A Taste of Passion (Sweet Temptation Book 1) is released today.
This is the blurb: When baking entrepreneur Trudy Cole falls for celebrity chef Bill Hart, all is far from sweetness and light. Instead passion, betrayal and ambition makes for an explosive mix in the high stakes game of gourmet dining.
Trudy Cole is an aspiring chef with ambitions to own her own patisserie. When she encounters celebrity chef Bill Hart she finds the older man antagonistic but disconcertingly attractive. Sexual chemistry soon boils to an unbearable temperature and they become lovers.
But Trudy’s affair and ambitions for her own business become too hot to handle when she discovers that Bill has a wife. To make matters worse, her business partner and ardent admirer, Donny, threatens to destroy her patisserie and Bill Hart’s reputation.
At a stately home where Trudy wants to woo investors with her culinary masterpieces, the paths of all three players cross again and the heat is turned up to a much higher setting…
The following passage comes from early on in the story, when Trudy and Bill first meet:
It was only when the lights came back on that Trudy remembered William
Hart was attractive. Disturbingly attractive. Admittedly, he was old enough to
be her father. Taking into account the lined face and steel-grey hair she
figured he was in his late forties or early fifties. But his age seemed
immaterial.
He was hot.
There was a timeless quality to William Hart that
she had noticed when he delivered the seminar at her university. His diamond
blue eyes shone with bright enthusiasm. His smile, set in a square and manly
jaw, glinted with a boyish promise of inappropriate mischief. At the university
she had thought he was physically imposing but, at the time, she had ascribed
that to the fact he was standing on a podium, wearing a generously-cut suit
beneath a double-breasted tweed overcoat. Now she could see his substantial
presence came, not from his clothes, but from his broad and manly chest and his
considerable height. From what she could glimpse beneath his white shirt and dark
sport jacket, there didn’t appear to be any excess fat on his lean frame.
Her heartbeat had been slowing back to its normal
rhythm.
The realisation that she was alone in Boui-Boui with the desirable William
Hart sent it racing again. Muscles deep in her loins began to tingle with
wanton and unbidden anticipation. She desperately willed herself to stop
brooding on his handsomeness. He was likely married or in a relationship and
she told herself it should be obvious that a man of his years would have no
interest in her.
“This way,” he said, extending a hand.
She allowed him to hold her fingers, thrilling to
his touch and hoping he couldn’t see that she was mesmerised at being in the
presence of a respected idol. When he led her toward the kitchen she felt self-conscious
about every step and how he might interpret her movements.
If she walked too close to him would he think she
was needy or infatuated by his celebrity? If she stayed too far away would he
think she had no interest in him? Or that she didn’t know who he was? Would it
be less complicated, she wondered, to simply embrace him and devour him with
kisses so he could see that she worshipped him?
That final idea made her smile.
It also made the muscles in her loins clench a
little more hungrily.
***
For those of you who haven't yet read any of my fiction, copies of
Beyond Temptation and
Dragon Desire (written under the pseudonym Lisette Ashton) are currently available as free Kindle downloads from amazon.co.uk. If you get a chance to look at either of them I'm sure you'll enjoy.
