My kittens-bringer of all things comforting

There are so many things I would miss if I were no longer here—my children, my granddaughter, my friends. At my age and stage in life I have accumulated so many things that are special and important to me that to pick just one was very difficult. But…I’d have to say my kittens.

My three adorable four-footed children came to live with us in 2004, just after Nefertiti, our wonderful cat, had passed away at the age of 17. Our house was so empty. All our children are out in the adult world and without Kitty the rooms seemed so empty. We finally decided we needed another little bundle of fur but somehow between home and the animal rescue shelter we ended up with three instead of one—Grace (the alpha cat), Bast (who challenges Nefertiti) and Blanca who has her own very unique personality.

From the first night in our house they slept on the bed with us, curled in a ball, bringing to us unqualified love and acceptance. It’s true cats rule but they also love unconditionally and so it was with these three.

Nearly four years ago my husband became ill and was bedridden for the last six months of his life. Bast, our tiny black kitten, sent nearly every day curled up on the pillow next to him, guarding his spirit and infusing him with love. When he passed away she began sleeping on his pillow.

And in the time since then my cats have filled a big void in my house, my life, and my heart. During the day they have their individual habits but Bast usually spends her time with me at my computer. She sits on my desk, lying on one of my t-shirts, or on my lap (making it difficult to type!) and sometimes even draped over my arms. 

When I sit in my big arm chair to watch television I have a cat in my lap and one draped over each arm of the chair.

And at night when I get into bed, they are right there with me, all three, cuddled against me, purring and assuring me that I am not alone as long as they are with me. Some nights that’s all that gets me through the dark hours.

So while I’d miss many, many things, my cats have to top the list. They live in my heart as I do in theirs.

Be sure to visit me online and tell me all about things you'd miss or your favorite pet stories.

@desireeholt

www.facebook.com/desireeholtauthor

It is what it is

Check out the contest at the end.

We’ve been talking about Happy Ever After, Happy For Now and maybe not even Happy At All (my personal NoNo.) Call me a sap, but when I read or write a book, I’m only truly satisfied if the ending is “happy,” whatever that turns out to be. I’ve read books that left me hanging and hated the author. I’ve read books that depressed me with the ending and hated the author even more. I love a good cry at the end of a book but only if the tears are happy ones.

So call me a sap. It’s who and what I am.

Somehow in the past year the great “out there” has decided that erotic romance doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ending, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. What can be happier than truly wonderful sex? If the author develops the characters well and invests the reader in them, if the emotion comes across as real, then the sex—detailed and graphic—is just a natural progression of that.

I like to create characters who have challenges to relationships, who have boundaries that are difficult to cross. I want the reader to cheer them on and celebrate with them when they achieve their “Happy Ever After.” A really good example of this is Grace Delaney. The heroine of Rodeo Heat. Do you remember Rodeo Heat? It’s the book I read a passage from to Bill Geist on CBS Sunday Morning. I think I made his eyeballs roll back in his head.

Grace was widowed young with two small children and lived a very contained, restricted life. She’s an excellent accountant but tries to keep the pieces of her life in ruled columns just like numbers in an account. Enter Ben Lowell, ten years young, decades more experienced, and nearly at the end of his rodeo career. When you meet them you think there can’t possibly be any way for them to get together. He’s too jaded and she’s too inexperienced and afraid.

But something not only clicks between them it snaps and sizzles. In small stages Ben takes Grace on a journey of sexual awakening that had me crying while I wrote it. And by the time you get to the final chapter, won’t you be upset if Grace and Ben, after having fulfilling erotic sex, don’t end up together?

Here’s a taste for you:

He moved his mouth over her body as if drawing a map with it, tasting every nook and crevice, seeking her pleasure spots and dwelling a long time on them. His open-mouthed kisses on her heated skin sent shafts of electricity through her, igniting nerves already snapping and firing.

His cock pressed against the soft skin of her inner thigh and her hands suddenly itched to touch it and hold it. Pulling Ben’s head up from its drifting path down to her pussy, she smiled at him. “Stop.”

His eyebrows raised. “Stop? Am I doing something wrong? Something you don’t like? Just tell me—”

“No. You’re doing everything just right. But I want to play too.” She pushed at his shoulders.

“And just what is it you want to do?” he asked, his eyes bright with curiosity as he rolled onto his back.

“This.”

Wondering where this spurt of boldness had come from, she shifted onto her knees next to him, her gaze riveted to his erection which pointed directly at her. Tentatively she reached out a finger to touch the bead of fluid sitting like a viscous marble atop the slit. Rubbing it back and forth along the velvet surface, she watched the thick stalk bob under her touch and saw Ben’s thigh muscles tighten.

She hadn’t done this since Joe’s death. The few men she’d had sex with hadn’t appealed to her this way at all. Sometimes she wondered if they really appealed to her in any way. Worried that maybe she just wasn’t a sexual person.

No. Wait. Then she wouldn’t be where she was doing what she was. Right?

Inquisitively, she bent her head and licked the surface of the purple head with the tip of her tongue, swiping it back and forth two or three times, loving the slightly salty taste of the fluid and the sensation of the soft skin against her tongue. Her fingers barely wrapped around the thick length of him but she felt the steel beneath the supple covering. She unclasped him and ran one finger the length of the heavy vein, feeling the blood pulsing through it.

“Am I doing this right?” she asked, her voice tremulous, unable to look at him as she waited for his answer.

“Are you kidding?” Ben asked in a strangled voice, one large hand coming up to squeeze her buttocks. “I think you’re trying to torture me.”

Grace’s laugh held just a hint of uncertainty. “Just finding out what you feel like. How you feel.”

His hand moved in slow strokes on the cheek of her ass. “Surely this isn’t the first one you’ve ever seen or felt,” he joked.

“Believe it or not, the first in bright light. At least for longer than I want to remember.”

Because the others didn’t bear looking at. Except for Ben.

Contest:

To celebrate the rerunning of my segment on CBS, I am giving away a $50 GC for either Amazon or B&N. Here’s all you do. Post a review of the book, send me the link at desireeholt@desireeholt.com and you’ll be entered in the drawing.

Ready? Set? Go!

Take me away – to the Snowy Mountains

By Desiree Holt

People dream about places they want to go, places they want to see. Things they’d like to do. Experiences they want to have. For my books I have daydreamed and researched myself into the jungles of Peru and Mexico, Caribbean islands, the countries of Europe and the Middle East. I have imagined myself in the strong arms of my heroes being rescued…or as in the case of Jungle Inferno, doing the rescuing.

Hold on, Mark. We’re here. We’re here.

As the man in grey slacks approached the helicopter at a dead run, Faith heard the whistling sound of what she later learned was a rocket propelled grenade and the ’copter exploded in a bright fireball. The man in grey fell back, pushed to the ground by the force of the explosion.

“Oh my God,” Faith screamed, forgetting the order for silence in the shock of the explosion.

“La senora!”

She heard the voice from below her and looked down to see a man raising his rifle toward her. She reacted automatically, barely taking time to think, all those hours on the range paying off. Before the man could fire she aimed the Glock at him and emptied the clip into him. He fell back, his face and chest covered in blood, his finger tightening on the trigger one last time in death, the rifle spraying bullets into the air.

Her heart was racing so fast she was sure it would explode any minute.

Think of him as a paper target. Don’t think of him as a person.

But she suddenly remembered her promise—I’ll get you out even if I have to kill someone. She hadn’t expected it to come to that but she realized with a shock that she’d do it again if need be.

But as much as I like the soothing blanket of heat and the lure of exotic places, I have always wanted to see the Snow Mountains in Australia. Why, you might ask? Because years ago I saw a movie, The Man From Snowy River, and I fell in love.

With the story, the scenery, the people. I wanted to ride a horse down the mountainside the way Tom Burleson did, cracking that long whip of his. I wanted to campy in the snow of the mountains, boiling the pure crystals for water and watching the sun cast its blinding light on it.

When I wrote about Reece Halliday in Crack the Whip, it was Tom Burleson I saw, naked in the snow on the mountains, the very essence of masculinity.

Crack!

The sound echoed in the room. India jerked even though he hadn’t touched her yet, simply cracked the whip in the air. But the sound was arousing to her. And to him.

Crack!

This time he applied it to her flesh and the tail left a satisfyingly red stripe on India’s ass. One of those delicious little sounds he loved rolled from her throat, diffused by the fake cock in her mouth.

And as I wrote this scene I could just imagine my naked hero, standing in the snow rather than in a heated room, naked beneath the sun. The fabled horses of the mountains thundering around him.

I play the theme from the movie very often when I’m writing because that image inspires me.  Check it out on iTunes. I bet it will inspire you.

Sticking your toe (or anything else) in the BDSM waters

This week Oh, Get a Grip! welcomes Desiree Holt to share her thoughts on Writing BDSM:

I have to say that for most of my years, my sex life could be classified as vanilla with a hefty dose of cinnamon—all the things on the vanilla to do list but with a heavy dose of spice. Even when I married Hubby Number Two, my very own cowboy hunk who is the model for alpha males, we added some hot pepper—okay, a lot of hot pepper—but I wasn’t writing erotic romance then. Play, I wasn’t writing anything then!. So those parts of our relationships that fit into BDSM were—just parts of our relationship.

Then, a few years ago, I read my first book by a BDSM author and I thought, OMG! Where have I been all my life? Not only was it a beautiful story about a relationship, it depicted the BDSM lifestyle in such a manner that I became a shopaholic—I combed epublishers for BDSM books.

Okay, okay, call me obsessed. And no, he doesn’t cuff me and spank me naked on the front porch, or decide to put on nipple rings in the middle of the grocery store. And we’ve had to find a balance in our relationship because we are both very, very strong personalities, and submission does not come naturally to me.

But as I began writing BDSM, like everything else I write I wanted to do my research so I would not depict the lifestyle in a manner insulting to those who live it. There are many, many really good sites on the Internet that give you a lot of information about the lifestyle, and really explain the emotional side of it.

Then I took a leap of faith, joined a chat room (using a screen name) and explained who and what I was. I got very lucky. Two people have become my online friends, willingly answering questions for me as long as they have a guarantee of anonymity and respect.

I’ve learned a lot about them—and about myself. I learned that the D/s relationship is all about sharing and caring. That the Dom provides and tremendous sense of emotional security for his sub, and at the same time the sub is as much in control because her submission is the source of his pleasure. I learned how to establish a give and take when there are strong personalities to establish a balance.

And I learned that whether you are totally into the BDSM lifestyle or just enjoy parts of it, those parts can enhance your life beyond anything you can imagine.

I began to reach a point where BDSM is a part of the relationship in ninety percent of the books I write. The extent to which it plays a part really depends on my, characters, but it’s always there. And the more I write about it, the more I understand my own feelings, and realize that in every Dom there is a hint of a submissive, and in every sub there is a hint of the Dom.

It’s one of those things where I want to tell people, who ask me how I can write about it—don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Any portion of it.

So if you want to try one new thing today, or this week, or this month. Pick up a book by an author who writes about The Life and you’ll discover you’re really in for a treat.

Go on. Stick your toe-or any other part of your body-in the BDSM waters and see what happens.

Come visit me at http://www.desireeholt.com/ www.bookswelove.net/holt.html www.myspace.com/judithdesiree

I love to hear from people.

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Letting Go

by Desiree Holt.

Blurb:

For Kari Loftin life was all about control, in every aspect of it. But she realized that at forty two she had managed to shut out every form of pleasure b y keeping a tight rein on herself. With her beloved Cubs on a winning streak, she tossed away her control for one night and ventured into the world of Petey’s Sports Bar. Little did she expect to meet a hot young stud like Riley Tucker, who showed her a side of herself she’d never dared to explore. One night together and Riley wanted more. Much more. Could Kari get past the age difference—something that didn’t seem to bother Riley at all?

Excerpt:

He settled his hands, big and warm, on her shoulders, the heat from them burning through her t-shirt. While she watched with wide eyes he bent his head and licked her lips. Just a very, very light sweep of the tip of his tongue but she felt it all the way through her breasts to her womb. Heat crept over her skin and the beat of her heart tripped over itself.

“Mmm, good.” He licked his own lips, then slid his hands up to cup her face. “I knew you’d taste delicious.”

His mouth came down on hers again, his lips like rough velvet. She was sure he’d be the kind to attack voraciously but instead he seduced her mouth. He nibbled at each lip, his teeth teasing around the shape of her mouth, his tongue touching each tiny bite. He rubbed his lips against hers, then drew in her bottom lip and sucked on it gently.

Her bones felt like wax and more liquid soaked her panties. She felt as if she was suspended in space, attached only to his wonderful mouth.

When his tongue pressed against the seam of her closed mouth she opened with a sigh and thought how good he tasted. It swept inside, pleasantly shocking her as it stirred the nerves on every inner surface. Not an inch was left untouched—the roof of her mouth, the insides of her teeth and her cheeks, the pebbled surface of her own tongue. Tentatively she stretched it out to touch his and in seconds they were tangled together.

He kissed even better than he looked. She couldn’t breathe. Every bit of air was trapped in her throat. She lifted her hands and wrapped her fingers around his wrists, not to pull him away but to hold him in place. Her brain felt fuzzy, her body weightless and she wanted this kiss to go on forever.

Then a switch snapped on in her head and she tore her mouth away from his. Inbred insecurity reared its head and skittered along her spine.

“Wait,” she gasped. “Wait, wait, wait.”

He lifted his head and took a step back. “For what? What’s wrong, Kari”

“I have to tell you something. Please.”

He frowned at her. “Like what? You’re married?” He lifted her left hand, the ring finger glaringly bare. “No ring, unless you’re one of those liberated women who doesn’t think they’re necessary.”

“No, no.” She yanked her hand back. “It’s not that.”

“So what else could it be? You’re really a man who loves cross-dressing? Hell, I think it would be very hard to fake luscious breasts like those.” He skimmed the palm of one hand over her. “Yup. Real and made for touching.”

She took a step backward, wet her lips and let out a breath. “I’m forty-two.”

Riley stared at her, confused. “And?”

Why is he being so stupid? And why did I come upstairs with a man eleven years younger than me?

“I’m forty-two years old,” she practically shouted. Get it out now and get it over with.

“And that’s a problem how? I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”

She clenched her fists in frustration. Why wouldn’t he understand. “How old are you, Riley? Thirty? Thirty-one?”

He shocked her by bursting out laughing. “Jesus, Kari. For a minute you had me scared there. I thought there was a real problem.”