Just two weeks before After Hours on Milagro Street, my first book in my new small-town, high-heat, Latinx series comes out, I’m thrilled to announce that I have a short and sexy audio-story called Touch Me available on the podcast Read Me Romance (check out listening links below). Read Me Romance is a free weekly podcast hosted by New York Times bestselling authors Alexa Riley and Tessa Bailey that features a free romance audiobook.
Even more exciting is that audiobook queen Stacy Gonzalez is the narrator!!! Stacy has narrated the audiobook for After Hours on Milagro Street, so you can get a free awesome preview of her work by listening to Touch Me. If you go to the Read Me Romance website, you can also enter a giveaway for a signed copy of After Hours of Milagro Street and Lush Money.
Narrated by Stacy Gonzalez. See below for listening links.
Marisol Gutierrez had it all – an amazing husband, great kids, and a successful investment firm. But when you’ve got it all, you’ve got it all to lose, and the stress she’s trying to manage all on her own is why she cries in her corner office for an exact half hour every Thursday before her one-hour massage with the best hands in San Francisco.
When the hands touch her body this Thursday, however, they’re not the hands of her masseuse. Instead, it’s the huge superhero hands of movie star Ray Morgan, her newest client and a man whose desire to take care of her has made him harder and harder to resist.
This fantasy massage story was so fun to write! Here’s a little excerpt:
Marisol Gutierrez had it all.
That’s what everyone told her.
Head of her own wildly successful investment fund, a husband who loved her to his mild-mannered Midwestern bones, two talented and thriving children, and a cadre of employees, friends, family, and organizations who valued her and needed her.
Even her dog, her little brother teased her, was perfect. A perfectly behaved and adorable junkyard mutt.
But what she never told anyone – no journalist or entertainment news reporter or business associate or friend or, even, her staunchly supportive husband – was that having it all meant bearing it all. It all was in your possession. Your safekeeping. It meant you were a possessor of all of these loving, beautiful, smart, talented, valuable entities full of potential and if you dropped one of them – if you got frigging exhausted and it went tumbling out of your over-burdened arms – then…well….
Marisol didn’t like to think about the “then well.”
Instead, Marisol Gutierrez allowed herself a good, hard, half-hour cry every Thursday evening in her corner office’s private bathroom, then she washed her face, took off her clothes, and emerged promptly at 6 p.m. for her one-hour massage with Rhondel. Marisol paid handsomely for the best hands in San Francisco. While Marisol cried, Rhondel set up his massage table, pulled the shades on her floor-to-ceiling windows, and lit aromatherapy candles, all in blessed, undemanding silence. In fact, Rhonda never uttered a word except the rare times that they would grab a drink after the massage, when her husband was at his class and the kids were busy with their own plans.
So when Marisol stepped out into her elegant office, she was fine that she was still hiccupping a little, her face blotchy and her eyes red. She knew Rhondel, tinkering behind the screen he set up, would say nothing. Marisol breathed in the light scent of sandalwood (her favorite) and crossed to the massage table.
She took off her robe, slid between the warmed heavy flannel sheets, and laid her face into the doughnut at the end of the table that allowed her to keep her spine straight. She inhaled deep, then let it all out. For one hour, she’d put her worries and anxieties and terrors into Rhondel’s capable hands.
“I’m ready,” she called, closing her eyes.
She heard him come around the screen and stop at the head of the table. Big male hands pressed against her flannel-covered back. A greeting. She smiled, eyes still closed, breathing deeply. His hands rose up and down with her breaths. That was different, but she liked it.
He circled to her side and folded the sheet down to expose her naked back, picked up her arm, and placed it back down to trap the sheet just above her ass. His touch felt more tentative than normal. Rhondel had worked on her glutes when she’d been deluded enough to train for a marathon; they weren’t shy with each other.
She heard the snick of a bottle, the rub of palms warming up the massage oil. He stood at the head of the table again.
The instant the man put his hands on her shoulder blades and slid them down the planes of her back, Marisol knew this wasn’t Rhondel.
Her head shot up, out of the doughnut.
She was looking directly into the world-famous bedroom eyes of Hollywood superstar Ray Morgan.