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Category: Erotica/Erotic Romance/Romance
Description: Enthralling Erotic Classic! Curvaceous 1950s TV reporter Elizabeth Renard was too wrapped up in her career to be bothered with thoughts of love or marriage. Then she met former football hero and campus idol Dan Harrington. The passion he ignited in her flesh taught her what love's illusions are all about!
eBook Publisher: Renaissance E Books/Sizzler, 2006
eBookwise Release Date: August 2006

3 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [234 KB]
Words: 56967
Reading time: 162-227 min.

CHAPTER 1

I should have been elated when they told me about the interview with Alfredo Carobino. Not just an interview, but a full week of dogging his tracks, living his daily routine along with him, capturing his every nuance on camera. A week with one of the world's greatest living tenors. Of course, it didn't hurt that he's also a world-class hunk of masculine flesh with appetites that had become legendary even in jaded entertainment circles.

Just Carobino and me. And the opera's publicist. And a television crew. No wonder I was less than thrilled. What chance would I have to be alone with this romantic icon? And realistically, what would I do if the opportunity arose--turn into one of those hysterical opera groupies who throw themselves at his feet and the more select parts of his anatomy?

Not hardly.

After all, I'm a professional, and a media personality, in my own right. My stature, and my dignity, have always been important to me.

I am Elizabeth Renard, star of local news, weather, sports, and film at eleven.

Actually, I'm not an anchorperson, just one of the reporters. But once you're on television regularly, even on a local station, people recognize you and you get star treatment. I've become accustomed to it. If you press me, I'll even admit to liking it, although I pretend not to.

Of course there are drawbacks. You don't dare leave the house without makeup, even to go to the corner store, or you're likely to overhear those dreaded words: "She's much prettier on television."

So it's a trap, that little bit of fame and recognition. You're never quite free. People own a part of you. It's nearly impossible to do the simplest things unobserved. But that's the challenge, isn't it? I accept it, and I've gloried in my bit of fame. I use it; I bask in it. And all the while I know, innately, that such power exacts a price, that it's only an illusion. I brood about it sometimes, analyze it always. I try to put my finger on who I am. Why I am. I'm not sure I've been entirely successful.

I know this--I'm extremely pretty. I don't say it out of vanity. It's simply the truth. Some people think I'm beautiful. The miracle of makeup probably has something to do with it--the ability to create illusions. Of course, that's one advantage of being on television. You have to look your best because someone in a plush office upstairs feels it impacts on the ratings. So professionals teach you how to strengthen the illusion. And they even do it for you on those occasions when the new director bestows upon you the high honor of being a substitute anchor.

I try to be honest. My looks have made me a television reporter, have helped me to be assigned more screen time than many of my ... shall we say, less radiant, associates? I've few regrets, although looking the way I do probably kept me from being a concert pianist. But I suppose I should be philosophical about it. A second, maybe even third-rate television reporter makes a lot more money than most first-rate pianists ... and certainly wields a lot more power.

And I have no way of knowing if I would ever have been first-rate at the keyboard.

I am only what I am.

I was the sort of child smiling teachers invariably cast as the princess in school plays. Sometimes I think it had as much to do with my hair as my face. It's raven black and long, with just enough natural curl in it. My mother loved to brush it, to make it shine until she could see stars in it, she would say. I'm not quite as devoted to its care as she was. But it still cascades to the middle of my back and has a nice sheen to it most of the time, although I suspect the stars in it have long since winked out.

Being everyone's princess is not the delight it should be. It's a world of responsibility when you're a little girl. People seem to expect so much when they've proclaimed you royalty.

And then when you grow up and you're not a princess after all, your subjects gradually disappear.

It takes a lot of adjustment. It also makes you painfully aware, like a slap in the face, that power--power--creates royalty. And in the awful light of that revelation, you can never be the same.

I suppose my private life isn't quite as glamorous as my public one. Mother never meant for me to be alone the way I am. She wanted me to be her little princess until my prince arrived. She didn't cling. She intended to hand me over to that prince, the way she'd been delivered to my father by her own parents.

I never knew my father. But I believed my mother when she told me they'd been blissfully happy. Until he got the call to fight in a war from which he never returned. Mother never stopped mourning him. And she hoped that some day I would love a man so much that he would become the lasting adoration of my life, just as my father had been to her.

Oh, Mother meant well. But for her, loving and a continual state of bereavement were a kind of happiness. She wore professional widowhood like a comforting shawl. That, too, had its effect on me.

She meant to teach me to love, to open myself to the kind of emotion that only a man and a woman can share. But instead, she frightened me with her reminiscences of bliss and fairy-tale romance. What good was love in absentia? I loved a father I could never know. I became afraid that loving a man meant that he would leave you or be taken from you.

I'm in my mid-thirties now. That's as much as I can say without the station publicist tearing her hair out. I've enjoyed a few moderately satisfying relationships with men, plus a couple of death-defying one-night stands. And since I meet a lot of men in my line of work, I have as many dates as I have time for. But I don't have a lot of time, or much tolerance for men with wilted self-images. A romantic dinner at L'Etoile, interrupted by my beeper and a subsequent rush to a three-alarm fire, can be hell on a man's ego and libido ... especially if "film at eleven" wasn't exactly what we'd been planning for the evening's climax.

But, hey, that's the news biz. I approach it the way I approach love. Make it matter while it lasts. You never know when it will go away. And there are perks, like spending a whole week with Alfredo Carobino. Not as one of the call girls that are always arranged for him by the posh hotels he frequents. Not as a sexual thing for his dispassionate use, to be paid off and forgotten when the last aria has been sung. But as a professional reporter, worthy of his respect as a person.

Carobino would remember me, I vowed.

"You're picking up Carobino at his hotel Monday, promptly at noon," Stan, my assignment editor, told me. "Plan on lots of pictures," he smiled crookedly. "Il signore doesn't want to strain his vocal chords answering a lot of mundane questions. Maybe you can find out who he's been sleeping with."

Good old Stan. You could always count on him to concentrate on the important things.

"Anyway, try not to swoon on camera or salivate on the microphone. I know how you get about these guys."

He was still smiling as I gave him the finger and left his office swaying my hips seductively.

I didn't swoon when I met Carobino. A healthy dose of reality saw to that. He wasn't nearly as splendid up close as he appears on stage. Being in the illusion business, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. Carobino was getting jowly as he approached his fortieth year. The critics had begun pointing out that some of his high notes left a bit to be desired in texture and pitch. But overall, his voice had remained strong. And he could truly act--a rarity on the opera stage. More importantly, in a pair of tights, he could match form with the best of the male ballet dancers.

God, I loved his buns. I'd fantasized about running my hands over their smooth firmness. I'd dreamed of rubbing my breasts across them, feeling my nipples grow hard at the contact of my skin on his. Then I'd turn him over and wrap my lips around the huge shaft that I knew would be there. I'd pump him mercilessly with my hand and tease the silky head of his cock with my tongue until I felt him expand to the point of explosion. Then he'd sing just for me as he coated my throat with the torrent of his passion. I'd hoped he'd be wearing tight-fitting pants.