Raise your hand if you love dark, intense alpha heroes. Raise it higher if your dream hero owns any of the following: handcuffs, blindfold, ball gag, paddle, flogger, or spanking bench.
Ah! The allure of the kinky alpha hero.
Do they get any better than that tall, strong, dominant man who craves his heroine – over his knee with skirts raised and panties dangling?
Even before Christian Grey there were superlative erotic romance authors crafting super-nova hot tales of love, longing and spanking. But since the colossal popularity of FSOG, new readers have discovered they love to get their kink on – fictionally speaking – and the genre has exploded and BDSM romance continues to heat up faster than a naughty submissive’s derriere.
The intensity of BDSM romance is what makes me lust after these torrid tales. I adore intense stories all the way around: In the bedroom and out! Complex, tormented characters, nearly insurmountable obstacles as they battle for their HEA. Multiple areas of conflict both internal and external feed my lust as well, and even intense and heightened settings and plots are my preference. No middle of the road stories – or sexual journeys – need apply. And what better way to explore conflict, raise the stakes, and ramp up the tension than through exploration of these taboo desires?
So the BDSM romance, with all that rough, raw, sexy goodness; with a heroine tough and strong and loving enough to submit to her one and only – or her two and only (& raise another hand if you love love love ménage BDSM romance where there’s even more bang for your reader buck); and with a Master-ful hero who adores his submissive beauty, whether he’s got her plugged and spread-eagle under his flogger, or in his well-muscled arms sharing tender kisses. These are the couples who fight the odds, the aliens, and the bad guys of every stripe and then celebrate with a full-throttle love scene that could scorch the nose hairs of those hapless villains!
My favorite characters fight hard – and they love hard. From the highest of highs, to the lowest of lows, the heightened emotion of these stories melds and blends perfectly with the edgy, extreme sexual relationships of the committed couple at the heart of the tale.
And that’s what makes me the happiest of romance reading campers.
Be they dramatic or hilarious, as Mae West once famously said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
So, what’s YOUR favorite BDSM romance?
Do you embrace the loving sadist? Or the tormented Dom? The 24/7 slave girl, or the bedroom only submissive?
What alpha Dom hero gets you all hot & bothered?
The saying goes “whatever blows your skirt up”, so the last time you turned that final page in a BDSM romance with a satisfied sigh, what tantalizing tidbit had blown yours way, way up?
Come on, ‘fess up! I won’t tell!
*wink*
Writing erotic romance as Lise Horton and erotica as Lydia Hill, her short story, “My Master’s Mark” in the recently released Cleis Press anthology (Ed. DL King), Slave Girls: Erotic Stories of Submission, earned a starred review from Library Journal and the praise “surprisingly poignant”. She loves kinky romance with heart and sting. Visit her at www.lisehorton.com and for a taste of what blows her naughty skirt clean off, check out her blog “Lust In the Afternoon” at http://blackrosediaries.blogspot.com/ .