Bondage, Beauty and the Beast, an excerpt from WICKED GAMES

Please note: This post is for adults only. If you're under eighteen, please go elsewhere. Thanks!

WICKED GAMES is now officially in bookstores, so I decided to tell y'all a little bit about the book and how it got written. 

The original idea was to reprint three really early BDSM stories of mine that appeared in a 2001 e-book called BODICE RIPPERS.

I started reading romance back in the late 1970s and 1980s, when there were certain really popular romance plots that involved the heroine or her family pissing off the hero in some way. He then took erotic revenge on her that in retrospect had strong elements of bondage and submission. 

At some point, he'd rip her bodice open and seduce her, more or less by force. Thus, the nickname Bodice Rippers.(Which romance writers today absolutely hate, by the way.)

None of this was even remotely heroic behavior, and editors and readers soon turned away from what were in essence rape fantasies. 

But by in the early 1990s, I'd discovered bondage and submission really turned me on. 

When I decided to start writing romance, I used the basic ideas behind these stories and took them just as far as I possibly could. I wrote a whole slew of  searingly kinky stories inspired by the novles I'd read back in the 1980s. 

At the time, I had no expectation of ever publishing any of it. The stories were written strictly for me, and I did not hold back at all. Anything I'd ever fantasized about, I wrote.

In 2001, I decided that some of those early stories were good enough to publish, and I submitted them to one of the first e-pubs, Renaissance E-books. I called the book BODICE RIPPERS as an ironic nod to those early Eighties romances. 

Soon afterward, my editor at Renaissance told me a Berkley editor had bought a copy of the book. I thought that was pretty cool, but I knew better than to hope she was really interested. 

Turns out she was.

A few weeks later, Cindy Hwang e-mailed me and asked if I wanted to write for her. She told me she thought if I could take smutty concepts like those in BODICE RIPPERS and actually make them romantic, I had what it takes to be a romance novelist. That was a decade and 18 novels ago.

Not long after I started writing for Cindy, she told me she wanted to publish BODICE RIPPERS. I, frankly, thought she was nuts. Those stories were too freaking kinky for a mainstream romance readership. 

But we decided to put the book out under a pseudonym --Julie Day-- as one of the first books of the HEAT imprint. (We ended up doing it under the Angela Knight name anyway.)

At the time, though, I was busy writing the Mageverse series, so a few years went by. In the meantime, the mainstream romance audience developed a taste for kink, thanks to FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. 

Which was when we decided the time was finally ripe to put out WICKED GAMES and LOVE BITES. (Love Bites will be out in September, by the way.)

Each of the books include a Mageverse BDSM novel and two nasty shorts of mine. Here's an excerpt from one of the ones in WICKED GAMES:

"Bondage, Beauty and the Beast"

The air was cold on my breasts, and my nipples tingled, drawn into tight, hard points. Staring into the darkness of the velvet hood, I tried not to shiver. I could hear the man pacing around me, inches away, moving so quietly, and yet there was an impression of size, of danger about him despite his silence. I was acutely aware of my nakedness.

“What do you think?” asked the precise tenor of my stepson. The whoreson bastard.

“Lovely,” the man said. His voice was odd, a deep, rich rumble that vibrated pleasantly in my ears. He was behind me now. Suddenly hands engulfed my breasts, big hands, hard and callused, lifting the soft globes to pluck delicately at my nipples. I stifled a moan and would have tried to push him away, but my wrists were bound in front of me. “She has very responsive breasts,” he said.

“Brianne’s tits are her best feature,” agreed Cedric. “God knows my lord father thought so. May he rot in hell. He must have been addled, marrying her as he did with one foot in the grave. My God, look at her. She’s younger than I am.”

“Yes,” answered the rumble. The big hands moved, drifting down the bare, sensitive ripples of my ribs, testing the plane of my belly. I fought not to squirm. I would not give either man that satisfaction.

The hand drifted between my thighs, long fingers burrowing skillfully into the curls there, parting the lips that had gone so shamefully damp under the man’s skillful caresses. I stiffened in outrage, but I knew a protest would only earn me a slap from Cedric.

He stroked slowly between the plump lips, taking his time, teasing shameful pleasure from my body. It seemed I felt a brush of fur against my inner thighs as he touched me, and I wondered if he wore gloves.

“Well,” Cedric demanded. “Do you agree? Will you keep her here, in your castle . . . ?”

A very long finger found the opening of my cunt and slowly eased its way inside. “That depends,” the man said. “I still don’t understand why you want to sell her to me.”

“Because otherwise I’ll have to pay Brianne the share of the inheritance the old man left her,” Cedric said with exaggerated patience. “And I don’t care to do that.”

A low, rumbling growl vibrated in my ear. I stirred nervously. It sounded far more like a wolf than a man.

When Cedric spoke again, he, too, sounded nervous. “I was going to kill her, but I remembered you and Edrea and all the games you used to play here before . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Before she cursed me.” The voice was so cold with frigid anger that I flinched. He slipped an arm around me to hold me still. I felt fur and linen brush my naked flesh, and shivered.

“Ah, yes. Don’t you see, milord? It’s poetic justice. She seduced my father with her charms, she would have inherited a third of everything rightfully mine . . . but instead, she becomes your slave. Yours to torment, as you are tormented.”

The finger probing me was joined by a second. The sensation was liquid, hot. Shameful. “Yessssss.”

“She is, after all, nobly born,” Cedric said, cajoling. “You won’t often have a chance at such a beauty, thanks to Edrea . . .”

The growl was so loud I jumped. “True, curse you. But this one . . . this one won’t refuse me. I won’t allow it.” He released my waist and cunt, and suddenly hands were prying my bottom cheeks apart. A finger stabbed up, forcing its way into my anus. I arched my back and gasped in pain.

“I’ll take her whenever I want, however I want,” the voice growled.

“So,” said Cedric, voice vibrating with triumph. “It’s agreed?”

“Not so fast. First I want to see her face.”

Before I could even pull at the ropes binding my wrists, he whirled me to face him and snatched the hood off my head. Blinking in the light of the torches, I looked into the face of the one who would be my master. And felt my heart skip in shock.

The top of my head barely came to his breastbone, and his shoulders were wide as a sword over a chest roped in muscle. He wore a rich wine doublet, a fine linen shirt, and black britches that hugged his long, brawny legs. His boots were made of soft dark leather that clung to his strong calves.

In all, he had the sort of strong male form to make a maiden’s heart beat faster—had it not been covered entirely in silky black fur.

His pelt—there was no other word for it—was as shiny and black as a panther’s everywhere except on his head, where it lengthened into a magnificent mane that extended down his back. Great horns thrust through that silken hair, curving like a ram’s on either side of his arrogant head.

Yet despite those animal features, his face was human. Indeed, there was raw masculine beauty in his high, broad cheekbones and square chin that not even fur could disguise. His lips were full and sensuous, though as dark as his pelt, and his teeth gleamed white as he smiled down at me, hungry and possessive.

“I’ll take her,” he told Cedric, his voice rumbling with lust. I fainted dead away.

And it gets kinkier from there. I came up with all kinds of magical clamps and BDSM toys for the Beast, and he used every one of them.

Tonight, April 3, at 9 p.m. Eastern, I will be doing another Launch Party for Wicked Games. I had originally planned to do it Tuesday, but I ended up holding it at the wrong Facebook page. (That's what happens when you break your leg and try to do promo while taking pain medication.)

So I'm holding ANOTHER party at the main AK page here  . I will be giving away five signed copies of WICKED GAMES and two $25 Amazon Gift Certificates. I hope you'll join me. Thanks!

Angela Knight