WIPped Cream-- A taste of "Oath of Service" from LOVE BITES

Here's a sample of my work in progress, OATH OF SERVICE, from Love Bites. Keep in mind that this is a first draft, so it's likely to change. And please, this excerpt is NOT for those under 18, so get thou gone if you are. Otherwise, enjoy!

Here, Morgana le Fey has offered Percival, a vampire and Knight of the Round Table, her Oath of Service, and has donned a collar that blocks her considerable magical powers....






The distilled male menace of Percival’s gaze sent a wave of ice across her skin. “Now, witch, you and I are going to have a word.”

The ice turned to heat when he grabbed the hem of his knit shirt and dragged it off over his head. She sucked in a breath, then hoped he hadn't noticed.

"I get hot when I work." He tossed the shirt across the back of the couch without breaking the intent focus of his gaze. Morgana longed to look away, only to find herself frozen like a rabbit in a combination of fear and erotic anticipation.

He was...incredible. She'd seen Percival without a shirt before, but there was a world of difference between seeing him shirtless during laughing horseplay and...this. Knowing that he owned her now, that she'd taken an oath to obey him, fuck him, however he wanted. So she stared, and listened to her heart's frantic thump.

All that sculpted brawn, the swells and hollows of muscle groups clearly defined, the branching veins snaking down his biceps, his triceps. Body hair formed a silken golden cloud on his chest, narrowing into a fine line down his belly, pointed the way toward the massive bulge behind his fly.

Oh, goddess…

He took a step forward, and she bit back a scream as he swept her off the floor the way an angry man would pick up a bag of frozen peas. Whirling, he took three long paces and banged her back against the nearest wall.

Despite her best efforts to suppress it, a startled yelp escaped Morgana's lips as he pinned her there with the hot, hard weight of his body. "Now," he growled, "you and I are going to have a word, witch."

"You might want to remember I'll get my powers back." She winced the minute the words were out of her mouth. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Percival smiled. Someone who didn't know him well might have thought it a pleasant expression. Morgana, however, recognized the carefully throttled rage in the tight curve of his mouth. "But you don't have those powers now, do you?" He whispered the words in her ear, each syllable a warm puff against her sensitive flesh. "And I have all of mine." He cupped her breast through the thin lace gown she'd stupidly worn to tempt the three knights.

She licked her dry lips. "You won’t hurt me."

“Won’t I?”

“You don’t hurt women, Percival.”

"Lord Percival," he gritted.

"What?" She was too close to real terror to grasp his point.

"You will address me with respect. Lord Percival, Sir Percival, or my lord." He bared his fangs. "Not. Percival."

She swallowed, staring at those lupine teeth inches from her face. "Yes, Lord Percival."

"That's better." A tight smile of satisfaction lit his starkly handsome face. "Both arms over your head, and cross your forearms."

"Why do...?"

His eyes narrowed. She hastily obeyed. "Thank you." He caught her crossed arms in one hand, pinning them against the wall. She knew without trying that she'd be utterly unable to break his implacable grip.

Stepping back, he let her hang by her imprisoned arms as he gave her body the kind of long, insulting up-and-down scan no Magus had ever given her. Then he met her eyes again, silently daring her to protest.

She kept her mouth shut. Nobody had ever said Morgana le Fay was stupid.

That smile flashed again as he wrapped his free hand in her lace robe. Fisted it. And ripped, shredding the peignoir as easily as if he were tearing down a cobweb. She couldn't seem to bite back her gasp. Still holding her gaze, he hooked a finger in her corset and gave it a slow tug. The laces popped like cotton thread, leaving her clad in only a lace garter belt, stockings, and heels.

Again, he subjected her to another sweeping, insulting stare. "Nice. Very nice."

She licked her desperately dry lips. Why in the hell was she getting so wet? Nothing about this should be arousing.

Morgana opened her mouth for some bit of acid sarcasm that would hopefully make him let her go so she wouldn't feel so bloody vulnerable. Perhaps "I'm delighted you approve," or "You always did have a bard's way with a compliment," delivered in a suitably icy tone.

Before she could get either line out of her mouth, his eyes narrowed. She snapped her teeth closed so fast, she almost bit her tongue.

"I've always loved your tits, Morgana." The words may have been flirtatious, but the cold warning in his voice was anything but. "I'm going to like being able to do any damned thing I want to them."

For the sweet sake of the Lady, that was a threat, Morgana told her idiot cunt. It kept growing slicker anyway, responding to...something. His eyes, his dark velvet voice, the white points of the fangs that flashed when he spoke. His sheer, fucking size...Gods, he was dangling her by her arms, yet her feet were still well clear of the floor.

His nostrils flared, and one corner of his lip lifted in a carnal cross between a sneer and a smile. Reaching between her legs, Percival stroked a finger between her labia and deep into her sex. "Ohhh, yesssss. You are creamy, aren't you? And how can anybody who regularly fucks a forty-foot lizard be so bloody tight?"

"Obviously, I shape-shift," she gritted.

"That would help." He added a second finger, pumped deep again, and flicked his thumb over her clit. She jerked at the knife-sharp delight.

Percival grinned. "Liked that, did you? Too bad. I'm afraid you're being punished for today's tactical goat-fuck, so you won't be coming. I will, though. I intend to enjoy you thoroughly."

The fingers withdrew from her traitorous pussy and reached for her right breast. The knight's big, warm hand gave it a squeezing stroke before tugging and twisting its aching nipple. Milking her, he watched her face in erotic calculation.

Morgana dropped her eyes, unable to hold his gaze, not with him beaming raw dominance at her with the intensity of a laser. That proved to be a mistake; when she looked down, her gaze fell on the bulge behind his fly. Horned God, it was huge.

Percival laughed, a dark chuckle, and stepped against her again, pinning her once more. She groaned in relief as his body took the pressure off her pinioned arms.

Pressing his face against her throat, he inhaled as if dragging her scent deep into his lungs. "You smell delicious." His lips moved against her skin with every word, a warm, sensual tease. "My two favorite things: pussy and blood."

"Percival..." When he stiffened, she corrected herself. "My lord Percival..."

"Can you keep your mouth shut, or would you prefer a ball gag?" He scraped the tips of his fangs over her helplessly banging pulse. "I don't care to be interrupted while I'm eating."

Which triggered another humiliating gush of cream into her sex.

With a growl, he sank his fangs deep, the sudden hot sting startling a gasp from her throat. She'd known he was going to bite her, but somehow she hadn't expected it just now. Morgana bucked, jerking against his grip, but he had her pinned too thoroughly. She couldn't move at all.

His hand abandoned her breast to seek out her crotch, his forefinger skating between slick labia to slide into her opening. He made a sound against her throat at what he found there, a triumphant growl that deepened to a rumble as he pumped deep, in and out, keeping the pace slow--goddess, far too slow as he drank in hot swallows.

Letting her head fall back against the wall, she moaned in helpless lust. The moan became a gasp as he added a second finger, thumb strumming her clit like a lute string. His body rolled against hers, branding the feel of hot, hard strength against every inch of her smaller, softer one.

This was why she’d always preferred bottling her blood. Feeding a vampire directly from her throat was too damned seductive, too much an arousing act of submission that revealed her darkest needs.

But Percival didn’t give a damn what she preferred. He just took her, like prey, like a mortal woman he was using, fingering her cunt as he drank, shooting her toward her peak with his erotic brutality until she…

But just as her climax began to pulse, he jerked his hand away. The orgasm drained away, leaving her body aching with vibrating, helpless need. Morgana cried out in frustrated protest.

He chuckled against her throat.

An Erotic Excerpt from WICKED GAMES

The following excerpt is intended for readers over 18. If that's not you, please find something more suitable to read so neither of us will get in trouble with your mother. :)

This is a love scene from "The Once and Future Lover," the prequel of the Mageverse series. For those who aren't familiar with this 9-book series, in the Mageverse, the Knights of the Round Table are vampires, and their ladies are witches. This particular scene shows how King Arthur, as a brand-new vampire, woos his beautiful queen, Guinevere.  The problem is that Arthur's mind has been temporarily affected by his transformation, so that all he knows is his own lust for Gwen. 

Please note that there's a strong dominance and submission element to WICKED GAMES and its sequel, LOVE BITES, which features Morgana le Fay and Sir Percival. Both are much more kinky than my other Mageverse books; some of you will find them too erotic for your taste, so be warned.

 WICKED GAMES will be out April 1st, 2014.

Despite the lamp she held, the room was dark as a crypt after the torchlit balustrade. Gwen fumbled to attach the lamp to the chain that hung from the ceiling.

When she turned around, Mordred loomed over her like a wall of muscle. Gwen froze in stark terror, unable to breathe much less scream for help.

Until she realized his eyes were dark, not Mordred’s icy green.

Arthur, she realized, and felt her heart lurch back into rhythm. It’s Arthur! He didn’t look quite as young as his son, though he could easily have been an older brother. “Christ’s wounds, husband, you frightened me witless!”

He stepped against her, forcing her to retreat until her back hit the wall. Leaning down, he sucked in a deep huffing breath, as if scenting her.

“You’re scaring me.” Gwen struggled to regain control of her rising voice. “Give me a little room, please.”

He didn’t react, still breathing deeply bare inches from her throat. She planted both palms against his chest and shoved. “Step back, Arthur!”

He caught her wrists and lifted them over her head. Pinning her hands in one of his against the cool plaster, he leaned against her.

Gwen once had a horse she was grooming pin her by shifting his weight, trapping her between his shoulder and the stable wall. The animal hadn’t applied any real pressure, but she’d found she couldn’t move him no matter how she pushed and struggled. Point made, the gelding finally stepped aside and let her go.

Arthur’s hold felt exactly like that. Not tight enough to hurt, but completely inescapable. He watched her, his expression patient, while she strained against his warm, immoveable strength. “Arthur, dammit, let me . . .”

“My queen?” Lancelot called through the door. “Do you need help?”

Arthur tensed and lifted his head, glaring toward the door. His lips peeled off his teeth.

Two of them were fangs.

“My queen? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Lance! He’s not hurting me, he’s just irritating the hell out of me. It’s not the first time, and I assure you it won’t be the last. Quit listening at the door before you hear something that will embarrass you as much as it does us.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. “Excuse me, my queen. I was but concerned. You sound . . . breathless.”

“Breathless or not, I’m in no danger.” I hope. She had never been so intensely aware of her husband’s size and strength, especially compared to her own far more delicate body. Was he actually bigger than he had been the day before, if not in height, then in sheer muscular breadth?

He looked down at her, his black stare hungry as he bared those fangs again. “Mine.”

Gwen actually felt the word rumble from his chest to hers. “Yes, my king. Yours. Still. Always.”

His snarl became a smile, sensual and hot. Gwen knew that smile. That was Arthur. The tension in her knotted shoulders began to relax.

Arthur lowered his head slowly, still watching her with that lupine intensity. The hand not holding her wrists reached up to cup one breast through her thin linen tunic. Pleasure unspooled along her nerves as she stared up into her husband’s face, at the smile that looked both familiar and alien with the curve of his lips baring those white, white fangs. His cupping fingers curled to milk her nipple with exquisite delicacy, pinching and tugging with steadily increasing force. Delight grew with each stroke, given an extra wicked kick by the undercurrent of danger added by those fangs. She tried to squirm, but he didn’t budge even the fraction he would have before. Instead he smiled, obviously well aware of her tangled emotions.

Then Arthur pounced.

She was in his arms before she even felt him move. He spun and dropped onto the bed, pinning her beneath his hot, hard strength as she yelped in alarm.

“Betterrrr,” he growled, and smiled.

The dark satisfaction in his black eyes made her catch her breath. Her sex tightened in the kind of wet clench that usually followed a whole evening’s worth of skillful, determined foreplay.

Arthur knew it, too. He leaned down and wrapped one big hand in the front of her gown. He did it slowly, giving her plenty of time to realize what he intended—and plenty of time to realize there was nothing she could do to stop him, even if she’d wanted to. Which she definitely did not.

Even so, Gwen gasped when he shredded the gown with one easy tug. The sound of ripping linen sounded incredibly loud— and just as erotic. “That was one of my favorite tunics,” she told him. Which it was, though with such animal want pumping through her veins, she really didn’t care about the tunic.

His lips curled in another fang-revealing smile. “Wet.”

“Hard,” she retorted. The hot length of him pressed against her belly. He was also naked, since they’d put him to bed that way. Normally, that wouldn’t give her pause; Arthur slept nude on all but the coldest nights. Their running joke had always been that he had enough fur to keep him warm—and her too, for that matter. The man radiated heat like a human hearth.

So it had been a very long time since Gwen had felt this kind of aching awareness of her husband’s nudity. Yet now every last inch of him seemed branded on her quivering senses. Gwen found herself staring up at him in the lamp’s flickering golden light, wide-eyed as a virgin.

He stared back, levering off her to look her up and down. Under that wolfish gaze, her nipples drew hard as cheery stones. Lowering his head, he took one rigid peak into his mouth.

And moaned.

The sound was deep, ragged, distilled male eroticism given voice. She found herself echoing him as he swirled his tongue over the peak, back and forth, around and around. Strong fingers found her breast, stroking and squeezing, increasing her arousal until Gwen found herself pressing her thighs together in an attempt to alleviate the ache between them. She groaned, rolling her hips against his thick length as she fisted her hands in the gleaming raw silk of his hair.

Feeling out of control, Gwen shivered, overwhelmed by Arthur’s animal sensuality. So familiar, yet simultaneously so alien.

Suckling hard, he rumbled a rough, wordless sound that might have been warning or need. Or both. She gasped back at him, digging her nails into the thick muscle of his shoulders, feeling just as lost in incoherent hunger as he was.

Arthur transferred his mouth to the other breast, triggering another bright ping of delight. Wanting to give him the same kind of pleasure, Gwen reached between them. His cock felt huge, hot, insanely tempting as she curled shaking fingers around its meaty width. “In me, Arthur,” she whispered. “Now. Please.”

Instead he pulled out of her arms and backed down her body. Settling between her thighs, he nudged them apart as she whimpered in helpless longing.

He bent over her clitoris, his lips sealing the little nubbin inside his mouth’s piercingly sweet hold. His tongue swirled around it, wet and maddening, before he tightened his lips and sucked so hard, she twisted like a woman in agony. Her entire body shuddered, her thigh muscles jerking as her sex pulsed in need.

Ecstasy shot up her sensitized body. “Arthur!” Gwen’s spine arched as her hands flew to fist in his hair.

Staring down at him, she found him watching her face as his tongue swirled and lapped and stabbed between her slick folds. His dark eyes narrowed, and she tensed, knowing that look. Sure enough, a beat later she felt the tips of his fangs against the sensitive inner lips. Not biting. Quite. But the erotic threat of it shot heat and fear and stark arousal through her blood. Jolting like a mare under a knight’s spur, she ground her pussy against his mouth. Wanting. Burning.

---

My screwup

I'm posting this out of sheer mortification.

Yesterday's post about the Romance Novel Convention featured some nifty images I'd bought from the RNC website which were full resolution. Because Blogger includes a setting that says something like full size, medium, etc., I thought the images downsized;many sites  automatically reduce the resolution on high resolution images. (Web images are a standard 72 dpi, but print images are 300. This is a big difference, and the reason that if you try to print web images, they look like crap.)

But the images didn't downsize. Jimmy Thomas pointed out that I'd posted the full-resolution images so anyone could copy them and basically obtain them for free.

Now, this violates the hell out of Jimmy's copyright on the images. I just bought the right to use the images for my swag and covers, so as soon as he brought it to my attention, I took them down and put up low-resolution versions.

Please, please PLEASE, if you copied the high-res versions and plan to use them, go to the RNC website and pop for the one-time $15 per image fee to pay for the rights to use them. That's a heck of a lot cheaper than being sued, which you easily could be if you haven't paid for those rights.

What's more, you could get me sued too, only in my case it would be for being too damned stupid not to realize my mistake in violating the copyright on the images. I wouldn't blame Jimmy a bit if he did sue me; he'd have every right to. (He's a nice guy, but if the post had gone viral or something, I could have cost him a lot of money. Luckily that didn't happen, but still.)

You should also be aware that ANY image, piece of music, ebook, ANYTHING you get on the internet, even if it's a cat video, belongs to the original photographer, musician, writer, etc. If you use it without the creator's permission, he can sue the living hell out of you.

And a lot of companies and creators will not hesitate to do just that.

That means if you, say, decide you're going to do a music video using a Black Eyed Peas song and half-a-dozen Jimmy photographs, you need to obtain permission from the Black Eyed Peas AND Jimmy or the photographer who took those pictures before you can post the video online. Otherwise, you could find yourself in court losing your shirt.

This is not about creators being hardasses. People like Jimmy, the Black Eyed Peas, and me make our respective livings creating things for your entertainment. But just because you've bought a copy of one of my ebooks, say, or "Boom Boom Pow," that doesn't mean you then can give it away to everyone you know.

You may think, "Hey, I bought it! I can do what I want with it!" Well, yes and no.

Let's say you bought a paperback of MASTER OF DARKNESS. After you finished reading it, you took it to a used bookstore and traded it in. You have a perfect right to do that: it's your paperback book. My publisher already got its $6.99 for that copy, and I already got my 6 percent cut of that, so we're square. You can give that copy to the used bookstore or your sister or whoever. I don't care, because I've been paid.

However, you could not take the book apart, take the pages to a printer, and make a thousand copies of my book and sell them for $6.99, because that's stealing. You only paid for ONE copy of my book. Selling 1000 of them violates my copyright, because I don't get paid anything for those 1000 copies.

People think writers and other creators are filthy rich, but in fact, most of us get paid what amounts to minimum wage. It takes MONTHS to write a book, and it's damned hard work. Creators, like everyone else, have a right to be paid for their efforts.

Now, let's say you bought the e-book of MASTER OF DRAGONS, and you put it up on your website and started charging $6.99 for it. Again, you have violated my copyright, but the damage is potentially much greater.

In the first example, you've only taken $6,990.00 from my publisher and me, but in the second example, there is no theoretical limit to what you can cost me, because you can sell that one copy over and over and OVER again, because it will never wear out.

Even if you give the file away for free, you're still costing me a huge amount of money, because every copy you give away is a copy I can't sell.

Jimmy's in the same boat I'm in. By putting the high res pics up on my blog, I could have cost him sales, even if my actual intention was to make more people aware of his website and help him sell more pics. That's why I'm so embarrassed and unhappy about my mistake.


So make sure you pay for the rights to any use you make of a creator's work. Just as you expect to be paid for your work, we should be paid for ours.

Thanks for your understanding!

Angela Knight