The BDSM romance novel — the one about the chiropractor named Lauri who needed to let go and couldn’t figure out how, until a dominant man showed her that what she needed was care and attention (and spankings) — is done. It’s about 80,000 words right now, although it does still need a little work.

Here’s a spicy scene to whet your appetite:

Like tonight. They’d had dinner, and done the dishes, and she’d been a little keyed up all evening, a restlessness she’d long since learned to read — needing to set down a week’s worth of carrying everything. And Benjamin read it too, because he read everything, and at some point in the comfortable evening he simply looked at her over his book, with a quiet command she’d organized her entire life around, easy and certain. “Come here. Over my lap.”

No negotiation. Not the rigmarole of a whole scene; they didn’t need it for this. This was just the current surfacing, a casual reassertion of the thing that ran under everything, and the lightness of it was exactly the point. She didn’t undress carefully, didn’t need ritual barriers; she just shed what she was wearing, easy and unbothered, naked and comfortable in her own skin in her own living room, and draped herself over his lap the way she’d done dozens of times now, and felt the whole keyed-up [echo] week begin to drain out of her before his hand even landed.

It did land, though: his bare palm, warm and certain, an unhurried rhythm across her backside. It wasn’t a scene’s careful escalation; it was a casual, loving, grounding spanking, the kind that didn’t need a destination because the point wasn’t the destination. The point was him taking the wheel when she was too tired to keep steering, reminding her body in the plainest language they had that she could stop, that he had her, that for these few minutes she was his and didn’t have to be in charge of a single thing. The heat bloomed and spread, easy and familiar, and she melted over his lap with a long sound of pure relief, thriving on it — genuinely thriving, the way a parched thing thrives on water — because this casual reinforcement, this no-occasion exertion of his quiet dominance over her, was a kind of nourishment she’d stopped trying to pretend she didn’t need. It reminded her that the structure was always there, that she could let go at any time and be caught.

She was well and truly caught now, and on the road to being well and truly spanked; even these casual spankings went on for quite a while, until her backside was warm and throbbing. By the time he stopped and ran his warm hand over the heat he’d raised, she was loose and glowing and thoroughly awake to him. The spanking had done exactly what they’d both known it would do: whetted her, lit her, burned off the week and left the wanting.

And she wanted him. Very much.

“Take me upstairs,” she whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. “Please.”

It was a foregone conclusion now that she would lie down on the bed, her legs hanging off the end; he would kneel in front of her, tasting her, hands on her soft inner thighs as he brought her slowly and carefully and almost painfully to that first orgasm. There was no need to ask, no questioning; she submitted to him — she could think the word now without wincing, without blushing — and allowed herself to ride wave after wave of pleasure, until she was boneless, until she could barely move.

Not that she had to. Benjamin moved her, arranged her, and — still taking the care that was the protection, something she filed away to discuss again later — sank into her, filling her. Her legs rested on him, her ankles on his shoulders, the weight of his body reinforcing the ache left over from the spanking each time he thrust into her. She let him have her, all of her, with the total trust of someone who no longer kept a single thing back. There was nothing performed, nothing negotiated, nothing held in reserve. It was just the two of them, in their own bed, the dominance and the tenderness the same thing in his hands. She thrived on every second of it the way she thrived on all of it now.

She came apart one more time, gripping the comforter in both hands, pushing her hips up to meet his, and she felt his orgasm answer hers. He was never loud; she’d observed that early on. They weren’t loud, his orgasms, but they were intense and powerful, and she adored them almost — almost — as much as she adored what he did to her.

It’s not as explicit as my erotica usually is — because, clearly, it’s not erotica — but I like to think it’ll still get the job done.

I predict this book will be released within 18 months. I still need to publish the Lizzie book and the GWWA book, and both of those need some edits (the Lizzie book is closer to being done, although I think I might need to rewrite a big chunk of the first chapter and change the timelines throughout). I want to have at least one more book come out this year. I also have these stories to work on.

Lots of stuff to do.