AND NOW I HAVE A BLURB FOR Sweet Caroline by Lissa Matthews!!!!
"Blue Jeans and Hard Hats, Book 1
Buck doesn’t do personal projects. Until he runs into a woman wandering the aisles of the local home-improvement store, looking lost and confused. Just the way this fantasy looks at him nearly buckles his knees. In a hot second, the successful owner of a contracting company becomes a simple handyman, ready and willing to get as personal as the lady will allow.
Since her less-than-golden marriage to the local golden boy ended, Caroline’s declaration of independence includes her own business, road trips…and nipple piercings. Now it’s time to cut the last tie to her old life, but the house needs some work before she can unload it and move to her dream cabin in the mountains. Hard as it is to admit, she needs a little help.
Over the next few months, he shows her his toys, like hammers and drills, and she shows him hers—like floggers and paddles. And their attraction is the tinder that could send Caroline’s plans for an independent life up in flames…
Warning: In this book, there are sightings of glass dildos, leather belt bindings, nipple rings, wicked clamps, cherry cheesecake and a hot, yummy handyman-type guy who’s really good with his hands…"
Just for completion sake I've put everything I know about this book on this page!
I think the cover proves how much he means buisness. I really enjoy Lissa Matthews' heroes, they're no nonsense and have a depth and adventurous side. I don't really encounter men like that outside of fiction, they seem to either go one way or the other so it's great to read about someone whom I can relate to myself but they're a step ahead of me too. And her heroines are my kind of people, let alone women, my kind of humans.
When I read the first excerpt, I got tears in my eyes, honestly. The second excerpt makes me get that jolt and rush repeatedly which sounds perverted but the story is already meaning a lot to me.
Sweet Caroline is released from Samhain Publishing in 28 days time, a February month's time so not long to go!
Sneak Peek at the shopping scene in Sweet Caroline; http://lissamatthews.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-03-10T13%3A37%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=7
“I’d have never guessed you’d be interested in clamps.”
“Oh!”
Caroline, the object of his affection, his lust, his raging out of control hunger jumped, startled, and dropped the items in question on the ground. She bent to pick them up and when she stood straight again, she looked at him, not avoiding his eyes as he’d expected since that’s what she usually did. In this place though, the small hole in the wall adult toy store and lingerie shop, she seemed different, more sure and certain of herself. It was odd to him because most women he knew or had known, wouldn’t ever admit to being in place like this, much less admit to liking any of the store’s contents.
“There are a lot of things I’m interested in that I’m sure you wouldn’t have guessed at.”
Buck’s dick did just that. Bucked. Of all things he thought she might say, that was definitely not it, but now since that it was out there… “Really? Then by all means, Caroline, enlighten me. Show me what you’re interested in.”
For a second he thought she would decline and walk out, but she tilted her head slightly and regarded him. A blush stole through her cheeks, but she kept her head held high and nodded.
“These. I’m interested in these.”
She handed him the clamps. They looked like miniature clothespins, but he imagined they’d hurt like a bitch.
They were heavy for being so small. “What else?”
She looked down and pulled another package from the rack. “These.”
Japanese clover clamps. His favorite. Not always the favorite of others. He used them on some of his more adventurous lovers. Loved the look of them hanging from a pair of breasts, the chain being its own instrument of torture when tugged and pulled. Caroline said she was interested in them, but had she tried them? Did she know what kind of pain and pleasure she was looking at? The clamps looked harmless enough sitting in their plastic bubble packs, but taken out, put on naked, tender nipples and they became anything but harmless.
“Have you used these before? Either of these?”
The blush deepened, and that damned little tongue of hers came out to swipe at her lips.
“Yes. A long time ago. My… Derek used them on me. Before everything went south with us, we used to play with toys a lot. He liked clamps.”
Derek was her ex-husband. Divorced for four months or so, he knew Derek had gotten remarried this past Christmas to the younger than should be legal for a fifty year old man to marry girl he’d left Caroline for. Buck couldn’t begin to know how Caroline had felt or what had been going through the other man’s mind to leave her, but Derek’s dumbassness and loss was Buck’s gain. He wasn’t about to squander the gift fate had dumped in his path at the Lowe’s Home Improvement store.
“And you?”
She looked him straight in the eye, something she rarely did with him. He liked it and hoped she would do it more often. “I grew to love them and now find that I miss them.”
Holy… He held on tight to both sets of clamps. “What else?”
Caroline looked around and walked over to the back wall. Floggers, whips, and crops hung on hooks at various heights. She took her time looking from one end of the wall to the other, from floor to ceiling. As he watched her take them all in, he noticed the blush was gone.
“These, but none of these. These are toys, novelties, play things. Derek knew a guy thatwho made them, and he taught me to appreciate the handmade craftsmanship, the sting that came with something being made to specifics. He spent a lot of money on toys and instruments, but always felt it was well worth it.”
Buck nodded. He used to make his own floggers and had tried his hand at making a crop, but that wasn’t his forte. Hie knew some guys that made amazing crops and some of the most beautiful whips.
He hadn’t made anything in a long time. Hadn’t had anyone to make anything for but maybe Caroline… “In general, which of these instruments do you like?”
“In general, the crop.”
How in the hell he was going to form any further thoughts, words and sentences? She was flaying him open at every turn. Outside she was this pretty but plain woman he’d never imagined would have a river of molten lava running through her veins. “Anything else?”
She turned and walked up to the counter, standing on the opposite side from the clerk. Inside the glass case were glass dildos. Behind her, Buck hung his head and closed his eyes. He was hard before, but now with clamps and crops he was in jaw clenching pain. But there was more. There was Caroline, looking at glass cocks that would be, could be, should fucking be used inside her.
“I like these. No, that’s wrong. I love these.” She pointed to a red and purple swirled one that was about the same length and width as him at his hardest. He swallowed and it was hard to do past thatthe lump in his throat. “This is my favorite. I don’t know why, but… It’s the most realistic looking, and it’s how I imagine passion to be if it were in color.”
He had no idea what to say. Pretty much knew that words wouldn’t come out. Instead of even trying, he placed his hand on the curve of her waist where it flared out to her hip. He squeezed lightly, and she leaned back into his body. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, but hell, nothing about her was what he’d been expecting, not from the first moment he’d met her and definitely not today. He knew she could feel his erection. There was no hiding it. No denying that he was harder than a hammer. She didn’t rub her ass against him. Didn’t press into his dick for which he was very thankful.
Then, oh fuck, then she pointed to a butt plug, and he had to count backward from a million or he was going to come in his jeans. It was a brilliant sapphire blue glass with three graduated balls that looked to be at one-inch intervals.
“I miss having a plug inside me sometimes.”
Her voice was soft, but he heard her and again, instead of being able to speak, he simply squeezed her hip.
“You want to look at one? I’ll open the case for you. You’d be surprised at how smooth they are, and if you hold them for a bit in your hand, the glass warms. My customers that buy them, rarely ever go back to the silicone ones unless they’re looking for vibrators.”
Buck looked up at the clerk whose gaze was trained on Caroline’s face. She shook her head and murmured a “no thank you” then slipped away, leaving him staring after her. She was looking through the lingerie now. The woman was going to give him a damn heart attack there in the adult store.
“I like corsets, but, not these. I like the handmade specifically for me ones ones that are handmade, specifically for me. I don’t usually buy lingerie in stores, only online lately for things other than the corsets and bustiers.” She looked and gave him a small smile that just tilted up the corners of her lips. “Do you want to see what else I like?”
He couldn’t handle seeing anything else, he really couldn’t. “Yes.”
She kissed him. With thather pretty smiling mouth, she kissed him. Over the rack of corsets she didn’t like because they weren’t made just for the curves of her body, she touched her soft lips to his and kissed him.
An excerpt from
Sweet Caroline
Copyright © 2010 Lissa Matthews
All rights reserved — a Samhain Publishing, Ltd. publication
Caroline’s hands were still shaking as she held onto the steering wheel so tight her knuckles were ghostly white. She couldn’t believe she’d been so forward with Buck, especially kissing him, telling him she wanted him, liked him wanting her, but… He’d been aroused. Had she pushed him too much though? Had she been too forward?
Seeing him in the store surprised her, but when she heard his voice, the amused interest in it, saw his smile, something happened inside her. Her lust for the handyman took over and she showed him what he wanted to see. He wanted to know what she liked, and she was more than willing to oblige. She’d harbored the fantasy of wanting him to see her as a forty-year-old woman who had life and hunger and freedom to be herself and not the forty-year-old woman whose husband emotionally and physically left her long before she’d ever asked him to move out. It had taken a lot of courage, but then a lot of what she had done over the last year and especially over the last few months had taken more courage than she knew she possessed. Showing Buck what kind of sex toys she liked wasn’t really such a big deal. If it ended up that he wasn’t interested, well, that was okay. It at least showed her she could put herself out there again and express herself.
Pulling into her driveway, she had to admit to being a bit relieved he hadn’t beaten her back. She’d made a few more stops before heading home and figured he’d had some errands of his own. He said he’d be back this afternoon, and she didn’t doubt him. There was a job to do, and even if a personal line had been crossed in the adult store, he’d finish the work on her house.
She pressed the button on the garage door opener and drove in. She grabbed her purse and her purchases and exited the car. Leaning against the warm metal, she closed her eyes, still thinking of Buck. The arousal from earlier in the morning when she’d taken coffee to him out at the shed combined with the arousal from the adult store thrummed through her. She took a deep, shaky breath and let it out slowly. What’s done was done, and it was time to get to work and stop thinking about it for a while.
“Yeah, you go ahead and try that,” she muttered to herself, pushing away from the car in the direction of the door to the house. Straight into her home office, she shrugged out of her hoodie and tossed it and her purse into the corner before setting the bag from the yarn store on her worktable. She had an order to fill for a crochet basket for a newly pregnant woman. The mother of the mom-to-be ordered the theme basket as a birthday gift, and Caroline needed to get it out in the mail first thing tomorrow.
She pulled a set of three boxes with a pale green stripe pattern from the top shelf of the closet. In the bottom box went a spiral bound crochet patterns for baby book and three skeins of hand-dyed yarn—baby green, baby yellow and a variegated purple ranging from dark violet to very light lavender. Being they didn’t know what sex the baby would be, the mother’d requested colors other than pink or blue. In the middle box she put crochet needles, handcrafted and personalized with the name of the recipient. The mother’d requested that, also saying she had been given needles with her name engraved on them. It seemed to be a tradition passed down from mother to daughter during the first pregnancy.
The top box would contain a pair of white baby booties, crocheted by Caroline herself. Throughout the package, were little hidden gifts—a crochet charm, a little book about being a first time mom, a baby duck stuffed animal, even packets of decaf herbal teas and a small journal.
Caroline smiled. She loved the baby ducks. They were her signature of sorts, her extra special touch. For every gift she put together, there was always a baby duck.
She went to the chest of drawers on the opposite wall from her table and in the top drawer, rifled through the ribbons. She had a pretty purple ribbon with very thin green and brown stripes somewhere. It would be perfect for the boxes, but damn if she knew where it was. She closed the drawer and opened the second one. Nope, still nothing. Surely it wouldn’t be in the third one, that’s where she kept…other things, but she looked anyway.
“What are you looking for?”
Caroline slammed the drawer shut and turned her head at the voice in the doorway. Buck. She hadn’t heard him drive up, hadn’t heard him come in the house. “Hi. How long have you been standing there?”
“Since you started looking through the first drawer and mumbling to yourself.”
“Oh.” She stood from her crouching position. “I’m looking for a ribbon.”
“To be tied up with?”
She grinned. She didn’t mean to. It just happened. She should have been shocked instead, right? Well, maybe not, probably not, considering their earlier encounter, but it seemed her uncertainty when she was driving home of having maybe pushed went right out the window when she was face to face with him.
It had always been the other way around with other men, but with Buck, from the first time they met, she was comfortable with him. It didn’t hurt that he looked like he wanted to devour her at times. And she had to remind herself that Buck wasn’t a lover chosen for her by another man, by Derek. He was just a man and maybe they were choosing each other.
“Well no, but now that you mention it…” She winked at him and was rewarded with heat flaring in his eyes and a smile spreading over his mouth.
“I’ll keep that in mind. I brought the stuff I needed for fixing the deck out back and the new screen door. I’ll be working on it tomorrow.”
“Okay. Are you leaving for today? I mean, you could have picked up what you needed tomorrow instead of coming back now.”
“No, I’m not leaving today. But I am done working outside. I have some things in the house I need to do.”
“Sure, okay.” Arousal was back full force, and her blood was hot. He was going to be in the house working. She’d be able to hear him, probably even see him when she left her office. It was time to honestly admit how much she wanted him, and it wasn’t just a little bit. No, it was a whole hell of a lot.
She turned away, intent on going back to work. She put her hands on her hips and gazed around the room. The ribbon had to be there somewhere. She—
Her thoughts were interrupted by his voice again, though this time from right behind her, his breath on her neck, his body a solid wall at her back.
“You didn’t ask what I’m going to be doing in the house.”
“Oh. Was I supposed to?” She really didn’t care what he was going to do. She just liked the idea of him being nearby. She was coming to like that way too much.
“Yes, you were.”
“Okay. Well, what are you going to do?”
His lips feathered kisses at her ear. “You. I’m going to do you.”
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