Dreaming of You excerpt by Ethan Day

In Dreaming of You by Ethan Day, restaurateur Aden Ingle has been in love with the perfect man since his fourteenth birthday. Unfortunately, his perfect boyfriend only exists in his dreams. But Aden’s always believed it was his destiny to meet his dream man, and he's perfectly content to wait around for him to walk into his real life.

When he meets Logan Price at a Hotel/Restaurant Trade Show, he finds himself drawn to this man who shakes him out of his dream world. Pretty soon, the flesh and blood reality is becoming more appealing than the fantasy. The only problem is Logan lives half way across the country in California.

Aden's going to have to choose whether to give up everything he’s built for himself professionally and uproot his whole life for Logan, or wait for the man from his dreams to become a reality.

Dreaming of You
Publisher: Loose ID (2009)
ISBN: 978-1-59632-922-5

Excerpt:

After we were showered and all shiny and clean, Logan told me he’d already made lunch plans for us. When I asked him where we were going, he told me it was a surprise. We ran by his hotel so he could change clothes, then climbed in yet another cab, and I listened to him give an address to the cabdriver. I resisted the urge to whine until he told me where we were going, and instead, settled into the seat with him. I smiled when he put his arm around me.

“I could really get used to this,” I said teasingly.

He chuckled and pulled me closer to him. “Me too.”

After a twenty-minute ride, the cab pulled up in front of a large three-story house with two-story giant columns. The yard was impeccably manicured, and there were black door-length shutters and French doors along the first and second stories, which opened up onto a two-story porch.

“Um…where are we, Logan?”

“My mother’s house,” he said matter-of-factly, as if telling someone the weather.

“I thought we were going to lunch?” I asked, trying to keep myself from panicking.

“We are, silly boy; we’re having lunch with my mother.”

“Yeah, hi… I’m thinking no!” I started squirming in my seat. “I can’t meet your
mother… I mean… Jesus, Logan, I had your dick in my mouth a few hours ago!”

“Okay.” His eyes widened as he tossed some money over the seat for the driver. “How about we get out of the car and talk?” He grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the cab. I felt the inevitability of what was happening to me sink in. Shutting the cab door, he looked at me and smiled. “Aden, it’s going to be fine. My mother doesn’t know you had my dick in your mouth last night.”

“Last night, try this morning.” I watched the cab drive off, leaving me no escape. “Jesus, I know it. She’ll be able to tell. Mothers know things like this.”

“Aden”—Logan grabbed my already sweaty palm and led me up the driveway—“if it makes you feel any better, she asked me to bring you to lunch yesterday when I was talking about you. That was before we had sex.”

“Okay, you have a point.” I was walking next to him and said, lowering my voice, “An idiotic one, but a point just the same. Why didn’t you tell me about this beforehand?”

“Because you would have said no,” he said with a slightly ornery laugh.

“Um…yeah!” Shit, I’d met parents before, but never on the second day. “Sure…we’ll just waltz in and you can say…‘Hey Mom, here’s the ho I fucked last night.’”

He stopped walking and started laughing. “That would be funny.” He turned and placed his hands on my shoulders. “It’s going to be fine…you’ll love her.” He leaned in and started to kiss me.

“Are you nuts!” I twisted away from him. “I’m not gonna mack on you on her porch!”
The most adorable smile spread over his face. “Damn, if you aren’t the cutest thing I think I’ve ever seen. Come on,” he added, grabbing my hand, “and stop fidgeting.”

Easy for you to say, I thought as he opened the front door, allowing me to go first.

Lamb to the slaughter! Lamb to the slaughter!


To purchase, click here
http://www.ethandayonline.com/
Blog: http://blog.ethandayonline.com/

Best Unspoken excerpt by Bryl R. Tyne

In Best Unspoken by Bryl R. Tyne,twenty-five year old social butterfly, Levi Finley couldn't be more mismatched for his middle-aged, introverted counterpart, biomedical tech, Rob Langston. What happens when two so utterly opposite men come together? Besides the hottest sex in Levi's young life? Throw in one opinionated mother, misunderstanding friends, and one hell of a birthday party at the wildest, gentleman's gentlemen club in town, and friction, a notch above wild, is bound to ensue. Will Levi allow doubts to destroy their relationship? Not if Rob has any say in the matter. But that might not be as easy as it sounds, considering Rob's preferred communication is always best unspoken.


Best Unspoken
Noble Romance Publishing (2009)
ISBN: 978-1-60592-034-4

Excerpt:

No matter how I struggled, Rob refused to release me. Without a word, he marched to the valet’s station, demanded his key, and located his car—all with me in tow. After unlocking the passenger door and yanking it open, he shoved me toward the seat. I’d never experienced an angry Rob. Despite wanting to inform him of the bruises he inflicted, or scream about the humiliation he’d brought upon me in front of my friends, for the first time in my life—I was speechless.

As we exited the lot, my insides warred. Hurt? Pissed? Maybe I was in shock. Every inch of my body felt numb. I stared out the window. Never had I seen him like this. I should’ve gotten out when he walked around the car. Why’d I just sit here?

I glanced his way. Jaw tight, his teeth ground a frightening rhythm as he focused on the highway. Had I provoked him to physical rage? “Rob, where—?”

His cool, hazel-green eyes had mutated into a fiery, burnt orange gaze that he cast in my direction. Any moron should’ve recognized the intent behind that glare. He didn’t have to add his thoughts, but he did. “Shut. Your. Mouth.”

I did. And kept it shut throughout the twenty-minute ride.

Under the eve of a shanty, ma and pa roadside motel, Rob slammed the shifter into park and exited the car. Why didn’t I run?

My door whipped open. Rob stood glowering.

“Here.” He slapped a room key into my palm as he hauled me from the car. “You’re a ball of energy tonight. Find the room on foot.”

I stared.

He pointed to the right of the lobby.

I followed the sidewalk in the direction he’d instructed. Maybe I should’ve listened to Mom? I could turn around, bolt for the lobby, call the police. It’d take Rob a good minute to get out of his car and chase me down. I stood before room twenty-five as he pulled the car into the space behind me. Still, plenty of time to make a break. In a daze, I unlocked the door and stepped into the room.

The slamming of the car door and the clunk of the room door registered as my mind reattached to reality. I recognized the dead bolt click. “Rob—”

Air left my lungs, and I dropped the room key to the carpet as he twisted me around and pressed me against the wall. Pinning my arms above my head, he covered my mouth with his.

Tracing the seam of my lips, his tongue enticed my mouth open. He teased just inside my upper lip, retreated, and closed his mouth over mine without entering. Christ, I love when he teases. He backed away, jagged amber outlining a now calmer green in his eyes. His salt and pepper sideburns accentuated high cheekbones, as his gaze followed his hand roaming down the front of my suit pants. He paused, palm over the pulse behind my fly, and his eyes met mine. “You want me to talk more do you?”

To purchase, click here
http://bryltyne.com/
http://nobleromance.com

LA Heat excerpt by P A Brown

L.A. Heat has been revised and reissued by MLR Press: Forbidden love, forbidden desire. Fast paced roller coaster ride through the dark underbelly of the city of Angels.

Additional excerpts can be read on the blogs dated July 24th and February 2nd, 2008.


LA Heat
MLR Press (April 9, 2009)
ISBN:978-1-934531-85-3(print)
ISBN:978-0-9817464-4-9(e-book)

Excerpt:

Downstairs he booted up his computer. By the time the coffee was ready and he poured himself a mug, he was logged in and online, ready to launch his queries. First he ran some simple searches on Bobby Starrz that brought back several links of film credits. Bobby had been a busy boy. The videos went back over three years, which meant Bobby had started when he was underage, since Chris doubted he’d been much over twenty-one. He printed off a couple of pages that listed the production company that had done most of the videos. StarFlight Productions. A quick Google search returned a hit for an office on Ventura Boulevard in North Hollywood. Even better, it gave him his first lead. A website. Bingo.

Opening StarFlight’s website landed him on a smarmy page featuring suggestive images without substance and a lengthy list of available titles. They even had a secure site for making online purchases. MasterCard, Visa, Amex or PayPal. Convenient. The videos could be ordered or downloaded as streaming video. Instant porno without leaving home.

StarFlight even sold a line of sex toys for the connoisseur. Dildos, specialty condoms, and the really fun stuff like butt plugs, cock extenders, bondage and S & M gear in every material from silk to leather.

All that merchandise meant a back-end database to store customer information and inventory. Was there also an employee database for the talent? The only way to find out was to gain access to it.

Chris dived into his laptop case and pulled out an unmarked CD binder. Leafing through it he found a page that had not CDs but USB flash drives. He slipped one into his USB port. A screen popped up and demanded a password before it opened. He used 1344 bit military strength disk encryption on the flash drive and only when he issued the pass phrase were the algorithms used to unlock the virtual drive he had created on the device. Until the algorithm ran, all the flash drive revealed were a number of folders containing music files. He played the Red Hot Chili Peppers latest while he launched his hidden files.

He knew if StarFlight paid big bucks to the right people their site would be nearly impregnable. But if, like most businesses, they were cheap with their IT dollars, this was going to be a snap. It took Chris all of ten minutes to determine that StarFlight didn’t invest in IT security. The site was wide open to his snooping.

He needed only one more thing. He wasn’t about to launch this attack from his own PC. If anyone at StarFlight realized they were being hacked he didn’t want them — or the cops — tracing it back to him. He had to find a vulnerable PC he could hijack.

He launched his port-snooping tools from the same CD and left to refresh his coffee while his software went out on the Internet in search of a computer that hadn’t been secured against hackers. He knew it wouldn’t take long. Home users were notorious for not securing their machines. No matter how often the media warned them, their blissful ignorance made them ideal targets for what he needed.

Back with his second coffee, he found his sniffers had discovered opened ports on several vulnerable machines and launched tiny, malformed packets that caused a buffer overflow. The vulnerable machines had no way to handle the overflow, so they allowed the packet in and Chris followed. He looked around his hijacked PC. All it had on it were a few cheesy games, chat software, and several dozen spyware gadgets installed by other unscrupulous netizens. The owner of this machine was a perfect dupe.

Chris launched a second set of tools, dug out of another virtual vault. These would set up the hijacked machine to run the processes he needed in the background, so even if the owner was working on his computer, he’d never know what was happening.

The hidden processes ran flawlessly, and within minutes he had a perfect little zombie machine doing his bidding. That was when he set to work hacking StarFlight’s back-end server.

The tools he used for that were a lot more sophisticated and he was sure the police would be very interested in knowing he had them. He had password-cracking tools and decrypters as well as a whole range of key loggers.

While the crackers and the decrypters ran against the database he refreshed his coffee one more time. Then it was back to check the progress of his hacking job. He was pleased to see that StarFlight most likely had chosen their operating system and their security model on the basis of office politics and management schmoozing, instead of good IT judgment — their system was the easiest one in the world to hack.

In another ten minutes his zombie machine registered success. He was in.

Within minutes Chris had a list of every movie Bobby had participated in — Chris refused to think of it as acting — and something even better. Bobby Starrz’s real name and his social security number.

Just like David had said: his name was Robert “Bobby” Allen Dvorak. Born in Topeka, Kansas, June ninth, twenty-one years ago. Quit high school at sixteen and, like so many before him, took off for granola land to become a star. And like so many before him, he was eaten up by the heartless, insatiable machine.

Best of all, a street address on Western Avenue in the still- ungentrified part of Hollywood. Maybe just ten minutes from Chris’s. He jotted down the full address just in case his memory failed him.

He knew he should call David. Dump what he had found in his lap. Only, how would he explain how he came by it? Admit to hacking StarFlight? Admit to having military grade encryption software? Homeland Security would love that. It wouldn’t help his credibility with the local cops, either.

Could he just give them the information without saying how he got it? No, David would think he’d known it all along.

http://www.pabrown.ca/
To purchase paperback, click here (Barnes & Noble) or here (Amazon)
To purchase eBook, click here (mobipocket) or here (Amazon Kindle)

The Paper Mirror excerpt by Dorien Grey

In this excerpt from The Paper Mirror, book #10 in the Dick Hardesty Mystery series by Dorien Grey, Dick and Jonathan are attending a party hosted by one of Jonathan's favorite writers, Evan Knight.


The Paper Mirror
GLB Publishers (September 12, 2005)
ISBN: 1879194570


Excerpt:

“So how did it go with Evan’s writing friends?” I asked.
“Great!” Jonathan said, his face brightening. “That tall one is Phillip Tanner―he writes the Grant Moss detective series. I’ve read them all. The other is Charles Beeman…he won a couple of awards for his last book…The Ghost of Years,it’s called. I was embarrassed that I haven’t read it, and told him I would pick up a copy as soon as I could. They were both very nice guys. I’ll try to introduce you later, if you’d like. I was really impressed.”
Again, though, I knew full well Evan Knight’s attentions to Jonathan were based on more than his being a nice guy. But I was happy for Jonathan’s opportunity to meet people he admired.
We went back out to the patio for another drink before, as Jonathan suggested, hitting the buffet table. Jake, Jared, and the guy Jake had been talking to in the pool were nowhere to be seen, and there seemed to be several more guys wandering around without their clothes. Evan was just walking away from the bar, his shirt unbuttoned to display a very nice set of pecs and a forest of chest hair.
Watch it, Hardesty, a mind voice cautioned. You don’t even like the guy.
Yeah, well, my crotch responded, paraphrasing an old standard gay joke, I didn’t come here to fuck personality.
“You about ready to come in the pool?” Evan asked as he passed.
“In a minute,” I said.
“Shall we?” Jonathan asked. I noticed that he’d given Knight’s impressive torso a rather lingering glance.
“If you want,” I said.
I saw that there were several chairs around the pool with clothes on them.
“Don’t you want something to eat first?” I asked.
“Not if we’re going swimming,” Jonathan replied. “It can wait.”
Very un-Jonahan, I thought, but we detoured to one of the few still empty chairs and began taking our clothes off. Odd, I’d done this a hundred times in the past without a second thought, but now that I was with Jonathan…
You don’t want other guys to see him naked, a mind voice observed casually.
Well, damn it, I realized it was right. I didn’t.
But you don’t mind them seeing you? the voice asked.
That’s different, I thought defensively.
Oh, yeah? Like how, for example?
Get over it, Hardesty, the voice said. You are Tarzan. Jonathan is Boy. He’s your possession. You don’t own him.
It was right again, of course.
We undressed and walked over to the edge of the pool, where seven or eight guys were splashing around, or doing underwater laps, or floating on their backs. Jonathan stuck one foot in. “Nice,” he said. “Come on!” and he dived in. I followed.
I must admit, it was a lot of fun. Jonathan insisted on ducking me every chance he got, and we got into a couple underwater scuffles. We weren’t even aware of the other guys around us until all of a sudden we came up for air, laughing, and Evan Knight was there right in front of us.
“Enjoying yourselves?” He asked. He was able to touch bottom, and was standing right in front of Jonathan. I saw him staring at Jonathan…and not at his face. “Ah,” he said with a big smile, “very nice! Just as I remember it.”

* * *

It was as if somebody had just kicked me in the gut…hard.
“What the…?” I heard myself say.
Jonathan looked quickly toward me, his face a study in mortification. “I…” he started to say.
“Oh, oh…sorry,” Knight said, his tone making it perfectly clear that he was no such thing. “No offense. But I knew knew you from somewhere. It wasn’t until after you’d left the other day that I remembered from where. We met at Hughie’s quite a while ago…you’ve changed so much I didn’t recognize you at first. You’ve really filled out nicely. Dick must be treating you right.” He reached out his hand under the water, and Jonathan stumbled quickly backwards.
He still looked stunned, and then I was afraid he might start to cry.
Knight looked at me, his face a mask of fake concern. “Hey, I’m really sorry if I opened any closet doors,” he said, his eyes shifting back to Jonathan. “I rather thought that might have been how you met Dick, too. No shame in being a hustler, especially if it pays off.”
I’m not sure quite what happened next. All I know is that there were little clouds of red in the water and Evan Knight was holding both hands to his face and a trickle of blood was running down one arm and dripping from his elbow into the water. I grabbed Jonathan by the arm and we waded to the steps at the end of the pool and got out of the water. There wasn’t a sound to be heard, except music coming from the house. I wasn’t aware of anyone or anything―just a bunch of statues standing around as if frozen in time.
I grabbed our clothes and we padded through the house, dripping water across the carpet, and walked out the door, stark naked.

* * *

And look for the June release of Aaron’s Wait, Book #2 of the Elliott Smith Mystery series, and for the July release of Roger/Dorien’s non-fiction Navy memoir, A World Ago.

http://www.angelfire.com/home/doriengrey/index.html
To purchase, click here
To purchase ebook, click here