Unlikely Cover Model Paired with Hunky Caveman
by Cris Anson

At last October’s RomantiCon, Ellora’s Cave’s first annual erotic romance conference, I was invited to participate in a photo shoot. I was paired with hunky Angelo at his virgin cover-model gig for the Romantica™ publisher. (The other EC authors were Tara Nina posing with Taylor and Eve Vaughn with Rodney). My immediate reaction: Is the Pope Catholic? Does the sun set in the west?

If you’ve attended a Romantic Times convention, you’ve seen the Mr. Romance contestants or the Ellora’s Cavemen posing as a group with one attendee at a time, proceeds to charity, three minutes max and on to the next person in line. And yes, I have a few of those mementoes myself.

But this. This was fifteen minutes of permission to stand seriously close to that gorgeous Venezuelan Caveman, to look deeply into his warm brown eyes, to run my fingers through his long black hair. To have his undivided attention as he held me in his muscular arms.

Have I mentioned that Angelo is hawt?

He was wearing only a towel, as you can see from the photo gracing the cover of my July release WHAT SHE NEEDS, and I’m not positive (or maybe it’s wishful thinking), but he might have gone commando. Be still, my heart!

Alas, I could never quite forget the photographers arrayed around us—standing, kneeling, moving to get different camera angles. Furniture had been moved to the side. Sunlight poured in through the hotel room’s windows. Lights had been set up to the side and behind us. Directives flew like machine-gun fire.

“Look this way.” “Turn around just a bit to your left.” “Now move behind her.” And so on.

The results astounded me. Or, I should say, the results of Ellora’s Cave Art Director Syneca’s efforts with PhotoShop astounded me. Instead of the old broad I really am, I look like…someone Angelo might want to get closer to. Like someone living the script she wrote. Like Delia Barnes, the heroine of WHAT SHE NEEDS, who found her younger man in a most unexpected place—an erotic romance convention.

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Older widow Delia Barnes greets fellow authors before an erotic romance convention sporting a black eye, which she explains away with “I didn’t say ‘Yes, Master’ quick enough.” Sitting at the bar, burned-out ad executive and former Dom Kurt Reinhardt overhears that comment once too often and interrupts to suggest she needs a new Master.

Urged by her friends to accept the younger man’s invitation to learn some D/s basics—hey, an author needs to do her research, right?—Delia joins him to get first-hand experience at being submissive, starting with removing her panties in a corner booth. Later, she learns more than she bargained for when she spends a weekend at Kurt’s home with his eager business partner added to the mix.

But an innocent misstep brings Delia’s world crashing down around her. Can she trust Kurt with her heart…and her life?

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

You can read an excerpt of WHAT SHE NEEDS and buy the book here: What She Needs

If you want to know more about RomantiCon 2010, here’s the link. We’ll be eagerly looking to see which of the Ellora’s Cavemen attend. *tha-THUMP tha-THUMP* Romanticon

To read more about me and my books, please check out my website, my MySpace page and my Amazon profile.