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reviews_and_ramblings
Slow Dance by V.J. Banis (M/F romance) Release Date: February 12, 2009
Publisher: Double Dragon Publishing
ISBN-10: 1554045428
ISBN-13: 978-1554045426
Amazon Kindle: Slow Dance
Amazon: Slow Dance
Blurb: Janice McKenzie is persuaded by her terminally ill husband to take one day a week off from her bedside vigil in Marin County. On the first day in San Francisco, she begins to cry on the ferry and, disembarking, catches a heel and finds herself in the arms of a young man, Brian Loomis, who takes her home and to bed. At first, Janice is horrified at what she has done, but as time passes and Brian pursues her, she finds herself more and more comfortable in his company. Janice's memories of her childhood and her marriage take on new meaning, as she contrasts them with her impressions of Brian. She develops new insight as to how she came to be the perfection-obsessed woman that she is. Brian is living temporarily with an older gay man, Robert Tyler--who, unknown to Brian, is a serial killer of the rich older women who are his home-decoration clients. Robert learns Janice's identity and rightly guesses that she and Brian are lovers. Convinced that, in time, Brian will become his lover, Robert begins to stalk Janice, determined to kill her. He stands on the deck outside her bedroom at night, plotting of how he will do it. As the friendship between Janice and Brian metamorphoses into an affair, Brian determinedly awakens the passionate woman hidden beneath Janice's cool exterior. Despite their affair, however, Janice feels more deeply in love with her husband than ever. As his condition worsens, she finds herself regretting all that she has deprived him of, in their marriage. When she realizes that she has fallen in love with Brian, Janice tries to break off their relationship, determined that she will not leave Douglas, nor allow him to become an impediment to their happiness. However, she finds that she cannot make the break. She and Brian determine that they will see each other when they can. When Douglas dies, Robert makes his move. His plan to kill both Janice and Brian not only fails to turn out as he expected, it also produces a surprising and poignant twist to this unconventional tale of a tender but sizzling love affair between two likeable, honest, passionate people.
Excerpt:
Janice McKenzie's husband is dying, and wealthy, reserved (some say priggish) Janice stumbles into an affair with a man twenty years younger and from an entirely different social set.
"Penny for your thoughts," she said.
They were lying on the mattress on the floor, their bodies still damp with perspiration, her loins filled with a sweet, bruised ache. He had been rougher than usual—and that, too, had excited her, as she would never have imagined possible.
"Promise not to laugh?"
"I don't think I could," she said. "My sides are still sore from laughing so much earlier."
"I was thinking, I wish we had lived some other time. You know, like in the days of King Arthur."
She sat up, smiling down at him. "That's rather amazing," she said. "I was thinking something like that about you a few days ago."
"Yeah? No kidding?"
"Well, at the time, I was thinking more like ancient Greece, but now that you mention it, I think you're right, knighthood-in-flower suits you better. Riding around on a great white horse, rescuing damsels in distress…."
"I like that part," he said, grinning.
He would have made a fine knight, too, she thought, with his boyish enthusiasm, his courage, his rampant masculinity. No fire-breathing dragon would have stood a chance. Nor, for that matter, she added, would any fair damsel.
She let her eyes move over the lean, hard length of his body, tracing one finger along the faint trail of coppery down that ran from beneath his navel to blossom below into a luxuriant bush, watched him immediately start to grow and stiffen. Really, he was inexhaustible.
Where did it come from, she wondered, this growing sensuality within her? Had it really been there all along, without her ever feeling it burn? She leaned over him, her hair brushing the muscular tautness of his belly, her lips kissing his ruby-colored crown. "If you're a knight in armor," she asked, "what am I?"
"In trouble," he said, his voice low and throaty, "if you keep that up."
"I like your…" she started to say, taking one into her hand, but "testicles" sounded so prissy, under the circumstances.
"My balls," he said, amused by her hesitance. "They're my balls, Janice. Haven't you ever played with a guy's balls before?"
"Honestly? No," she said.
She fondled first one and then the other. She had never so much as touched Douglas there, and she was surprised to find them so soft. Everything else male was so hard, wasn't it, and these wrinkled and down-covered globes seemed so delicate, so vulnerable. She ran a tongue over one of them. It tasted salty, the hair on it soft and wiry at the same time.
She came back to his member, rigid once again, pointing skyward, and took it in her hand, and moved her fingers up and down on it. That, too surprised her, the way it felt, so sleek, velvety almost. His cock, he called it, and she could see that, the way it stood up, rooster proud, red crowned. She said it aloud: "Cock."
"Suck it," he said, giving her head a gentle downward push. "Suck my cock. Please," he added.
She did, thinking that this, too, she had never done for Douglas, and surely he would have enjoyed it, as Brian was so obviously enjoying it, growing impossibly harder, his belly heaving up and down, his breath rasping.
As she was enjoying it herself. How sweet he tasted, unlike what she would have imagined—if she had ever imagined, but she had not. She loved the way it felt, slipping between her lips. She lifted her head and gazed at it fondly. Who could have imagined, what a wondrous thing it was.
"Oh, I know," she said aloud, "I'm Sleeping Beauty, I think, just starting to awaken."
He turned around on the mattress, apposite of her, and kissed the inside of her thigh, licking upward with his tongue. His soft laugh was like a purr. "Do you think this is how he woke her up?"
"It works for me," she said, and yielded to the gentle pressure of his hand on her head again, inhaling sharply as his mouth reached its goal.
"Your pussy," he said, in a voice like someone explaining to a child; and in some ways, she supposed she was. "I'm eating your pussy," and went back to it.
* * * * *
Later, both ravenous, they went out for cheeseburgers. "I haven't had one of those in years," she said, on the way back to the car.
"Seems to me like you've been missing out on a lot of good things," he said. "You should have met me a long time ago, if you ask me."
"And been arrested for child molestation," she said.
Despite the fact that it was nearly three in the morning, the street showed little sign of quieting down. If anything, it looked to her like the crowds had increased. Somehow, though, it all seemed less of a jangle to her now. They walked hand in hand, like a pair of smitten teenagers.
"What're you thinking?" he asked after a while.
"I was thinking, how very much you've changed my life since I met you."
"So? Was it so happy before?"
She thought about that for a moment. Had it been happy? She had always thought so. Well, not "happy," exactly. She'd always had a vague notion that "happy" was just a trifle vulgar, a little too showy.
Satisfaction was closer to what she had worked at. At least, she had worked at showing it, but really, that had been only another of her illusions, a guise that she put on for the sake of propriety. Unhappiness, dissatisfaction, frustration: they were for common folk. A lady was supposed to be above such things, wasn't she? Above showing them, anyway. Though she couldn't think why, now that she pondered it. It was just one of Aunt Eloise's lessons, drummed into her so long ago.
"No, I suppose it wasn't, now that I think of it," she said aloud. "Still, honestly, you're the last sort of person I would have expected to change it for me."
"Well, but, who would you expect to change it?" he asked. "Someone just like everybody else you've always known? It would have to be somebody like me, wouldn't it, somebody completely different?"
He was right, of course, She wondered how she could ever have considered him stupid, at the beginning. Because, he had been right all along. She had been wrong and he had been, oh, so right. For all his lack of sophistication or intellectualism, for all his, well, innocence in a sense, he had a wisdom all his own. The wisdom, certainly, to know right off what it was that she needed and yet, making of that truth not something dirty or unflattering, but making her need for his sexuality a compliment to her, a tribute to her womanness. Not her failing as a lady, but her right as a woman.
And he had known, too, that it wasn't just sex: that she needed him, his maleness, his instinct for her, his grasp of who and what she really was. He was a mirror, in which he had discerned her reflection before she had.
He had known with a confidence that had been unshakeable, that had withstood her rejection and her disinterest, even her disdain, had been man-certain that he was right, that in time she would come to see, would come to….
She stopped abruptly and found herself turning, right into his arms—his instincts at work again, ready for her every move? Or had he merely been walking that close, that the embrace was inevitable?
She looked up, meaning to say something, but the words died on her lips. She found herself instead plunging into the brown-green depths of his eyes, drowning in them.
Why, she thought, bewildered by the discovery, I've fallen in love with him. Something seemed to pierce her heart, a pain that was soft and gentle, and at the same time, thrillingly sweet, too.
"Right now," he said in a low, husky voice, looking down into her eyes, "I want you so bad I could just about throw you on the sidewalk and fuck you right here, and to hell with all these people."
She did not answer because she knew that she did not have to—knew that he could read in her eyes that she would not have objected if he had done what he said. That, indeed, she would have welcomed him with an animal heat to match his own.
* * * * *
They made it, in fact, as far as a doorway in an alley a few yards away, neither of them able to wait long enough to reach his friend's apartment, neither of them finding it necessary to put that into words.
They fucked standing up, frenziedly, desperately, like animals. She was shocked at herself, disgusted, even, and no more able to help herself than he was.
"Sorry," he said sheepishly afterward, "that wasn't one of my best."
She did not answer this time because, now that the urgency of the moment had passed, she was embarrassed to tell him that, for her, it had been.
And, the last. She had known from the moment of that other, shattering discovery, that this affair would have to end.
