Fans of Teaser Tuesdays know what’s going to happen here:

I’ll post a snippet from one of each of these three authors’ books with the character names asterisked out.

Your mission is to guess which of their books the excerpt comes from! Email your answer to me,  zamaxfield (at) zamaxfield DOT com. Please be sure to put “Teaser Tuesday” in the subject line! I’ll draw a random winner each week. Winner gets an ebook. It’s that simple! Come play along…

 

Once upon a misspent youth, Whitley read and wrote stories under the covers at night. At some point, real life intervened, bringing with it a career in the medical field. After years of technical writing, Whitley took on the challenge writing romance. Inventing characters and putting them in interesting situations turned out to be addictive, and having two heroes is twice as nice. A pot of coffee and a storyline featuring a couple of guys makes for a perfect day. Stop by www.whitleygray.com and feed your fix for heat between the sheets and M/M romance.

Here’s the snippet!

Huh. An interesting basket that looked like a wicker cigar box: oblong with a hinged top. The lid had an illustration of a winking, bowing white rabbit in parti-color hose and colorful red, green, and blue paisley smock. The picture looked vaguely familiar. He released the catch and hesitated. What if it was something bad? Everything else today had been one insult after another. He locked gazes with the rabbit.

“You have something bad planned, Mr. Hare?”

The rabbit seemed to wink at him. He dropped the box, and it landed on the bed with a soft plop. Holy shit. He’d started to hallucinate. After rubbing his eyes with thumb and forefinger, he checked again. The rabbit didn’t move for the count of ten. Okay. Rolling his shoulders, **** flipped open the lid.

On top was a card hand-addressed with his name. He lifted it out, checked the back. Blank. Beneath the card was a trio of foil-wrapped chocolate rabbits nestled in spring-green velvet. The design on the foil made the chocolate rabbits’ outfits resemble that of the one on the top of the box. Judging by the “fur” colors, **** had received one each of white, dark, and milk chocolate.

Clothed rabbits… A shiver went down his spine, and he swallowed. These weren’t just any chocolate rabbits. These were White Rabbit Chocolate Company rabbits, made in his hometown of Crooked Creek, Colorado.

Or formerly made. The factory had closed over a decade ago. Had **** sent these?

**** closed his eyes and inhaled. This was definitely fresh chocolate, and the expensive kind. A complex aroma, with cocoa and spices combined with fruit and nuts, as if an artist had taken unlikely ingredients and assembled them into something fabulous and unexpected.

The White Rabbit chocolates **** remembered from childhood had been excellent, but not anything like this, not smelling of heaven and exotic locations. Had someone reopened the factory?

Licking his lips, he selected the white-chocolate rabbit. Taking care not to rip the foil, he unwrapped it, held it under his nose like a good cigar, and took a sniff. Satiny white chocolate with hints of honey, hazelnut, and…ginger? He took a bite and let it melt on his tongue.

Definitely ginger–a subtle kick that made him warm all over. Visions of Crooked Creek filled his mind: the festive look of the old brick storefronts downtown lit up by dozens of tiny lights, the pleasure of lounging around the pool with *******, the joy of hiking through the woods.

Funny how the chocolate triggered those thoughts; **** hadn’t thought about ******* in a long time. He took another nibble, and the sweet, low note of hazelnut came through. He and ****** had had some good times. And ***. Lying on the grass with *** on a summer night, gazing up at a million stars…

“Tell me something no one else knows about you,” *** whispered.

**** stared up at the October night sky. The stars were scattered like backlit diamonds on dark velvet. “Like what?”

“Your deepest, darkest secret.” *** cuddled a little closer, and **** pulled the blanket up around them.

There was no way **** could reveal the worst secret, not even to ***. **** couldn’t wrap his mind around the fear, let alone confess it. Instead he tilted his head and kissed *** full on the mouth. As usual, *** tasted like peppermint gum and dark chocolate. “You,” **** whispered. “You’re my secret.”

*** broke the kiss with a snort. “******* knows.”

“Not everything.”

“He can guess.”

**** claimed ***’s mouth and shifted half on top of him, silencing him.

There had never been anyone else like ***.

 ~*~

Karenna Colcroft is a survivor whose books try to encourage other survivors to believe they deserve and can find love and healthy relationships if they dare to open their hearts. She does not compartmentalize love into gender or number, and her stories show that no matter how afraid or reluctant someone might be, and no matter how much work it takes to build a relationship, finding someone to share a life with is worth the effort. Karenna lives in the northeastern United States with her two children, her real-life romance hero husband, and three cats, one of whom does a great parrot impersonation. Find out more about her on her website, http://www.karennacolcroft.com, or like her Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/karennacolcroftauthor

Here’s the snippet:

I followed his command and opened my eyes. With a face-splitting grin, he pulled the neck of my shirt open and sprayed a stream of whipped topping down over my skin. “There, is that better?”

“Asshole!” I couldn’t help laughing. I yanked off my shirt and surveyed the damage. Topping streaked my chest, dotting my nipples. “You’d better clean this off, ******.”

“Yeah? And how would you like me to do that, ****?” He turned my name into a low growl. In his eyes, I saw something wild. Not wolf. Something more primal than that.

Before I could squelch the impulse, I replied, “Lick it off.”

He ran his tongue over his lips. Orange flame kindled in his gaze and he bent and licked a line across my chest from one nipple to the other. I shuddered and clutched the counter behind me to keep from being knocked over by the rush of arousal coursing through me. My dick hardened to the point of pain and I let out a low moan.

“Does that feel as good as you taste?” He sucked my nipple between his lips and clamped down lightly with his teeth.

“Fuck, yeah,” I gasped. “******—” I stopped, not knowing whether to beg him to stop or to keep going, to bring us both past the point where anything mattered other than the physical. The point where we could forget about everything and just rip off our clothes and fuck.

I was pretty much already there.

“You’re not clean yet.” He swirled his tongue over my skin. “I think I like this even better than fresh strawberries.”

“******!” I closed my eyes and let my body take over. The point of contact between his tongue and my chest grew to a bonfire that spread through me. My cock strained against the front of my jeans, wanting release in every sense of the word.

And he didn’t stop. Making soft sounds of pleasure, low grunts bordering on growls, he licked every spot of topping from me. I tensed and thought frantically of baseball and my former next-door neighbor’s hugely ugly housedresses to keep the explosion of my climax at bay.

Finally, he looked up with a satisfied smirk. “All clean.”

“Fuck.” I leaned against the counter, breathing heavily.

He laughed, a rich sound rolling over me like warm water. Without speaking, he unfastened his button-fly jeans and shoved them to the floor. His long cock sprang up against his abdomen with the force of its release, a droplet at its tip.

He picked up the spray can and squirted a ring around his dick. “Banana split? You did say you like topping.”

I cracked up. “You are a dork, you know that?”

“Yeah.” His tone turned serious. “Your dork.”

“My mate.” I dropped to my knees. “I’m going to lick you clean,” I said hoarsely.

“Good.” His fingers twined through my hair. “And then?”

“And then.” I licked up his shaft from the base to the tip and enjoyed the power surge from hearing his soft moan. “And then, we’ll fuck.”

 ~*~

Rhys  admits to sharing the house with three cats of varying degrees of black fur, a black Pomeranian puffball and a ginger cairn terrorist. Rhys is also enslaved to the upkeep a 1979 Pontiac Firebird, a Toshiba laptop, and an overworked coffee maker.

You can find her on her blog, Facebook, Twitter, and at the Starbucks down the street. No really, they’re 24/7. And a drive-thru. It’s like heaven.

Her books can be purchased, folded, and first chapters read at Dreamspinner Press.

Here’s the snippet:

If I’d met a bookie in between the Rover and the building where the shots had come from, I’d have won millions. Although if the bookie knew anything about me, he wouldn’t have taken such a sucker bet.

Because the universe fucking hated me.

The building I’d stormed was one of the multitude of old brick structures someone thought would be cool to build on the crest above the downtown area. They were thin, dark red, and would have looked more at home in Whitechapel than Southern California, but they made for cheap, sardine-can-like housing in an area that crammed more people into every square foot than candy in a kid’s mouth the day after Halloween.

Oddly enough, despite being one of the more heavily populated areas in LA, the courtyard I’d run into only boasted two people, a distraught older Hispanic female and a quite deceased young Vietnamese woman.

And something told me she had something to do with the woman I’d been coming to see.

The seven-story U-shaped building blocked out nearly all of the sunlight except for what little could make it past the thick iron overhang of the roof’s edges. Poorly maintained, whatever patches of lawn there might have been in the building’s heyday had succumbed to California’s brutal sun. Now scorched weeds cluttered what little shade reached the corners of the walk-around, their brown leaves covered with a thin fine grit from the surrounding arid dirt patch.

She’d been killed only moments before, but the dun-colored dirt was already coating the Vietnamese woman’s exposed skin and clothes.

She was also a guy.

There were small signs. Her hands were larger and blunter than a woman’s, and the slight ridge of an Adam’s apple stuck out of her slender neck. The tight tank top she wore was filled with perfectly shaped breasts, larger than her slender frame could support. They slid down under her skin, flaccid packets of silicon bulging up above her rib cage.

Her legs were stick thin, barely muscled, and brown under the fluttery skirt she wore. It was too short to be called decent, and as she’d fallen, the hem had flapped up to expose her underwear, a girly, sweet pair of briefs made of pink cotton and lime-green ribbon polka dots. It was vulgar to leave her there, splayed open and on display, but touching or covering a dead body was not something that would endear me to the cops.

Still, she deserved better than what she got.

One thing was for certain, she wasn’t **** ****, and it was my greatest hope, whoever she’d been, she hadn’t felt the pop of the bullet that ended her life.

I slid my Glock into its holster at my back and flipped my shirttail over its grip to avoid notice. Touching the Latina startled her, and she screeched, throwing her hands up to batter my shoulders. I caught her up into my arms, consoling her with what little Spanish I knew, but she was splattered with blood, and her tears ran pink rivulets down the too-large Dodgers shirt she wore over a bright blue peasant dress. I didn’t know if she was grieving because she actually knew the girl or if the shock of finding a dead woman on the sidewalk did her in.

****** showed up with the police moments later, and I handed off the woman to a kind-faced female cop with the darkest liquid brown eyes I’d ever seen. Within seconds, the walk-around area was full of blue uniforms and the chatter of walkie-talkies, staccato bursts of conversations breaking through the general murmur of a gathering crowd and officers asking people to step back.

“Shit, her… head.” My brother gulped air like he was drowning, and his cheeks turned ashen as I watched.