Passionate Pleasures

Bertrice Small
is a
New York Times
bestselling author and the recipient of numerous awards. In keeping with her profession, Bertrice Small lives in the oldest English-speaking town in the state of New York, founded in 1640. Her light-filled studio includes the paintings of her favorite cover artist, Elaine Duillo, and a large library. Because she believes in happy endings, Bertrice Small has been married to the same man, her hero, George, for forty-seven years. They have a son, Thomas, a daughter-in-law, Megan, and four wonderful grandchildren. Longtime readers will be happy to know that Nicki the Cockatiel flourishes along with his housemates: Finnegan, the long-haired, bad, black kitty; and Sylvester, the black-and-white tuxedo cat, who is the official family bad cat.

My dear Readers:

I am very happy to tell you that there will be one more book in the “Pleasures” series. Tentatively titled
Guilty Pleasures
, it is an anthology, and will be out in the summer of 2011.

I thought rather than telling you one story with one heroine and her adventures in The Channel, I would tell you five wickedly erotic little tales. The heroines involved are all, except one, characters you have met in previous books.

There is Carla from
Private Pleasures
, Tiffany and Nina from
Sudden Pleasures
, and J.P. from
Forbidden Pleasures.
The new character is Maureen Kelly, a nanny hired by Emilie Shann Devlin, my heroine from
Forbidden Pleasures.
Nanny Mo, as she is known to her charges, has a thing for brawny Celtic Warriors.

I hope you have enjoyed
Passionate Pleasures
, and that you will look forward to
Guilty Pleasures
in 2011. God bless and good reading from your most faithful author,

Bertrice Small

K
athryn St. John, pronounced
Sin Gin,
could still see forty in her rearview mirror.
But just
. Still, for a woman of her years she remained amazingly youthful. She was tall, standing five-foot-ten in her bare feet. She was slender without being thin. She had breasts and hips and a butt that had caused more wet dreams among men of a certain age than could be imagined. Her features were elegant: with a heart-shaped face; a long, slim nose; and surprisingly sensual lips, which needed no enhancement. Her eyes were the green of a summer forest, and while she wore it in a proper, neat chignon, her hair was still the red-gold she had been born with though whether the color was enhanced now no one knew for certain. Her voice was low and melodious. Her smile quick and sexy.

Many people in her own generation said she looked like Suzy Parker, a famous 1950s model. Kathy had heard that her entire life, and had always been flattered by it. As a teen she had admired the glamorous flame-haired beauty turned actress, who was often quoted as saying that as a model she was nothing more than an animated clothes hanger. It indicated to her a woman of common sense with a solid grip on reality. But then reality was for those who lacked imagination. And if there was one thing Kathryn St. John had in abundance, it was imagination. A very active imagination.

She supposed that, kept in check, an imagination was a good thing for a librarian to have. Miss Kathy, as she was known to her staff, was Egret Pointe’s librarian. It was a position to which she had been born. Since her great-great-grandfather had built the library in 1895, all its librarians had been St. John women. There was nothing written into the bylaws of the library corporation that said that had to be so. But it was tradition, and the St. John women had all proved most satisfactory in their duties.

Kathryn St. John had thought she might be the last of the St. John women to manage the library, for her older brother had been late to marry. But then at the age of forty Hallock Kimborough St. John V had found himself a wife. A very young wife, Debora, who had so far produced five little St. Johns—twin boys and three girls—and was newly pregnant with a sixth. Kathryn was rather surprised to find her brother so invested in his paternity, for she had always thought him a bit stuffy and selfish. She couldn’t quite imagine Hallock having sex or in the throes of unbridled passion. But she had to admit that he was a very good father and a devoted husband. Go figure.

At least she didn’t have to live with him. When she had taken up her position at the library twenty years ago, Honeysuckle Cottage had become hers. Great-aunt Lucretia, the previous librarian, had never retired, but at that time Hallock was unmarried, so Kathryn had continued living at home even as she pretended to be the assistant librarian. Her great-aunt spent most of her days asleep in a rocking chair behind the checkout counter while Kathryn attended to library business.

Great-aunt Lucretia had been her grandfather’s elder sister, born in 1898. She had become librarian of the Egret Pointe Library at the age of twenty. Her fiancé had been killed in the war, and so she devoted her life tending to her family’s gift to the town. The St. Johns were after all among Egret Pointe’s founders. It was the family’s duty, having founded the library, to see it was well maintained and as well run as a St. John would do it.

And so Lucretia Kimborough St. John had remained at her post until she quietly passed away one summer’s afternoon in her rocker behind the checkout counter. She was ninety-two. And with her quiet death the library board had officially hired Kathryn St. John as the town librarian at a salary of one dollar a year, as was customary since the St. Johns all had private incomes.

Kathryn would have worked at the library for free because Honeysuckle Cottage came with the job, and she had waited her whole life to possess it. Set on a half acre of gardens directly behind the library building, the cottage was a replica of an idealized English cottage. It had been built in the same year as the library to house Miss Victoria Kimborough St. John, the first librarian. Everything in the cottage had been original when Kathryn St. John came into possession of it. She had waited another year before moving into it while the electric and plumbing were brought up to code, the chimneys cleared of decades of birds’ nests. And she had kept it up to date ever since.

Honeysuckle Cottage was a whitewashed structure decorated with vertical light-colored wooden strips and standing two stories tall. The second story overhung the first just slightly. It was typical of cottages found in the Southeast of England. It had a fine slate roof although if it had been totally original, it would have had a thatched roof, the peak and eaves decorated with a design. Its leaded paned casement windows swung out when opened. There were two brick chimneys. The larger could be seen on the outside at one end of the cottage. The other came up through the roof at the other end of the building. An ancient honeysuckle vine climbed over the roof of the entrance to the house and around it. The oak front door had a leaded paned glass window shaped like a beehive.

Inside, the cottage had a charming parlor with a fireplace on one side of the central hall. On the other side was a small dining room with a second fireplace. The kitchen ran across the back of the cottage and had a hearth with an old-fashioned oven to one side of it. There was also a little powder room. On the second floor the cottage contained a large bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom. First-time visitors being given a tour of Honeysuckle Cottage were always surprised by the bathroom, which was light and airy with—among other accouterments—a bidet, a large garden tub, and a glassed-in shower.

Kathryn St. John might have been the town’s librarian, but she liked her comforts and could afford to indulge herself, and she did.

She might have married. She was beautiful, and had money. But Kathryn St. John was an independent woman, and she liked it that way. She took several little vacations a year, flying to places like Paris or Dublin. She had been to Rio and to Venice for carnival, climbed Mont Blanc, traversed the Great Wall for several miles; and done a walk-about in the Outback of Australia. She chartered a private sailing yacht to cruise the Caribbean for a week, and even spent ten days at The Channel Corporation’s Island Spa, where its manager, Fyfe MacKay, had proved a most satisfactory lover.

She knew his uncle, of course, for he had briefly been her first lover. Nicholas was a charming man, and while obviously much older than she was, no virgin had ever had a grander introduction to pure unadulterated sex than Kathryn St. John had had. It had been Nicholas who had introduced her to The Channel, and cajoled her into presenting a few of her friends and acquaintances with it. She often wondered what their lives would have been like without The Channel. Most women kept it for a time, but then gave it up. Kathryn St. John wasn’t one of those women. The Channel allowed her to retain the independence she never meant to give up.

She had taken some of her favorite novels to translate into fantasy adventures. Just last night it had been
The Three Musketeers.
Kathryn loved playing the role of Milady St. Jean, and she played it to the hilt, enjoying every moment of the passionate pleasures she obtained from her lovers. She had programmed her remote, and suddenly she found herself quite naked and in bed, the man atop her fucking her quite vigorously.

“
Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!
Is there anything finer than a lascivious noble whore?” He groaned as he sank himself deep into her steaming cunt.

“Only a libidinous musketeer with a long, thick, randy cock,” Kathryn answered, laughing. She wrapped her slender legs about his sturdy torso. “Go deeper, Porthos, and harder. You know how I like it,
cherie.
”

“Will you scream for me, milady?” he asked softly, brushing her mouth with his own. His dark eyes were alight, the mocking smile touching his lips beneath his small, neat, dark moustache. He was so deliciously dangerous, she thought, as he rode her harder.

“Can you make me scream, Porthos?” she taunted, her fingers caressing the thick nape of his neck and sending chills down his spine. Make me scream,
cherie.
”