Authors: Eden Bradley
Breaking Skye (12 page)
Adam had been right in their very first conversation. She’d had to give up control, to let it all go: her history with her father, her fear of intimacy that experience had created. She could see it all so clearly now, in the light of love. She’d had to give up control to allow herself to let someone in. Finally, she’d found the way. With him.
ABOUT EDEN BRADLEY
Best-selling and award-winning author Eden Bradley, who also writes as Eve Berlin, has published a number of novels and novellas, both print and e-books, with Bantam, Berkley Heat, Harlequin Spice & HQN, Samhain Publishing and Black Lace, as well as several self-published novellas. Several of her books have been translated into German, French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese, and her Eve Berlin books will soon be available in Czech. Her BDSM novel THE DARK GARDEN will appear as a graphic novel in Japan in 2013, and her novel FORBIDDEN FRUIT was profiled in Cosmopolitan magazine. Eden appears regularly on Playboy Radio and conducts workshops on writing craft and writing about sex. A psychology major, she's fascinated with how the human mind responds to intimacy, especially when sex and romance collide.
When not writing, you can find her wandering museums, buying shoes, and reading everything she can get her hands on.
Visit her websites: EdenBradley.com EveBerlin.com or her group blog Smutketeers.com
Other Titles by Eden Bradley
Now Available from Samhain Publishing:
Midnight Playground Series
Celestial Seductions Series
Wasteland Continuity Series
Now Available from Bantam/Delta:
Exotica: Seven Days of Kama Sutra, Nine Days of Arabian Nights
Now Available from Harlequin Spice:
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Written as Eve Berlin
Now Available from Berkley Heat:
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Also from Eden Bradley
From The Smutketeers - A Kinky Christmas Carol
Bonus Excerpt: THE DARK GARDEN
Eden Bradley
If you loved Fifty Shades of Grey…get ready to enter The Dark Garden.
Surrender has its own rewards…
A deliciously potent tale of one woman’s quest for self-discovery.
Rowan Cassidy likes to be in charge—especially in her personal life. As a mistress at Club Privé, the most exclusive bondage/S & M club on the West Coast, Rowan can live out her dominant fantasies safely, and with complete control—until the night Christian Thorne walks in. Self-confident and sophisticated, he’s a natural dominant if Rowan’s ever seen one. Yet she can’t stop thinking about him and imagining his touch.
Christian has returned home, hoping to break free from his dissatisfaction and malaise—and discovers the cure in Rowan. He’s dying to get his skilled hands on her and watch her surrender, to unlock the mystery of her that captivates him. Determined to be her master, he makes Rowan a daring proposition: give herself over to him for thirty days.
Rowan finds Christian’s offer terrifying—and impossible to resist. But abandoning herself to Christian’s power might be more than she can handle…. Or it might be the realization of her true nature and the dark garden within her. There will be only one way to find out. And once the game has begun, there’s no turning back.
EXCERPT:
He led her to the bed once more, and this time he undressed her with his own hands, carefully, tenderly. He helped her step out of her shoes, then her wool slacks, slipped her crème-colored cashmere sweater over her head, left her in her ivory silk camisole and matching thong.
“We’re going to take things slowly.” He spoke softly, soothingly. “One step at a time. I just want you to get used to my touch first. To being under my hands. You know you can always stop the scene if anything gets to be too much for you. But I want you to try to stretch your boundaries a little.”
“Just being here is a stretch for me.”
“I know that. That’s why I haven’t thrown you over my knee and given you a good, hard spanking.”
His wicked grin was infectious and she couldn’t help but smile.
“Ah, that’s better. Come now, sit here on the end of the bed.”
He pressed down a bit on her shoulder, guiding her. The bed was soft beneath her, as though it had a layer of down ticking on it under the rich brown and gold bedspread. The room was warm enough, but she shivered anyway. It was impossible to hold still.
He moved to the head of the bed and she couldn’t see what he was doing, only heard the slide of a drawer. She felt the mattress sink a little beneath his weight as he sat down behind her. When he touched a fingertip to her bare shoulder she jumped.
“It’s all right, Rowan. It’s just me.” He slid that fingertip down her arm, raising a trail of goose bumps. Down her arm to her wrist, over the back of her hand, then back up. His fingers continued their stroking exploration, over her neck, the line of her jaw. She could feel the heat from his hand on her skin. Incredible, how much heat came off that one finger. What would his whole body feel like pressed against hers?
Before she could banish that thought, her sex gave a squeeze, went liquid. She couldn’t fight it with him still touching her. He continued to stroke her skin, moving down to her collarbone, and her nipples peaked hard as he swept across the swell of one breast, then the other. She closed her eyes and let herself enjoy the sensation.
His hand slid over the outer edge of her bra, down over the curve of her breast and she wanted to arch into that hand, to make him cup her breast, but she didn’t move. She was trembling inside with desire.
His hand made its way over her ribcage, the lines of her abdomen, lower, until he brushed the very top of her panties. Her sex ached. She was sure he could sense the pacing of her breath, the heated flush of her skin. But right now she couldn’t find it within herself to care. She only knew she didn’t want him to stop touching her.
He took his hand away, leaving her skin cold. Then his mouth was next to her ear, whispering, “I’m going to blindfold you now.”
Panic hit her full force. “No!”
“Yes.” It was a tone few would argue with.
“I…I can’t do that.”
“You don’t have to, Rowan. That’s the beauty of this arrangement. I’ll do everything.”
He tucked her hair behind her ears while she sat, shaking and silent. She didn’t know how to fight him.
The blindfold came down over her eyes, shutting the world out. She raised her hands to her face but he quickly pulled them away.
“Still, Rowan.”
How many times had she given that very command to the bottoms she’d played with?
“You know how this is done. I want you to focus. To be aware of only the sensations in your body, your own breathing. Shut out the rest of the world. It’s just the two of us now. Let the rest fall away.”
His voice was soothing, hypnotic, yet her pulse was racing. She understood the purpose of the blindfold: to allow her to draw inward, to concentrate only on what was happening to her in this moment. But she couldn’t shut her mind off. She couldn’t stop telling herself why this whole scenario was all wrong, even as her body responded to his nearness, his hands on her. Even though her sex was soaking wet, her nipples hard and needing to be touched.
Pure agony.
He was touching her again. He lifted her hair from her neck, stroked the skin there, making her shiver.
“You’re very responsive, Rowan. I like that. You’re like a deer; hyper-aware, hyper-sensitive.”
He let her hair fall back into place and continued stroking her skin. His fingertips moved over her face; her cheekbones, her lips, where he lingered just long enough that she knew if she darted her tongue out she could taste him.
Where had that idea come from?
Copyright 2007 Eden Bradley. Excerpted by permission of Bantam/Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Bonus Excerpt: FORBIDDEN FRUIT
Eden Bradley
From the bestselling author of
THE DARK GARDEN comes an irresistibly romantic tale of forbidden attraction.
Sometimes the forbidden…
is irresistible…
One taste is never enough.
For university professor Mia Rose Curry, it was all academic: her course in alternate sexuality was a safe, socially-acceptable way for her to talk about the things she desires most—but has never let herself experience. And while students crammed into her class to learn about fetishes, bondage, voyeurism and much more, Mia kept her own raging desires, and her most private fantasies, carefully under wraps…until one student undressed her with his eyes...
Jagger James is everything Mia wants and everything taboo, yet Mia can’t help imagining drawing closer and closer to this forbidden fruit
.
She soon discovers how much Jagger wants her, demanding she abandon every inhibition with him. Now, they are about to take a dangerous step, tempting each other’s flesh, savoring every touch and breaking every rule in the book—knowing that this dazzling, sensual feast is only a taste of something more to come…
EXCERPT:
Lips like cherries. What song was that? Jagger had heard it so many times. But now he knew exactly what it meant. Mia’s mouth was soft and sweet, with chocolate and the tangy raspberry coulis. With
her
.
She was tentative at first, shy almost, but he kept kissing her, just a soft press of lips against lips, over and over. In moments she opened for him. He slipped inside, and it was like a shock, that wet warmth, the tangle of her tongue against his, the way she immediately gave herself over to him. He’d never felt anything like it.