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Category: Erotica/Erotic Romance/Romance
Description: Licks & Promises is a new erotic short story collection by a master of the genre. If you like your sexy stories sweet, silly, scary or simply outrageous, this is the book for you! Featuring classic M.Christian stories plus some tales that have never been seen before. This is one book you'll read, re-read, and remember for a very long time.
eBook Publisher: Phaze, 2009
eBookwise Release Date: April 2009

1 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats: OEBFF Format (IMP) [238 KB]
Words: 50392
Reading time: 143-201 min.

The rails were clicking and clacking out a message, Maggie was sure, but it was one she didn't want deciphered or explained. She knew the nature of it, after all, if not the exact words: Come back.

A seductive message, an alluring bait, hidden in the sounds of the train, but she'd escaped; she'd made it to the station, boarded the 6:15 to Atlanta, and she wasn't coming back.

The train rocked her gently over uneven rails, a slow side-to-side sway that reminded Maggie of being on a ship caught in low swells. Closing her eyes, she pictured herself sailing somewhere, the ocean patiently rolling around her, the warm wooden deck under her bare feet. It was a thin illusion. She'd never been on the ocean, but it was better than thinking of where she had been.

She tried to put herself on that ship, boat, whatever--anywhere but back in that hot city. The tiny, overhead air conditioning jet became a cool breeze coming off the waves.

Thin, perhaps, but Maggie suddenly had a surge of nausea. Smiling ironically at her suddenly too-successful illusion, she opened her eyes. A threadbare Amtrak coach; a scattering of tired travelers, the backs of their heads poking above their seats, a wide-ranging display of beehive hairdos and male pattern baldness; the gray distance blurring by the darkly tinted windows.

Turning, she watched the streaking view, her gaze catching on sudden details, barely registering before the train's heavy momentum rushed it away: the green blur of close trees, the distant stroll of far ones, the scintillating snake of a side road, the sudden flash of crossings, the diagonal rush of a steel bridge. That last one, the bridge, brought a surge of fear--that maybe that bridge was the long one again, the one that had started her journey. Nevertheless, all the bridges remained short, and her anxiety flickered away. The Mississippi was behind her, as was the city on its shore, and its delta.

So much left behind: six months of paintings, some clothes, some cheap furniture, and a photo or two. Some of it she'd miss, but not for long, not after remembering why she'd escaped.

Evil city, a bad place. It had done things to her. The hot days; the hot nights; the slow, sensual lethargy; the undulating accent; the peppery meals--it had all seeped into her, mixed with her normally cool, reserved, immaculate body and will. There she'd steamed in the heat, had burned with a slow fire.

It had frightened her. She'd grown up in the high latitudes, the cold and rainy pine forests of Oregon's Pacific Northwest. The days there had been thick with fog, the nights drowning in freeing rain. The only thing hot had been the bitter coffee.

Her early works had been local, her hometown flowing from her brushes onto the canvas: gray, black, white, and a deep, impenetrable green. She'd painted vistas and views, sky and landscapes. Like her works, Maggie had surrounded herself with the same colors, the same views. The world, while she was there, had been glacial and patient.

Light. It had been so totally missing in that overcast town that she had even been alien to the idea--then a chance visit to a museum. Brilliant, warm, burning, blinding; she'd stood before the reds and yellows for what felt like years, but what were probably just minutes. A month later, she packed her tired little Volvo and was on the road in search of the place where such shades lived, wild and free.

It had taken some time in the new city, but eventually the colors of New Orleans had started to work their way into her, seeping from the oil on her brushes and pallet, through her skin, and down deep. Subtle, for such brilliance--almost unnoticeable.

Someone bumped into her elbow, jogging her memory. With a sharp shock, she straightened.