Practice Makes Perfect

“How so?”

“I'm a good friend, and I'm willing to be your guinea pig.”

“My sex guinea pig.”

“Your sensual guinea pig. We'll do things and then you'll write about them.”

“You realize this is not how most romance novelists work?”

He grabbed her shoulders. “Helen Lee, you are not most romance novelists. You are Helen Lee. You are the master of your own creative process.”

“If I didn't know you better, I'd say this was just an attempt to get into my sweatpants.”

“I would never. Pay attention this time.”

And then there was his face again, jamming into hers.

This time, she took notes.

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Practice Makes Perfect

Sarah Title

LYRICAL SHINE
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

 

 

LYRICAL SHINE BOOKS are published by

 

Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018

 

Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Title

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

 

 

Lyrical Shine and Lyrical Shine logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

 

First Electronic Edition: August 2016

ISBN: 978-1-6018-3685-4

eISBN-10: 1-60183-685-6

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

You guys, look at that dog face on the cover! Too cute. Thank you to Kensington/Lyrical for doing such a good job making my books look professional and appealing and for including dog faces where appropriate. It makes me feel like a real author!

So, there's no town of Willow Springs, but if there were, there would totally be an abandoned brothel there. However, Belle Brezing was real (and I guess she still is real, even though she's dead). I found some interesting pictures of her on Kentucky.com, the website for the
Lexington Herald-Leader
, and don't tell my library school professors, but there's a pretty good article about her on Wikipedia. She was a cool lady, as far as madams go.

Thank you to Alicia Condon of Kensington for believing in my little towns and goofball stories, and for believing that other people will believe in them, too. Thank you to Louise Fury of the Bent Agency for keeping that spreadsheet. Hearts!

Also, a million thanks to Brock Savage for our weekly Skypes, which remind me that everything I write is not garbage and nobody cares so I might as well quit my job to become a professional dog snuggler.

And thanks to my dog, Starr, for snuggling.

You guys, my dog is really cute.

Helen read the first paragraph of the email, recognized it for the rejection letter that it was, and was about to file it with the others in the folder she'd succinctly labeled “Nope.” It was getting to be her most popular folder, almost the size of the “Dumb Questions from Students” folder. Almost manuscript-sized. She could probably craft some kind of meta-novel from all of her electronic rejection letters. Maybe she'd be more successful in the world of literary fiction, anyway. Apparently her love scenes were bad enough. Maybe she could get on a book tour with Franzen.

This letter, though, was different. It was more than two sentences long. It actually referenced the content of her submitted manuscript. It was not just a generic “thanks but no thanks.” It was specific with changes, and included an invitation to resubmit. And it implied she knew nothing about writing sex.

Great. Just what she wanted to hear. A single librarian who spends more time with her elderly basset hounds than she does with human males definitely wants to hear that her ability to portray a steamy love scene on the page is an accurate reflection of her actual recent sex life. But she knew about sex! She had it all the time! Just not terribly recently. In fairness, the only reason she wasn't dating at the moment was that she was focusing on her writing.

Oh, the irony.

But when she did have sex, it was great! She was super into it! Dammit, she knew about sex!

She just couldn't write about it.

That was a small but significant difference. She thought back to the last time she got down and dirty. When was it? Definitely before she adopted George and Tammy, and that had been, what? A year?

A year!

Not great. But not terrible, right? In fact, it was the breakup with that visiting professor that had propelled her to the dog pound. Get a dog, everybody said. You'll meet tons of guys if you have a dog. And she had! Really cute, nice guys with dogs, who also had really cute, nice wives. Or husbands. Either way, George and Tammy were clearly not pulling their romantic weight.

“Good thing you're cute,” she told their floppy, mooshy faces as they followed her up to bed.

Oh, the irony.

* * *

Hands, warm and strong, touching every inch of her body. Her calves, her thighs, her hips, her back. She arched and writhed, and everywhere she moved, the hands moved too, into just the right spot. They were mapping the terrain of her body and she was an arching, writhing, moaning . . .
beeping, beeping, beeping, beeping.

Helen moaned in frustration as the alarm on her phone interrupted her sexy dream just when it was getting good. She reached for the notebook she kept by the side of her bed and started scribbling everything she could remember, before it was gone.
Hands. Hips. Maps.

Maps. Sexy, sexy maps.

She threw herself back onto the pillows in frustration. Tammy growled in protest as Helen moved her foot, which was falling asleep, and which the dog had been using as a pillow.

“I'm sorry,” she said, moving over so there was space on her warm pillow for both heads.

“You're spoiled, you know.” She reached up to scratch behind Tammy's ears and the dog snuffled in pleasure, which caught George's interest, and soon Helen was deeply ensconced in some slobbery morning cuddles.

Maybe she should spend less time with her dogs. But then she thought about how George and Tammy had been found tied to a dumpster behind a GoMart, and she nuzzled them close and whispered sweet dog-nothings to them.

Maybe she should write dog mysteries. She lived in a small town; there was plenty of fodder. A librarian who finds nothing but trouble . . . and murder. Good thing she has two prescient hounds who point her to the clues. And they keep her warm at night, until a new cop comes to town, asking all the right questions, and suddenly the librarian wants more in her bed than two sets of walking jowls . . .

. . . And this was why she was writing erotic romance. Because wherever her stories started out, they always ended up in bed.

Too bad that was where they got boring.

She looked up the email on her phone again, just to start the morning off right with a little self-flagellation. “Considerable research skills,” it said. She did have considerable research skills. She was a librarian, after all. And she apparently had the knack for integrating research into a story so it looked like she knew what she was talking about. So, OK. That was it.

She would just use her considerable research skills to find out about great, toe-curling sex.

See? She already had the toe-curling thing. That was new. She jotted it down in her notebook.

Research.

Into great sex.

She could do this.

No problem.

After she walked the dogs.