Time outs have never been so tempting...
I didn’t bargain on a roommate, especially not my alluring, naïve little stepsister. She wants to get to know me better, but what she’ll discover could send her screaming in the other direction—or screaming underneath me.
Summer in New York is hot enough without her panties melting, too. I warned her that curiosity killed the cat, but then she reminded me of the rest of that saying—satisfaction brought it back.
Something soft thumped against the door, followed by a low, masculine laugh. I stomped to the door and swung it open. Zoe almost fell in.
“Whoa!” Her male companion caught her around the waist, and she squeaked as the back of her head hit his shoulder. She wriggled around in his arms and put her finger to her lips.
“Shhhh!”
The bushy-haired guy in skinny jeans met my gaze across the threshold. His reddened eyes—what had the little shit been smoking?—widened. “Whoa,” he repeated.
Zoe dissolved into a fit of giggles. I didn’t think she’d seen me, or she might not have been so mirthful. Her linen dress was wrinkled, her shoes missing and her eyes and cheeks bright. I backed up and moved to the darkened kitchen, not sure I could control myself seeing her like this—loose and tipsy and flirty. When she squealed again, I turned back to see her “friend” had hauled her up bridal style in his arms and carried her through the door.
“Where’s your bed?” he asked her.
Her hand flailed out. “The Den of Iniquity,” she directed, “is that way.”
He began to maneuver around the furniture, stumbling a little under her weight, when I reappeared out of the shadows.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
He stopped in his tracks, then Zoe’s legs nearly took out my floor lamp as he whirled around with her in his arms.
“Putting her to bed.” He managed to look me in the eye and didn’t stutter, but that’s all the credit I was about to give him.
“The fuck you are.” I stalked toward them, my arms outstretched in demand.
Zoe’s head wobbled as she noticed me. “Oh shit.”
“Oh shit is right,” I snapped, eyeing her friend. “Give her to me.”
His hands slipped over her hip as he tried to adjust her, and his grip left a red mark on her bare upper arm. Fury and jealousy bubbled up in me, like a bottle of soda shaken too hard.
I’d been told before that the more I felt, the less I showed on the outside. At that moment, I must have appeared like a fucking robot.
“I’ll just put her—”
“Give. Her. To me.” I couldn’t make it any clearer.
Zoe sighed. “Sorry, Tom. I’m his.”
I startled, blinking in surprise at her simple words. Whatever had been coiling inside my chest suddenly unwound, and I felt like my head had popped off and was bobbing around like a jack in the box.
Tom looked down at her nervously, his arms shaking a little as he righted her to her feet. “Shit, Zoe, you didn’t say anything about a boyfriend.”
“Roommate,” I clarified, still trying to recover my equilibrium.
She rolled her eyes while making a flicking motion toward me with her fingers. “’S’my brother,” she mumbled.
And just like that, my bouncing head was shoved back in the box and the lid clamped shut over it. But her words still echoed in my head. “Sorry, I’m his, I’m his, I’m his.”
The relief on Tom’s face vanished, along with his buzz. “Look, man, I’m sorry—” When I met his gaze, it was with the guilty understanding that I knew how he’d been hoping to end the evening, and he knew that I knew.
The blazed hipster looked like he was about to shit his pants at the idea that his date’s big brother was about to kill him.
I reached for Zoe, knowing that if I was holding her then I wouldn’t be able to throw him through my coffee table. I also just needed to touch her, needed her safe in my arms. My hand around her wrist, I tugged her to me. She spun over as though we were on a dance floor, her elbows up and caged by mine as her back pressed against my bare chest.
“Nathan, he’s just a f—”
“Quiet.” I felt the urge to hold up my hand, but both of them were full of her luscious, quivering body. She froze briefly, stiffening in my arms. I stifled a groan, my body reacting in completely predictable but nonetheless inappropriate ways to her nearness.
She wriggled, trying to get out of my hold. My arms tightened, and I pressed my hips forward against the curve of her ass. Her gasp was loud, startling both myself and Tom.
“Nathan,” she stage-whispered, “do you have fireworks in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” She fell into titters at her own joke, while Tom’s wide eyes met mine.
“Uh, I’d better get going…” Tom averted his gaze and made a beeline for the door.
Fuck, who knew what kind of gossip he might spread at her office?
I squeezed my eyes shut, loosening my hold on Zoe. When I was fairly sure she wouldn’t flee or fall, I opened them. Tom opened the door to the hallway.
“Thanks for getting her home safely, man,” I said gruffly. He turned back to nod at me before shutting the door behind him.
Zoe and I were suspended in silence after he left, frozen together in an intimate pose like a Rodin sculpture. Her chest moved up and down with her breath, the line of her collarbone shifting and her neck flexing as she swallowed.
The sweetness of her perfume had faded, mixing with her sweat and possibly tequila. I wanted to lick the salt off her skin, then sip and suck every part of her until I was drunk.
She cleared her throat nervously. “Uh…”
“Bedtime for bad little girls,” I announced. Then I bent down and hauled her over my shoulder in a fireman carry. Hopefully she wouldn’t puke on me.
She poked the back of my thighs in protest. “Nathan! Put me down!”
I silenced her with one swift, sharp smack to her ass. And it felt fucking amazing. My palm tingled, my whole body vibrating with need. She gasped, but stilled and sagged in submission.
Adjusting my hold on her, I ran my hands up the backs of her thighs until she gasped again. Then she moaned. Navigating carefully, I carried her to my bedroom and tossed her on the bed.
“You are in big trouble, missy.”
"I don't give a s*** about money, unless it can buy me a better steak or get me out of jail."
LUCAS -- I might be a brand new billionaire, but I'll be damned if I'm going to take charm lessons from former socialite "Sexy Lexi Kink-ade." She's getting under my skin, but now I'm stripping away her veneer to find the woman underneath.
ALEXIS -- Redeeming Luke's bad boy image is my job, but there's something seductive about a man who can fight in a tuxedo and scare away paparazzi. I might be living hand to mouth these days, but his mouth on my hand isn't helping...
Welcome to the first meeting of the Billionaire Book Club—because even the wealthy need help to read between the lines.
When friends become lovers, is their relationship screwed?
WILL -- Cassie is more than a friend with benefits, and I love helping her overcome her shyness in the bedroom. Now our teaching assistant has his eye on her too and all my primitive instincts are taking over. Maybe I'm being a bit possessive, but what have I got to lose?
CASSIE -- I told Will that once should be enough, but he's determined to make me scream over and over again... I feel truly sexy for the first time in my life, but with a new wager on the line I'd better think twice before falling for my best friend.
"I think I hate sex."
When I confessed to my cocky friend Will that I'd never had a happy ending, he bet me a thousand bucks he could give me one. I must be a college outlier, because I think it's all pretty... meh. Even if the dirty promises he whispers in my ear make me shiver, once should be enough to say "I told you so," right? Easiest money I'll ever earn.
But I didn't know he meant trying everything once, and now he's raising the stakes...
If you mean The Naughty Step, then it's the second book in a little series I'm writing called the Billionaire Book Club. So many billionaires out there (at least in Romanceland)... they must like reading, right? But they're not going to go to coffee klatches and B&N, I'm guessing.
In this book, we meet real estate magnate Nathan Brownlow. More importantly, HE meets his unknown-to-him stepsister, when she shows up at his Manhattan apartment begging for a place to stay. New college grad Zoe is in New York for an advertising internship, and her sublet fell through. Nathan, who doesn't have a good relationship with his father, didn't even know that he had a new stepmother and stepsister. He reluctantly agrees to let her stay.
Things start to ramp up when she discovers his closet of kink in the spare bedroom and teases him mercilessly about his "Fifty Shades" life. Nathan's twitchy palm gets hard to control, especially when his beautiful, naive, impulsive stepsister says and does reckless things...
I'm not so much into "step sibling" kink as I wanted to play with the differences in age, experience, wealth, and attitude. It was fun to write a story with a thoroughly alpha hero and an impudent heroine with a wicked sense of humor.
~~~~~~~~~~
If you mean what I'm writing currently, then I'm working on the third and fourth books of the Billionaire Book Club. In Help Yourself, motivational speaker Marcus Blake learns that you can't go home again--at least not when the high school girlfriend you dumped is your mother's new nurse. And in Mafia Mistress, enigmatic Russian mobster Viktor finds it hard to get out of the business once he rescues a girl brought over by his boss for unsavory purposes--by marrying her.
The next book I have coming out, though, is a full-length standalone novel called No Excuses. It's about Gage, a no-nonsense tech billionaire with high expectations of everyone around him. His new communications assistant, Madeline, is having a hard time making him say "please"--until he wants to tie her up at an office retreat in the mountains.
Q: Who designed the covers?
Several of my covers have been designed by Sybil Wilson of Pop Kitty Designs. I started off making my own covers, and all my erotica short stories and a few other things are still done by me (and have gone through several iterations). So I still do some covers and all my own teasers and ads in Canva (a free web design program). I had a strong sense of visual identity and branding from the beginning of being "Nikky Kaye," and did everything myself for the first six months or so.
Q: What books have influenced your life the most?
Oh my. Where to begin? I'm sure most writers find it difficult to respond to this. I began reading with college textbooks when I was three (my father nearly drove off the road as I started reading his PhD work to him from the back seat). I was one of those kids who read all the time--Laura Ingalls Wilder, Gordon Korman, Judy Blume. I acted out things like Pride and Prejudice and Gone With The Wind with my Barbie dolls (I even had hoopskirts for them). I loved period stuff and historical books. I got into romance as a teenager with Danielle Steel, Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, Julie Garwood, etc. (I'm SO dating myself here.) It was all made easier when I got a job in high school with the public library.
But in 1994 someone introduced me to Diana Gabaldon. It just so happened that I took Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber with me on a trip overseas that was intended to be a long-term move, but ended quickly and violently. When I was recovering with friends and family in yet another country (halfway in between, essentially), I totally lost myself in those books. I could never write like her, but I was absorbed by the story, the characters, everything. The language, complexity, history...gah! But while the books themselves are certainly extraordinary, the impact they had on me when I was in a fragile physical and emotional state was even more so.
In the mid to late 1990s I decided to try writing romance myself. I was an active member of of RW-L (a listserv), and wrote five books in about two years. They were mostly romantic suspense, targeted to Silhouette. I was lucky enough to have the full manuscripts requested by editors, and I got a high profile agent (this was back when you sent letters and self-addressed stamped envelopes). But ultimately, my stuff was too "quirky" for category, and I became derailed by grad school.
Do you remember the first book you read?
Well, according to family lore it was a thick volume on ancient Greek architecture, but I don't recall it very well. I remember reading lots of Enid Blyton when I was five or so--Famous Five, St. Clare's and Mallory Towers series, The Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair books. Blyton was a prolific children's author in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. That's what I grew up on. I devoured Scholastic catalogues when they arrived in the classroom. I would stop in a bookstore on my way home from school and read Tintin and Asterix books. But the first book I remember purchasing by myself (no parents with me) was Jane Eyre, from the university bookstore at the age of 6 or 7. Man, I sound ridiculously precocious, don't I? Argh.
If any of your books were made into a film, who would you like to play the lead?
These are not easy questions! Despite my love of reading, my love of movies was greater, and I thought of nothing else for a career from the age of 15 until, uh, 35 (ultimately becoming a film professor). So it's really impossible for me to answer casting questions. :)
Do you have a blog/website?
http://www.nikkykaye.com has my basic information. I tried to blog on it for a while, but couldn't be consistent or find interesting things to talk about.
I only began writing fiction again last summer, after I decided to write and self-publish a niche non-fiction book that had been on my mind. My plan was to mostly write non-fiction with occasional forays into erotica, but it turned out that I couldn't escape the romance bug again. So, for the most part, all my titles are from August 2016 to now (April 2017).
Sometimes the best decisions are bad ones.
http://www.nikkykaye.com
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