Candlemoth: A Holy City Romance
By Pauline West
Genre: Steamy New Adult, Romance
BLURB
A bold and independent free spirit from the foster system of small town South Carolina, Lily is a survivor with skeletons in her closet. She knows what she wants and how to get it. And a spoiled rich playboy is not part of her plan- but Ry is irresistible.
Steamy, exciting and beautifully written, this dramatic romance will appeal to fans of Sylvia Day.
Book One in the Holy City Romance series about a wild and fun-loving group of twenty-somethings in Charleston, South Carolina.
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BLURB
“The masterpiece of my life was having learned how to glass myself inward, burying my heart so deep I didn’t even know where it was buried.” - Lily Inoue Lily is a bold, passionate free thinker from small town South Carolina. Fiercely self reliant, the same strength that helped Lily survive a traumatic upbringing makes it difficult for her to trust anyone, especially Ry Calhoun. When Ry’s political obligations and Lily’s rising notoriety in Charleston threaten their relationship, Lily arrives into her most reckless act yet- and at incredible cost. The scorching second installment in the Holy City Romance series of steamy romance novels about a wild, fun-loving group of twenty-somethings in Charleston, South Carolina.
GOODREADS ♥♥ BUY LINK
The only way this lush, ultra-deluxe festivity gets any nicer is if you can get Ry to hand-churn while you watch.
Place glasses in the freezer to chill for 30 minutes.
Make out wildly on the kitchen counter.
Pour ice cream, milk, ice cubes, bourbon and chocolate syrup into a blender and whirl.
Try before you pour- the milkshake should be thick enough to be fed to you by Ry with a spoon, so if it seems thin, add more ice cream and blend again while Ry wraps you up in his arms.
Download the Candlemoth series, pull out glasses. Serve with spoons.
Lock the door... and enjoy.
EXCERPT - CANDLEMOTH #1
I fitted my leg around Ry’s so that there was nothing between us but my panties and his linen pants, and he kissed me so savagely it sucked the air from my chest.
Oh, I wanted him deep inside me.
“I want to get on my knees for you,” Ry said, and everything in me tightened at the cultured, raspy purr of his voice.
“I think I’d like to see you on your knees,” I said, my voice raw and strange.
Ry, paused, smiling, his eyes slitted with lust. He kissed me differently then, with slow, lush slides of his tongue that made me ache to feel his mouth between my legs.
“Mm…”
His fingers curved roughly down around the front of my thigh, pushing the silky fabric of my dress up as he hunted towards my panties, lingering at the hem teasingly. His eyes danced, watching mine, as I moaned. My hips curled towards his and I felt the tips of his fingers slip beneath my panties.
I was the wettest I’d been in all my life, as if the whole center of me had melted into hot, silky lava. I cried out, pressing into his touch, plunging Ry’s fingers deep inside me, and he began to stroke with searing accuracy, the expression on his face both hot and tender.
“Ohhh,” I said, hanging from his sweet mouth. I stared up at the stars, crying out as their light slurred down over us.
I felt a fullness in me beginning to build, felt myself dizzily falling back, but Ry caught me in his other arm, propping me there against the wall as he drove his fingers into me again and again, rhythmic, relentless. His knuckles bit perfectly into my clit as he worked the tiny apple of sensitive flesh inside me. I almost screamed, feeling my orgasm flood forwards.
“You want to come for me?” Ry murmured, pressing his face into my hair possessively. I bit his shoulder, trying to stifle my cries. This sweet, layered agony-
“I want to come for you,” I gasped, “Please, please.”
“Come for me, Lily,” Ry said, pressing himself close as his fingers continued to work inside me, and I let the sensation crash through the gates of me, washing through again and again as I fell bonelessly against him, jerking a little with the aftershocks.
Ry smiled wolfishly, his eyes pale in the moonlight, their contrast delicious beneath his dark tan, his dark eyebrows. I thrilled again at how little there was between us, even as it terrified me how helplessly I’d fallen for him. I threw my arms around Ry’s neck, burying my face in his soft hair, locking my legs around his waist.
“You could make me do anything you want,” I said, softly.
He pinned me back against the wall again, his eyes shining. The fullness of his cock against me sent another shockwave through my body, and I leaned back, shivering with his touch, looking up at him.
“I’m drunk with you,” I whispered.
Ry began to grind into me, moaning in a low, strangled voice that made all the hair on my body lift with arousal. We kissed again so hungrily I thought we’d slide down and fuck there on the rough cobble stones.
But he put me down gently and led me by the hand through the gate. I followed, tugging my dress down. We were laughing soundlessly again, still a little breathless, and when we stopped at the door, Ry held his hand to his face and closed his eyes, breathing in the smell of me on his hand.
His eyes rolled slightly with pleasure, and then he bumped open the door with his hip, tugging me inside.
The silence of the house instantly folded around us. It felt different to kiss him there, in that unfamiliar dark. Ry lifted me off my feet against him and then sat me onto the kitchen counter, burying his face against my breasts. He squeezed my breasts savagely, until they began to feel heavy and swollen. Then he bit and sucked at my nipples through the wet silk of my dress.
The hot darts of pain made me hiss with lust.
“I need to make you come again, Lily,” he said, his hands forcing insistently between my thighs.
“I can’t, I can’t so soon,” I said, trying to close my legs, but he forced them apart with a strength that just rode the edge of violence. Ry sank his face into me hungrily, taking my hips firmly into his hands, the pressure from his fingers spreading my flesh so that the center of me was all the more bared to him as he opened his mouth against me.
I gasped, so slippery wet that I was soaked all down my thighs, my body begging to sheath him even as it couldn’t take any more arousal. My senses were so exquisitely tortured that I was afraid I’d pee on his lovely, hard-sculptured face.
But Ry’s tongue began to work in expert, slow circles against my clit. One of his hands found its way warmly between my thighs, drawing me tight, stretching me raw. I bucked against his face, my hands clawing at the counter.
“Please please no,” I said, “I can’t, I can’t take this-”
Ry held me steady, the hot, hard velvet of his tongue relentless against my swollen achy flesh, his eyes locking on mine greedily. My nerves sizzled raw. I felt microscopic shooting stars race up the insides of my thighs as he stroked at me continually, restlessly, brinking me to orgasm, letting me slide back down again. I was panting with lust, both our bodies misted wet with sweat. I could see droplets of it on my bared thighs, on the backs of his forearms, his neck.
Ry’s eyes glinted mischievously; he knew exactly what he was doing to me.
That turned me on all the more, even as it made me wildly jealous to know all the women he must have perfected his skills on. Every dial on my body was cranked farther than I’d ever dreamed I could go. The bliss of it was tortuous, unending. With every raw swirl of my nerves, I felt myself sucked all the deeper into his orbit, losing any control I’d ever imagined I’d had.
And then finally, Ry Calhoun decided to let me come. He sucked me up to the precipice of orgasm again, but this time dropped me over the edge with a hard lick. He stuck his tongue inside me as I came in a long, rolling orgasm around him.
“Oh god, oh god-” My cries were animal now, my body so wet that I slid on the counter. Ry dug further into me, his fingers opening me deeply. The effect was shattering. I lost my mind, bucking wildly, and almost blacked out with pleasure. He lifted my legs up onto the counter so I was securely supported as I pulsed hard and then began to sob, utterly released.
Ry moved his face back and forth as light as a butterfly on my thighs, tracing up my electrically lit body with his mouth, pausing gently at my tortured breasts, and then again at my lips.
As I curled inwards, he leaned over me, kissing me sweetly while I sobbed with relief, the gentleness of his kisses smoothing my ragged sense while his hands continued to stroke me lightly. After a moment, he pulled back, biting his lips, as if tasting me again. I looked up at him, too limp to move or speak.
“Now,” he said, “I’m going to fuck you to death.”
I couldn’t even speak English anymore.
I shook my head, trying to move away from him and his vampiric ecstasy. But even as I was overcome, I still felt a clawing, insatiable need for his body. Ry was like some unnameable drug; I was hopelessly addicted.
He began to unbutton his shirt, revealing the tight cut of his abdominals and upper arms. The immediate bolt of lust I felt for his touch drove home how much he already owned me. Ry tossed his shirt to one side, pulling me by one leg open to him again, and undid his pants.
His cock was enormous.
“I’m going to make you come so hard you can’t walk,” Ry said, darkly, pulling me into him like a slack doll. “You’ll have to stay here with me. Then I’m gonna nail you all morning...” His mouth on mine was like hot stone, and I couldn’t resist kissing him back, feeling myself heat up for him all over again as he slid me down to his cock. He ran his thumb inside me again, drawing my skin taut so savagely that I cried out and fell against him, raw and exquisitely stretched.
I throbbed with grinding lust, pulling myself upright again.
“Come fuck me.”
Ry drove himself inside me with a force that made me see stars, fitting his mouth over mine in one of his hungry, soul-sucking kisses, and I wanted all of it; I wanted him to batter me loose, fuck me to death, I didn’t care.
It felt so good that I couldn’t feel anything of myself anymore except a sheer, shooting, bodiless pleasure.
Our bodies were both drenched now, and it felt so good to clutch his hard, naked skin, to see the flash of his tattoo under my hand as I rode his thick cock to Kingdom Come. I let my head fall back, wanging it hard on the cupboards, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except-
I heard someone clear his throat in the doorway.
My eyes snapped open.
Silhouetted in the dim light from the street, an old man stood in the kitchen doorway. He was coolly drinking a cup of tea, his robe loosely belted so I could see the crisp white hair on his chest; his face was craggy and seamed from a lifetime of too much sun and rich food.
Even though his thick white hair was crazed on one side, as if he’d been unable to sleep and now was wandering aimlessly around the mansion, I recognized his face from the oil portrait I’d seen the day before.
Mr. Calhoun.
He was watching us as if we were stray dogs he’d caught fucking in his house for the thirtieth time. “Christ, another one?” Mr. Calhoun said, finally. He went back out into the hallway.
Another one.
What did I expect?
But my heart sank through the floor and dissolved. I was humiliated.
I’d been more emotionally exposed than I’d ever felt in my life- and just as suddenly, all the new flowerings in me folded up and died off.
I shoved Ry away, trying to cover myself with the damp ruins of my dress. But Ry had already half-turned, zipping up his pants hastily in a way that filled me with disgust.
“Dad-!” Ry said, rushing after him. Then, torn, he whirled in the doorway, heading back towards me. “Lily, wait here. Dad!”
But I was already out the door.
Ry chased me outside. “Please, please, you don’t understand. He didn’t mean it like it sounded-”
I was crying, and furious with myself for crying. “I do, I understand you perfectly. You just want-you just wanted to get laid.”
Ry tried to kiss me, to take me into his arms. I wouldn’t let him.
“Baby, don’t you remember any of the things we’ve said? How I’ve made you feel?” Ry said. “I know you feel this, too, I know you do, I could feel it. Everything in you answers everything in me, Lily. You keep forgetting all of that whenever something-”
“Bullshit! I can’t believe anything you say! I can’t believe any of this; I don’t know who the fuck you are- why are you being so fucking nice to me, anyway? I don’t like people doing things for me, remember? You know why? Because I can’t fucking trust anybody! I don’t trust you, I can’t, I won’t!”
Somehow, I was screaming.
“Lily, enough!” His voice cracked my name like a pistol shot. I felt my body respond to the command in his voice, instantly hating myself for it.
“Don’t. Just don’t. All right?” I said.
“At least let me walk you to your-”
“Don’t fucking touch me. I don’t want you to follow me, I don’t want you to touch me. Leave me alone!”
I ran into the dark.
I drove home with all my windows down, needing air in my face.
Cold, clean air. Hungry black air. Anything to wash away the electricity, the unrelenting connection that still remained like an
unbroken thread between me and Ry Calhoun. No matter how far away I was from him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pauline is a bookworm, trail runner and bourbon lover. Her hobbies include mild hypochondria and ill-advised matchmaking.
Visit Pauline's Website
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