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    Winter Heat
    Winter Heat
    Winter Heat
    Ebook87 pages1 hour

    Winter Heat

    By Julie Strauss

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    About this ebook

    Raven Darke is living every author's dream: living in New York City, a hot career writing about beautiful men. If only her real life was half as exciting as the one she's created for herself in print.

    Artist Jaxon Dawes wants a private life working in his studio. But when he unwittingly becomes the star of a popular erotica series, his anonymity disappears.

    A chance meeting causes sparks to fly between them. It will be a Christmas miracle if they can keep their hands off each other long enough to fight for their independence.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJulie Strauss
    Release dateNov 1, 2016
    ISBN9781540167620
    Winter Heat
    Author

    Julie Strauss

    Julie Strauss lives, reads, and cooks in Southern California with her husband and four children.

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      Book preview

      Winter Heat - Julie Strauss

      CHAPTER ONE

      Raven Darke fumbled under her bed to pull out her laptop, and her fingers flew across the keyboard to find the new video of the day. She settled back into her pillow, straightened her shoulders, and smoothed her hair out of her face like a preteen waiting for her first date. A sip of water from her bedside table, a gulp of air to loosen her tight chest, and she pushed play to welcome her favorite man into her bed.

      She couldn’t see his face. The video image stopped just below his strong jaw line. He wore a tight, dark blue tank, perhaps just a size too small. His sculpted biceps bulged through the fabric, a vein running the length of his arm, even as he sat in stillness, arms relaxed, waiting to begin. His clean hands rested on his knees, spread apart to accommodate a potter’s wheel between his long legs. A cone-shaped swell of alabaster-white clay sat in front of him, the wheel holding it spattered with milky white stains that had also splashed on to his khaki shorts and brown legs.

      He reached into a bowl of water beside him. Raven’s nerves buzzed; she knew what came next. He held the liquid in his closed fist, then let it drizzle over the mound

      His hands were covered in the sluice of the wet clay as soon as he touched it; it moved underneath him now, elastic and yielding. He moved his palms toward each other, pushing it upward into a column before forcing it back down into a disk shape. The tribal tattoos that covered his densely muscled arms rippled with every movement. Raven’s heart raced around her chest. The material began to respond to his touches; his grip would change soon, and the clay and her body would react accordingly.

      Slowly, evenly, he pressed his thumbs downward, forming a hole in the center, and the creamy liquid seeped down the outside of his dark hands as he dragged his thumbs apart, opening it slowly. Her hand went to her throat. The staccato beat of her pulse under her fingertips thrummed harder with every revolution of the wheel. He reached for more water and put his hand in the hole, and the clay spun below his hands, responding to the gentle pressure.

      Sometimes when he leaned over, she caught a tiny glimpse of the bottom of his jaw, which was always set in intense concentration. Now the milky liquid covered the dark skin of his hands in a thick paste, but he didn’t pause. Pleasure pulsed through her veins as he began to round and shape his work. With every turn of the wheel and stroke of his hands, he drew her further into his world. The voluptuous feminine form he’d been favoring recently began to emerge.

      Raven loved how the shape appeared. The tiny bumps on the outside smoothed out in response to his touch, and the clay suddenly became what it was meant to be. Her heart raced at the final pull. How would those hands feel running from her hips, up her waist, and over her breasts, the perfect shape he must always picture for his work?

      After he’d completed the overall form, he sat up straight. She couldn’t see the bottom of his face anymore, but it hardly mattered, because this was her favorite part. She was certain he had handsome, dark eyes that glinted in satisfaction. He dragged one finger in the hole on top of the vase, pulling it out a little farther, smoothing the outer edge of the vase lip with his right index finger until the neck flared in a simple, perfect adornment.

      When the wheel came to a stop, he sat back and placed his hands back on his knees in a mirror image of the opening shot. Raven had hunched over her laptop as the video progressed. It had seemed like hours but was only four minutes long, his usual time. She collapsed against the pillows, closed her eyes, and inhaled a chest full of air. She rode the wave of her pounding heart until it evened out and slowed.

      He’d post a photo to Instagram tomorrow of that same vase sitting on the windowsill of his shop, the sun forming a halo behind it. After that, one day next week, it would show up again, glazed with rich color. He’d been favoring a dark blue glaze lately, which she loved.

      Her hands trembled as she replayed the video, this time focusing only on his arms as he moved. Huge and muscular; he looked more like a bodybuilder than an artist. Did he go to a gym to get those muscles, or was his body was just a result of lugging blocks of clay around his studio? She scrutinized the video again, this time watching his legs. He rarely shifted in his seat, but sometimes his knees would come in closer to the spinning wheel, particularly when the piece was finished and he smoothed the final pass over the top. The fourth time through she turned up the sound to hear the heavy metal music that always accompanied his videos. Without the music, the movement of his hands was graceful and balletic. With the pounding music, he became harder, edgier, and even sexier. The music had to come last, after observing him carefully from every angle, otherwise she lost all control. Today was no exception.

      Raven tumbled out of bed now, hair rumpled, face flushed and damp, her body tingling with orgasmic energy. She set the laptop on her desk, then opened her website and started a new post. She titled it Our Favorite Finger Banger Is At It Again! and began to write an erotic encounter with Jaxon Dawes, Master Ceramicist.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Raven Darke hadn’t intended to get famous for writing erotica about a ceramics artist. But after some spectacularly bad sex on a date with her UPS man, she’d stayed up all night writing the encounter as she wished it had gone.

      In her imagination, the UPS man seduced her with champagne and sex on his balcony overlooking New York City, the cool night air caressing her skin as he contorted her body over the banister. She came up with her sexy pseudonym and published it without even reading it a second time.

      She forgot about it for two months, until the deposit from Amazon appeared in her

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