Undone for New Year!

Happy New Year! Have you made any resolutions? I have to admit I’m not good with keeping my resolutions, so for the last few years, I’ve just stopped making them. Instead I try to make things a habit. I’ve always been a daily walker, but last week, hubby and I have started walking together. We wear our pedometers, and we’re trying to do 20,000 steps daily. That equates to 10 miles. So far we’re doing great! We hope to be healthy and ready for a lot of walking when we go on vacation to Daytona in a couple of months. I’d love to hear about your resolutions, or just things that you want to turn into good habits.

Today marks the release of my Berkley e-special, Undone. This is a fun little story that I wrote for the Unlaced anthology which came out in 2008. The anthology won a Capa Award and the novella itself won the National Readers Choice Award for best novella. I’m so happy that Berkley is putting it out on its own in e-book format. I love this particular story because it’s a May-December romance and my hero Dirk is such a hottie. I hope you’ll think so, too! Here’s a blurb and excerpt for you to enjoy.

 

Margo Faraday is a mortgage broker who’s been off her game ever since her last breakup. She needs help losing her inhibitions and exploring her sensual freedom. So when she sees an ad looking for models to pose for erotic pictures, she knows she’s found the solution. But opening herself up to an amateur photographer who has no limits—and an uncensored appreciation for the female body—will undoubtedly lead to something naughtier than her wildest fantasies…

 

Undone

By Jasmine Haynes

Previously published as part of the Unlaced Anthology

 

Amateur Photographer Looking for the Perfect Model.

 

Ever thought about posing for erotic pictures?  We can start out with you clothed, then various stages of undress until total nudity.  Pose as erotically as you’re comfortable with, perhaps even touch yourself, use a toy or two.  Let your inhibitions go, I want you completely undone for the camera.  The disposition of the pictures is up to you; if you don’t want me to keep any, I won’t.  I’m not looking for a professional model, I want a real woman.  I know you’re out there.

 

The A-frame house nestled among the pine, oak, and redwoods was ablaze with icicle Christmas lights.

 

Of course, once she’d gotten home that night after dinner with her best friend Lorie, Margo had vacillated.  In the end, though, it was the echo of Richard’s accusations that had her finally answering Dirk’s on-line ad for an erotic model.  Her ex-lover Richard claimed she was unwilling to take a chance and worried excessively about what everyone else thought, especially her mother, and her mother’s friends.  That drove him crazy.  It was ultimately why he left.  So now, even if it was just once, she wanted to do something wild and crazy, kinky and hot.  She wanted to prove to herself that Richard was wrong.  She could get down and dirty, and have fun while she was doing it.

 

Parking her sedan by the stand-alone garage, Margo shut off the engine, and the silence of the forest settled in around her.  The house was isolated.  She’d passed several driveways coming up the long, winding road, but the homes were set too far back to see more than a porch lamp beaming through the trees.

 

The boy next door, Lorie called him.  The Christmas lights twinkling along the roofline attested to it.  And Lorie had vouched for him, not to reiterate the fact that Lorie’s brother had known him since college.  Dirk Araman.  The name appealed to Margo in a warrior kind of way.  If someone accosted a woman in the street, a guy named Dirk would run the mugger down.

 

Over the week since she’d e-mailed about his ad, they’d exchanged several e-mails.  He was articulate, funny, and well, sweet.  She felt like she knew him.  Mentioning how she came to see the ad at Lorie’s, she’d asked him to keep it quiet.  She hadn’t actually told Lorie she planned on modeling for Dirk, and explaining herself to best friend now was out of the question.  All right, the secrecy was shades of excessive worrying, but honestly, even Richard would agree she didn’t have to broadcast her intent.  Dirk agreed to keep it to himself.  She also made it abundantly clear that the pictures would be for her use only.  Not for this contest of his, not even for him to keep.

 

She’d told she was forty-five, and though he was twelve years younger, it hadn’t fazed him.  All he wanted was to take her picture while she...  The photos were hers after they’d looked through them together and he’d made all his notes.  He explained about the photography competition, that if he won, he stood to get national attention for his work.  His goal for their session was to work on posing, lighting, and a host of technical jargon that had passed right over her head.  He’d also asked her measurements for some special lingerie he wanted to photograph her in.  The competition was for nude portraits only, but he was honest enough to admit he’d added the erotic part for the titillation factor.  Well, hell, she was in it for the titillation, too.

 

That made them equal perverts.

 

Could she get naked for a stranger?  She took care of herself.  Her breasts were small, but they didn’t sag.  She didn’t consider herself a bad-looking woman.  But it was one thing to say you’d do it, another to actually do it.  And touching herself for him?  A hot shiver raced through her.  Yes, she was nervous, but she wanted it.  The idea was kinky, decadent.  She’d just wasted one precious year ignoring her needs after Richard left, and she wasn’t about to lose another year.

 

Margo threw open the car door and stepped out.  The chilly December night bit through her coat.  Opening the rear door, she stuffed her small purse, phone, and keys in her gym bag, which was packed with makeup (camera lights could be harsh), lingerie (despite his having something special for her to wear), a bottle of wine (she liked the sweet stuff), and her vibrator.  She didn’t know if she could use it for him, yet the fantasy had haunted her.  Her toy had seen extra duty every night this week.

 

The three-story A-frame loomed above her.  A balcony ran the length of the second floor, and the third was obviously a loft.  The scent of wood smoke tinged the air.  Stepping up on the porch, she detected the soft sound of a woman’s musical voice drifting through the panes of opaque glass in the door.

 

This was it, her last chance to rethink.  She might have except for the distant echo of Richard’s voice alleging that, just like her mother, she’d grow old in her pristine, picture-perfect life, and find out she hadn’t done a damn thing with it.  No risks, true, but no rewards either.

 

Margo pressed the bell.

 

A giant answered her ring.  Oh.  My.  God.  Though she was five-six, with four extra high-heeled inches, the man at the door towered over her like the Incredible Hulk.  He had to be at least six-foot-five.  His thighs in black jeans were the size of tree trunks, his chest beneath a red-and-black flannel shirt rippled with muscles, and his hands would span her waist, room leftover.  With a face made up of blunt angles, square jaw, sharp cheekbones, and a slightly crooked nose that had been broken at least once, he looked like the warrior his name implied.

 

Margo clutched her bag to her chest, and her heart pumped fast and hard.  What had she gotten herself into?

 

“I’m glad you didn’t change your mind, Margo.”

 

His voice was liquid smoke easing over her nerve endings.  The stuff of wet dreams, it trickled down her spine, settling between her legs.  She’d always been around average men, and Dirk was anything but average.  Truth to tell, there was something bone-melting about his sheer body mass, all muscle and no fat.

 

He watched her watching him, his eyes an extraordinary shade of blue totally unexpected beneath that short cap of thick, dark sable hair.  “Maybe I should have sent you a picture before you agreed to meet me,” he said.

 

Then he smiled, and Margo’s libido went into overdrive as a single boyish dimple appeared at the left corner of his mouth.  It transformed his face from Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein to...well, Margo didn’t know exactly.  Except that the combination of his smile and size made her panties damp.

 

“You can back out right now, if you want.”  He held the door wide, standing slightly to the side so she could enter. If she wanted.  Yet he didn’t touch her with anything but that smile.

 

Right.  That’s exactly what Richard would expect her to do.  Turn tail and run.  You’re so afraid someone might actually find out you’ve got a dirty mind.  Newsflash, Margo, most people have dirty minds.  You’re nothing special.

 

She realized she’d been staring rudely.  “I’m sorry.  You’re just so...”

 

“Big,” he supplied.  “You’d never believe my mother is only five-foot-one and a hundred and five pounds.”

 

Margo gaped.  “No way.”

 

He nodded, a hank of brown hair falling across his forehead.

 

“What about your dad?”

 

“Five-eight and the proverbial ninety-pound weakling.  He always claimed I belonged to the milkman.”  The dimple appeared again, his blue eyes twinkling like Christmas tree lights, and Margo imagined everyone laughing over the family legend.

 

The night air was creeping beneath her long wool skirt, and all his central heat was whooshing through the wide open door.  She couldn’t take forever to make up her mind.  She’d wanted the titillation of doing something out there and kinky.  She wanted the erotic photos.  She needed to feel alive again, needed a connection.  But whereas before she’d fantasized of stripping down for a total stranger, now she realized she wanted to do it for this man.

 

Dirk Araman held out his hand.  And Margo took it...

 

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt. You can find Undone on Kindle Nook Kobo iBookstore All Romance  

 

I want to remind you that Revenge Sex, West Coast Book 1 is free for the holidays! Here’s all the places you can find it free right now: Amazon Kobo Smashwords All Romance and iBookstore. So go out and download, download, download, and feel free to tell all your friends!