One Week To Go!
In honor of my upcoming release, I’m going to post a brief new excerpt from This Is Not the End. A steamy one, this time. Ooh, la la.
Excerpt from This Is Not the End by Sidney Bell, copyright 2020:
He doesn’t touch her until she touches him, and then he mirrors what she does—she cups his face and so he returns the favor; she puts her hands on his hips, and he does likewise. She wants to be held, so she puts her arms around him, digging her fingers into the muscle of his shoulders. He squeezes back, more gently, careful, careful.
He told her once that he wasn’t good at being intimate with people, that he wasn’t the type of man most people wanted when they thought of fucking a rock star.
Most people are stupid. Cal’s cautious and respectful, but not unskilled. In fact, he’s a pretty damn good kisser. She likes Zac’s sloppy enthusiasm, the way he’s so damn pushy because it makes her feel desirable and wanted, but Cal’s smooth as satin. He coaxes instead of pushing, seduces instead of demanding. He kisses the way he waltzes, with grace and control and intense awareness of what she needs.
It’s so good. She likes it so much more than she expected to. Enough that she wants more, wants more of everything. She gets closer, rocks against him, lifts a knee to wrap her foot around his calf, trusting him to balance her, and holy shit, he does one better, lifting her with one arm around her waist and turning and walking her backwards a couple steps until they hit the wall. Gently, of course, he’s always so gentle, but she’s still gasping at the sheer strength it’d taken to do that, as if she weighed nothing at all. He hadn’t even broken the kiss to do it, and that’s before she realizes that he’d also been considerate enough to aim for the wall so she wouldn’t get a doorknob in the back.
What a smooth fucking devil he is.
Now he’s pressing her against the wall, letting his body rest against hers almost politely, if there can be such a thing, and he’s so solid and warm around her that she’s—she’s done waiting, she’s done—
“Fuck, take this off,” she demands, wrenching at his shirt.
He lifts his head. He seems confused for a brief second, like he’s lost all sense of time and place. “Really? I—okay.” He pulls back, stripping out of the T-shirt, and then there’s just muscle and bare skin and a light spattering of hair across his chest that leads down into a thickening line that disappears beneath the waistband of his jeans. He’s strong and masculine and his shoulders are ridiculous and she wants to bite him.
So she does, right on the thick wedge of muscle that joins his shoulder and his throat, and he jolts against her, burying his face in her hair.
“Oh,” he says, low and shocked and breathy, and she grins against his skin, licking at him, viciously pleased at how easy he is. He’s going to give it up so sweet, he’s going to let her do anything, and she wants to take him apart, make him blind and desperate until he’s begging.
Obviously, what with it being fiction and all, things don’t stay hot and awesome for very long. Stuff has to go wrong, you know? People are gonna people. They’ll struggle and screw up and do self-destructive, inefficient things because they need to change to be successful and change is hard. So in that way, This Is Not the End is pretty much on-brand for me from start to finish, even if it’s my first poly romance and my first non-romantic suspense. There are some things I just can’t get away from as a writer, and foremost among them seems to be characters who are hot messes but try really hard.
Eh, that’s all the thoughts I have right now. My brain is still recovering from Christmas. I only showed up to throw sex scenes at you, so now I’m gonna go.
