Saturday's Excerpt from Loving Sarah by Julie Shelton

Owning Sarah will be available from www.sirenpublishing.com beginning September 25.  It is the sequel to Loving Sarah, which was published in November of 2012.  It is available to Amazon,B & N, Kobobooks, Sony, Googleplay and others.  I am also enclosing the back cover  blurb for Loving Sarah, which you can use or not, as you desire.

 Back Cover Blurb for LOVING SARAH

 

Eight years ago Jesse Colter fled his small town, leaving behind eighteen-year-old Sarah Marshall, broken-hearted and devastated.  Now a retired Navy SEAL, he’s back and he wants only one thing—Sarah Marshall—preferably bound, naked, and on her knees before him.

She has never forgotten Jesse.  He’s been the object of all her sexual fantasies since she was fifteen, as well as the star of nightly dreams that have become increasingly erotic over the years.  So when he suddenly reappears in her life, she is torn.  Can she trust him not to hurt her, or will he once again break her heart?  Warily, she agrees to let him introduce her to his world—the world of bondage, Domination, and erotic slavery.  When he also introduces her to his best friend, Adam Sinclair, Sarah faces a daunting future of sexual submission to two powerful alpha males.

But Sarah faces an even bigger challenge.  Someone is stalking her.  Is it the old enemy who’s just been released from prison?  Or is it someone else from her past who is determined to destroy any chance she has at happiness?  Can Adam’s and Jesse’s love protect her?  Or will her world explode in a cataclysm of betrayal and violence that will destroy them all?

It’s been a month since Sarah Marshall was kidnapped and held at knife-point by her ex-fiance.  But Jesse Colter and Adam Sinclair, her two loving Doms, know that there is an even deadlier threat still out there—Ryder Malone.

He blames both Sarah and Jesse for sending him to prison eight years ago for attempted rape, and he’s determined to make them pay.  So, he begins a systematic campaign of terror and intimidation against them.  But the danger he poses doesn’t end there.

Set against the deepening love and commitment between Sarah, Jesse, and Adam, Owning Sarah is more than just a sexy, sensual, BDSM love story.  It is a harrowing race against time for Jesse, Adam, and a team of former SEALs to stop one of the biggest arms-for-drugs deals in U.S. history.  And to rescue Sarah before Malone sells her to a human trafficker and she’s lost to her men forever.

STORY EXCERPT – OWNING SARAH

As soon as Sarah finished greeting the last man, Jesse moved in behind her, pulling her against his body, her back to his front. He ran his hands up her arms before settling them on her shoulders. At that blatant gesture of possession, all conversation died and six pairs of eyes bored into her. Wow. She was surrounded by eight strong, powerful, confident men. Men who had survived harsh, primitive conditions. Men who had experienced the brutality of combat and undertaken untold numbers of dangerous missions, all to keep America free. Men whose exploits would never be recognized or acknowledged, who were heroes in the truest sense of the word.

Men who gave new meaning to the term sexy, even if they weren’t particularly handsome. There was nothing handsome about Bulldog, for instance. Yet….wow. The sinuous, animalistic grace of his movements, the air of command he exuded were both undeniably sexy. To a man, these Spec Ops soldiers were tanned, fit, confident, powerful…masculine. These men were potent. The testosterone they exuded was so strong it was almost palpable, a living, breathing thing.

Wow.

Nearly overcome by a sudden bout of near-crippling shyness, Sarah stiffened her spine and gave them what she hoped was a confident smile. “It’s lovely to meet you, and I hope you all can stay for dinner, although I’m not sure what we’ll have. We’ve been eating so much take-out lately, there’s nothing in the refrigerator but a bunch of science experiments on the properties of mold.”

“And beer,” Adam piped up. “There’s always plenty of that.”

“Right,” Sarah agreed tongue-in-cheek. “Science experiments on the properties of yeast.” Her smile faded. “Like I said, you’re all invited to stay for dinner. But why do I get the feeling that this is not a social call? You’re not here for dinner, are you? You’re here because of Ryder Malone.”

“I see we’ve come to the question and answer portion of the evening,” Jesse murmured, squeezing her shoulders gently before dropping a kiss on the top of her head.

“Speaking of beer,” Adam interjected brightly, turning on his heel and moving toward the kitchen, “who wants one?” Everyone except Sarah and Jesse followed him out there. Turning her to face him, he let go of her arms and lifted his right hand to tuck an errant, mink-brown curl behind her ear.

She tilted her chin to look up at him. “This is about a hell of a lot more than just vandalizing my bedroom, isn’t it? What’s going on, Jesse?”

His fingers stilled, warm against her skin, sending a shiver through her. Aware of the undisguised interest on the parts of the men filtering back into the room, beer bottles in hand, they struggled to fight the sudden heat blazing between them. “Don’t worry about dinner, baby,” Jesse said in an effort to divert her attention, “It’s all taken care of. I’ve ordered a Pig-Out Feast for Twelve from Porky’s Bar-B-Q.”

“But,” she spread her hand in confusion, “there’s only nine of us.”

He just chuckled. “Obviously you haven’t seen these guys eat. Anyway, they’ll be deliverin’ it in around”—he glanced at his watch—“half an hour or so, so be on the look-out while we finish up—”

“Finish up what?” she interrupted quietly, refusing to be diverted. “Answer my questions, Jesse, and stop trying to protect me from the big, bad world out there. I know what’s out there, remember? I see it every day in court. So, why are they here? What could Ryder Malone possibly have done to merit a response like this? An entire SEAL team? Really? Don’t you think that’s just a little bit over the top? Like sending a Cruise missile to take down a gnat?”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, they’re no longer SEALs,” he offered lamely, lifting one shoulder in a slight shrug.

“Oh, well, that’s certainly a relief.”

“Sarah—“”

“Who are they, Jesse? Aside from the biggest, scariest, meanest-looking, bad-ass, uber-macho bunch of guys I’ve ever laid eyes on? Some sort of clandestine, super-covert, black-ops commando group that’s so Top-Secret not even the President knows about them?”

Everyone froze. Seven pairs of eyes were suddenly riveted on her. Her mouth dropped open as realization sank in.

“Oh. My. God!”

Her entire body solidified.

“Holy shit,” Bill Payton muttered, his beer bottle halted in mid-air, halfway to his mouth.

“Told you she was smart,” Jesse muttered back.

Sarah just stared up at him, dumbfounded.

Oh.

My.

God!

Omigod!

“Jesse—”

“It’s okay, baby.”

“It’s okay? It’s okay?” Seized with a sudden need to shiver, she crossed her arms over her breasts. “How can this possibly be okay? What, exactly, makes this okay?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m pretty sure the President knows about us,” Jay offered helpfully, patting her shoulder as he passed her on his way to the couch.

“Looks like she’ll be coming to the meeting.” Adam joined them, grinning, holding out a frosty bottle of beer. She just stared at it pointedly until, shrugging, he withdrew it.

“What meeting?” she wanted to know.

“The meetin’ that’s startin’ right now,” Jesse said grimly, grabbing her by the elbow and steering her unresistingly toward the sofas and chairs gathered around the stone fireplace.

“C’mon, sweet pea.” Adam latched onto her other elbow and they led her to one end of a brown leather sofa where they sat with her tucked snugly between them. The other six men spread out on the other sofa across from them, the oversized ottoman, and in the two club chairs.

Jesse turned his attention to Bill Payton. “Okay, Wildfire, it’s your show,” Jesse said before relaxing back against the cushions himself. Conversation died as they all turned their attention to Bill “Wildfire” Payton, who cleared his throat, and looked directly at Sarah. “Sorry to bring this to your doorstep, Sarah. But it appears that your boy Malone is one seriously bad dude.”

Friday's How She Does it featuring Julie Shelton

How do you create your characters? Do you have a specific method?

I created the hero of my first book, Loving Sarah, and its upcoming sequel, Owning Sarah, when I thought of the name Jesse Colter.  I spent months just thinking about what someone named Jesse Colter would look like, sound like, BE like.  I knew he would be part Native American.  I knew he would be a capable, confident, sexy, alpha male, overcoming a brutal childhood to become a man of loyalty, honor deeply in love with the heroine.  What I didn’t know until I was actually halfway through the first draft of the book, was that he was also a Dominant.  Sometime during the four years it took me to write Loving Sarah, I discovered BDSM, and that just answered a whole bunch of questions I hadn’t been able to answer about Jesse’s personality and his interactions with the heroine.  Once I went back and introduced that element into the story, I knew I had solved the mystery.  But then I had another dilemma.  What to do with Adam Sinclair, Jesse’s best friend and former SEAL teammate.   He was just as good a hero as Jesse.  And he proved it by not staying in the secondary role I had assigned him to, but by taking over and exerting equal claim over the heroine, having fallen in love with her himself just by hearing Jesse talk about her over the years.

 

2. Do your characters come before the plot? Do you sketch out your plot or do you let the characters develop the route to the end?

In the case of both books, the characters came first.  I had a general idea of where I wanted the first book to go.  But if I hadn’t pared it down and deleted a lot of scenes, the finished book would have weighed eighty pounds.  Fortunately, all of those deleted scenes ended up in the sequel and made for a much better story over the two-book arc than if I’d tried to address all the elements in one book.  So, if you’re reading this, save EVERYTHING!  You’ll find a place for it eventually.

 

 

3. Do you know how the story will end before you begin? In a general way or a specific one?

 I vaguely know how the story will end.  That being said, there were still a lot of surprises in store for me as I wrote, not the least of which was the replacement of the original villain in Loving Sarah with an equally plausible secondary villain, thus making a sequel necessary.

 

4. Do you choose settings you know or do you have books of settings and plans of houses sitting around?

I definitely have books of house plans sitting around, as well as decorative arts magazines.  And the small town setting was an amalgam of all the small southern towns I’ve either lived in or visited over the years.

 

5. Where do you do your research? On line or from books?

If it’s a fairly quick question, I now use the internet.  Before that there were libraries and books, both of which are on the wane.  The novel I am currently working on is a Medieval erotic romance, which I actually wrote twenty years ago—before the internet, so all the research for that was done with books.  Copious amounts of research, using many, many books over many, many years.  Thanks to the deep research these books afforded me, I know much more about the middle ages than the internet could possibly tell me.

 

 

6. Are you a draft writer or do you revise as you go along and why?

I revise as I go along.  Sometimes I re-write a sentence or paragraph a dozen or more times, looking for the best way to phrase what I want to say.  After I have completed the book, I read it from the beginning, making further changes as I go.  Then I repeat that process, this time looking for errors.  Then I do it one last time, reading it out loud to check the flow, changing what’s awkward.  Then I cross my fingers, shut my eyes, and press SEND.