burned
through her. Pin-points of blood rose on her pale skin and swelled, a string of
rubies decorating the white flesh and the roseate nipples. ‘Ah,’ she groaned.
Robert Wakefield seemed to grow
taller; his hard-on bulged. She could taste the coppery tang of her
victory.
‘Tell me; have you ever whipped a
girl with your roses, Mr Wakefield?’ Lilla began to crawl backwards from him on
hands and knees, arse swaying, breasts wobbling. ‘Maybe one of your servants?
The parlour maid perhaps? You ever taken a bunch of roses and whipped their
tits?’ She put on a country accent for her next words, her voice suddenly
breathlessly innocent but at the same time teasing: ‘Oh Mr Wakefield, you
wouldn’t be thinking of doing that to a poor innocent girl? I couldn’t bear
that sir – it’ll hurt something cruel. You wouldn’t want to ruin a helpless
maid, would you, sir? You wouldn’t want that on your conscience?’
Inhumanly swift, he lunged and
grabbed the front of her bodice and yanked her up to slam her against one of
the wrought-iron pillars. Eagerly Lilla extended her hands over her head,
thrusting her breasts out so that he might feed. But he didn’t, not right away.
He looked down at her with a face hollow with hunger, and then he took hold of
her long drawers at the waist and snapped the drawstring with one tug of his
wrists. He tore the damp, clinging cotton from her thighs to bare her sex, and
then he tied her wrists with the twisted strips and secured her to a ornamental
bracket high on the pillar, hauling her up onto her toes. She said nothing,
words robbed from her by anticipation, lips parted about her shallow breaths.
His face mask-like, his eyes
burning, he plunged his cold fingers between her thighs and up inside her,
breaching the gates of her sex to take the measure of her heat, the slick of
juices, the yielding sucking flex of her tight hole. Lilla writhed on his hand,
twisting helplessly with each thrust of his wrist, and he watched her breasts
jiggle and bounce, their pink points dewed in red. His teeth were so extended
now that his upper lip did not hide them.
‘Oh please,’ she gasped. ‘Please – bite
me!’
*****
Buy Links:
*****
Author Bio:
Janine Ashbless is a multi-published
author of erotica and erotic romance. Her first collection of erotic fairy,
fantasy and paranormal stories, Cruel
Enchantment, was published in 2000 by Black Lace. Red Grow the Roses is her
sixth novel. Her stories have been published by Spice, Black Lace, Nexus,
Xcite, Racy Pages, Cleis, Ellora’s Cave and Samhain, among others. She was Jade Magazine’s Erotic
Fiction Writer of the Year 2009. Janine loves goatee beards, ancient
ruins, minotaurs, trees, mummies, having her cake and eating it, holidaying in countries with
really bad public sewerage, and any movie or TV series featuring men in very
few clothes beating hell out of each other. She lives in England.
Hmm, sounds like a hot read!
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