Homegrown Heat: Romance Author Lara Dien

Though I consider myself an arch-romantic, I am not generally a reader of romance. To me “romantic” is more like traveling the country in an Airstream and making a living from the road as it is red roses, wine and chocolate, which are nice, but too safe to really be romantic at all. If you’re checking off boxes to create romance...you haven’t.

       Romance writers are getting the hang of this and the genre is changing in unexpected ways. One local author and new president of our local chapter of the Romance Writers of America is Lara Dien , whose stories are available on the Wilder Rose Press . Lara has a way of giving you a story and largely bypassing the clichés of romance – plus her sex scenes are hot, which matters to me as one of those people who eats the frosting and leaves the cake.

       Another great thing is that the stories on Wilder Rose Press are very inexpensive – as financially painless as downloading a couple of songs off iTunes. I like books as much as anyone but just as it’s nice to be able to snag a song off the web it’s nice to be able to spend a few dollars and get a good read right there at your computer.

        I’ll be doing an interview with Lara on the sight soon, but in the meantime, below is a passage from her first novella, The Fortuneteller’s Lay, and my review of it in the Orlando Weekly. Check out her new work "Bad Enough" and "Hungarian Masquerade" - which Lara tells me includes a liason behind a potted palm in a swank public venue, long a personal fantasy of mine, so I can't wait to read it. In the meantime enjoy:

"Close enough," he growled, pushing the thin material of her blouse off her shoulders.  He pulled the neckline down until he freed her breasts, but kept her arms imprisoned at her sides as the shoulders of the blouse fell almost to her elbows.  Miranda's head fell back as his hands scooped under her breasts, the slight roughness of his calloused fingertips running over her breasts and nipples causing a rush of heat to her cunt.  One thumb started teasing one full breast, tracing circles around the nipple, while his mouth found the other, suckling at her, tugging at the taut peak with his teeth.  Miranda cried out from the feel of it.

The Fortuneteller’s Lay 
by Lara Dien 
(Wild Rose Press; 78 pages; $3; 
www.thewildrosepress.com)

From the pages: “Let’s finish you first,” he said before beginning the most erotic assault Miranda had ever endured.

“Print is dead,” intoned Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters, and 24 years later that end may be closer than we book nerds would like. We love our books, but frankly, I’d rather read something of quality on a screen than some of the tinny, insufferable caca wasting ink out there. Online or on paper, good is good. The Fortuneteller’s Lay, by Orlando author Lara Dien, is an e-book that should come with a downloadable microfiber cloth to clean the steam off your monitor as you read.

Miranda Merrill is a part-time fortuneteller; into her tent stumbles detective Devon Cole, not looking for his fortune, much less his future. The chemistry that explodes between them isn’t so much boy-meets-girl as fire-meets-kerosene. The sex scenes are juicy and numerous, paced deliciously and placed so there’s enough real life between them to make the story a story and not a series of quickies (or longies).

Since they’re forced to part as fast as they came together, finding each other again is going to be a problem, but luck has a way of aiding destiny. The wrap-up is a bit more romantic than the hot, lurid, crazily luscious, very graphic sex that precedes it (which I could have used more of; shut up), but you’re on solid ground when the worst you can say is you wanted more.

This is an erotic romance – no human depths are plumbed but the obvious ones. But it is a gem in its genre, and Dien pulls off writing’s neatest trick, which is to make you forget that you’re reading. Anyone who has ever attempted to talk dirty and failed has glimpsed the toughness of the sex writer’s task. Fortuneteller predicts good things in Lara Dien’s future.

— LL