Spank Me Hard! … Please?

For a very limited number of days this week, my novella, The Case of the Disciplined Valentine, is available for FREE on Amazon for ereader devices. As you can see from the screen shot below, it’s currently doing quite well.

Disclaimer: The Case of the Disciplined Valentine, with minor changes, is the same novella as previously published in the Lust in Lace anthology, as Sir MacRath Thrashes his Valentine. If you have already purchased the anthology in ebook or audio book, then there is no need to purchase it again… unless you want to financially support me. 🙂

A comedy of Victorian manners mixed with delicious spankings and sexual encounters guaranteed to raise even a vampire’s blood pressure. Byron Cane sets a torrid pace in his historical paranormal erotic novella.

It is 1854 in steampunk London, and Sir Nachton MacRath is warily returning to his home isle after decades abroad. He has good reasons to steer clear of the Royal Family, but is immediately snared by the Queen herself, who anoints him, Her Chastiser of Loose Morals, complete with elevation to the upper reaches of the aristocracy. Rather than a quiet existence as a vampire, he is now a Peer uneasily rubbing shoulders with the most powerful men in the Empire.

Phoebe Hayward is a lady of good breeding, but like all her contemporaries, longs for some excitement and romance. Valentine’s Day is only weeks away, when their paths cross with a bump. Despite later discovering the man ordered to discipline her is actually a vampire, she can’t help falling in love. The more encounters with Sir MacRath she has, the more her body yearns to know what it is to submit to his vampiric touch. When he reluctantly agrees to be her Valentine, thus begins a Domination and discipline the likes of which she’s never dreamed.

MacRath doesn’t feel he deserves Phoebe’s love, and attempts to push her away by taking her deeper into sexual submission. She surprises him — and herself — by eagerly submitting to his every desire. Together, they explore the sensual heights that a woman and a man — a vampire — can reach. But politics and conflict are never far away, and the Valentine’s Day deadline comes all too soon.

xx

Prologue

For the first time in ten days, the steady ‘thump-thump’ of the engines and boiling thrashing of the magnificent side-mounted paddle wheels fell silent. The harbor pilot called down to the tug.Thus began the ancient and primal ballet of man versus water as seasoned hands strove to bring the steamer from America into safe mooring. As it docked, heavy hemp hawsers and thick bollards were tossed over the side to waiting stevedores. The shrill triumphant shriek of the steam whistle echoed among the emigration sheds where the starving poor sought passage to a new life in the former colonies. Vast clouds of slate gray and white gulls took flight as the noise reduced the raucous calls of workers to pantomime.

The blast faded and the flocks swooped to await handouts from the new arrivals. A crowd had gathered to meet the arriving ship. Touts held up placards bearing names of lodging and dining establishments. Open steam carriages emblazoned with coats-of-arms and commercial enterprises chuffed impatiently quayside, uniformed chauffeurs chatting amiably with gloved hands held over barrels of flame. A late arrival coasted silently to a stop along the quay. The pennants on the front bumper proudly waved the Three Lions of the House of Hanover. Eyebrows rose: no Royal had been listed on the telegraphed manifest.

At the gangplank’s head, Sir Nachton MacRath waited to debark, nose wrinkled in protest. The tide had reached slack, raw sewage and industrial offal collecting in rotted mats along the banks of the River Mersey. After eighteen years away, on this fifteenth day of January, in the Year of Our Lord 1854, he prepared to once again set foot on his native soil. Well, to be precise, tarred oak planks covered with guano and rubbish. Six months removed from San Francisco, he was glad to be finally back, although unsure of his welcome. He had run afoul of the Regent in late 1835 and, despite repeated assurances from the Queen in the following decades, he had decided instead to tour the Near East and China.

By fortuitous timing, MacRath had sailed from the Sandwich Islands to the sparsely populated lands of Northern California (still Mexican, for a short while longer) in 1848. The subsequent fortune he’d created during the Gold Rush was not from water blasting the hillsides, but from parlaying the exotic nature of his Scottish title into land and mercantile trade for the arriving miners.