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New Angeles, 2126….

Lily, the most
sought-after of all geisha submissives in the renowned Garden House, is about
to graciously decline yet another wealthy patron’s offer to become her Danna,
her Dom, when she discovers the man making the offer is Teven Vance. Heir to
the most important banking family in New Angeles, Vance was not only Lily's
first love as a young apprentice but the patron who purchased her virginity—the
night before he disappeared from her life.
 
Eight years later, he returns a self-made man to claim Lily as his own,
but military plots and political intrigues follow Lieutenant Colonel Teven
Vance of the Western Command, threatening the family and traditions that mean
everything to the woman he loves.
 
They
could even cost her life.

An
Excerpt From Erika
Masten’s

Flower-And-Willow In New Angeles

As soon as Teven
returned to the salon where he’d left Lily, where she now stood fully dressed
and facing the glass garden wall just as she had found him earlier in the
evening, she gathered her breath and her thoughts and wiped the telltale trails
of tears from her pale cheeks. For one absurd moment suspended from her pain,
Lily was grateful for the fine spray sealant keeping her geiko makeup in place.
She was already enough of a mess without streaky eyes and smeared lips.

“So you are a traitor,”
she said in a bitter gush of emotion, without turning to face him. “To The
Garden and to the Territories.” In that moment, she was no top class geiko but
a shell of herself. She held no poise or grace or peace at all. No art. Teven
Vance had made her a woman and a true geiko in one night, and now it felt like
he had unmade her in another.

He answered first with
a weary, cautiously measured breath, then said, “My mistake to forget that
teahouse walls all have ears.” A common saying, that the walls had ears but no
lips, knowing and keeping all secrets. From directly behind her, Teven asked,
“Do I get the chance to explain what you obviously overheard?”

When she spun furiously
to confront the man, Teven grabbed Lily by the shoulders and pulled her into
the hot crush of a kiss. His full lips, plump and silky, deftly pried hers open
for his tongue. The Dom’s kiss was not the one she remembered. Where her first
love had always begun gentle and coaxing before stirring both their passions to
greater hunger, this man kissed like he knew her and owned her, inside and out.
His broad, warm tongue danced along all the places inside her mouth that
tickled and wound her up like a spring. Then he laved slowly along her own
tongue to smooth her ruffled nerves back down into a pliant languor. When she
clenched her hands into fists on his chest and tried to shove him away, to
fight off the persuasion of this devouring intimacy, Teven shifted to loom over
her even more. His position over Lily made her arch her spine and tip her head
back and drink down the melting heat of his kiss.

Their bodies sealed
tight to one another, Lily felt both his manhood and her stomach stir. Her core
had not forgotten, not for a moment, the bliss of his unyielding cock inside
her. But the muscles of his chest, arms, abs…. These were all much firmer and
more defined than she remembered. This body was harder, fitter, so much more
powerful, but also lined with scars she could discern now and again through the
fine material of his clothing, when he shifted this or that way against her. As
traitorous as Teven himself, her lips itched to trace and taste and comfort his
healed wounds. Using that new strength, he lifted her like she weighed nothing
and drew her body up on tiptoes to fit the juncture of her thighs against his
mounting arousal. The threat of the pleasure he could inflict with his cock
very nearly made her forget the heartbreak he had now twice visited on her with
his disregard.

Only when Lily had
stopped pushing on him with her fists, had curled them protectively against her
own chest and closed her eyes and simply relented, did Teven slowly withdraw
from his onslaught with a last light scrape of teeth on her trembling lower
lip. Her lips and mouth tingling with the soft coppery spice and heat of his
lips and his mouth, Lily stepped back. She retreated until she was pressed
against the glass wall. Teven let her.

“You want to explain?”
she asked in a bitter rasp, then flashed her eyes up at him. She still held her
arms and fists crossed over breasts, like a shield, but she felt more like a
freezing child just hugging herself to keep from crying. Only half her anger,
she knew, came from Teven’s actions and the rest from his effect on her. The
effect she let him have on her. “I guess you must have a lot to tell me, from
what I’ve heard. I don’t think I even know who you are.”

She had almost added
anymore
, but it seemed tragically naïve
to assume that she had ever known him. Even tonight, part of her had been
willing to believe Teven Vance had come back to her, that his offer to become
her Danna had been sincere. When all along his return to The Garden had been a
cover for clandestine meetings with shady connections, for treason. Lily was
just a conveniently believable excuse to make use of the comms- and
surveillance-blocking technology that shielded the teahouse from the chaotic
electronic noise of the twenty-second century.

Lily hugged herself
tighter, stubbornly lowered her face, and glared up at Teven from beneath her
lashes. “Yes, let’s start with who you really are,
Colonel
,” she suggested.

The title brought Teven
subtly and reluctantly to attention, widening his chest as he shifted his
shoulders back and assumed his full height of 6’2”. After a moment, though he
wore a grave expression with lips pressed firmly closed, he gave a slight nod
of agreement. “It’s Lieutenant Colonel Teven J. Vance, actually. Western
Command, newly stationed in New Angeles, in charge of Mechanized Armor Team
Alpha of the Special Warfare Brigade.”

Teven narrowed his eyes
on Lily’s as he said this, obviously looking for a reaction. As much as Lily
wanted to deny him one, a hint of her wince peeked through along the corners of
her eyes and mouth, she knew. She didn’t need to be familiar with the specific
unit to recall years of news feeds lauding the exploits and mourning the high
casualty rates among mechanized armor divisions. The men, the carnage, the
victories earned only through what was to her unimaginable losses of life
verged on legendary.

Lily’s hesitant glance
flitted over Teven’s left oblique, his right shoulder, and finally his heart.
Teven’s gaze followed, surely recognizing the fact that she’s felt the scars
there.

“That makes no sense,”
she whispered, and even she thought she sounded pained. Indeed she was pained,
by confusion and by the thought of those wounds in the flesh of the man she had
loved, even if she had done so foolishly. “You’re the oldest son of
Parlan
Vance. Who joins the military when he’s the primary
heir to the biggest banking fortune in a city with the second largest economy
in the world? Who….?” She came close to letting her voice crack but steadied
herself with a breath and the feeling of smooth glass at her back, with the
thought of the serene garden beyond. “Who walks away from the New Angeles elite
to risk the kind of off-world death that… that….?”

Carefully tracing
Lily’s cheek with one finger, Teven offered, “The kind of death most
power-armored soldiers find on shithole asteroids or muddy, low-atmosphere
outposts?” She nodded, shivering at the thought and at his touch. “I didn’t do
it because I had disdain for the family wealth or a burning desire to fight
off-world. It was all about you, Lily.”

The geiko shook her
head as though she were hearing things. Again she said, “That makes no sense.
You left me, without even a goodbye. That night, you….” Now her voice did
crack. “You….”

Teven nodded, obviously
knowing exactly what she meant. “I took your virginity.”

“
Bought
my virginity,” she snapped. “Bought it and took it and
walked away, and now you want me to think the experience was special to you?
That you… you pined for me for the eight years you were gone without a single
word of explanation?”

Vance reclaimed that
breathing space he had allowed Lily, as he stepped up over her and pressed his
hands flat to the glass on either side of her. Sage and mint and musk assailed
her senses, lulling her even as Teven’s power and nearness set alarm bells off,
screaming in her head.

“I don’t think you can
tell me truthfully that you’d have preferred to have a man who cared nothing
for you or even a perfect stranger escort you up the Fourth Step,” he said in a
gentle murmur that nonetheless held an affronted edge in the harder syllables.

Escorting her up the
Fourth Step…. The poetic euphemism for the auctioning of a geiko’s virginity
just before she began to train with the Fourth Step geisha to fully serve the sexual
fantasies of her clients. The prohibitively expensive training, housing, and
costuming of a geiko were not the only reasons for this. Even more than her
surrender to a particular patron, the experience was about surrender to the
erotic arts, or at least that was the intention. For Lily, all that had
mattered was that she was giving herself at last to the young man she had
fallen in love with over the previous two years, over wordless glances and tea
ceremonies, over innocent flirtation and increasingly intimate encounters
until….

“Did you know?” Lily
asked with a choking breath. “When you bid in the auction that night and you
took my virginity, did you know all the time that you were leaving before dawn
and not coming back?”

“I was always coming
back, Lily.”

“Did you know?”

“Yes.”

You can buy Flower-And-Willow In New Angeles now at your
favorite online retailer.

For a full list of Erika Masten titles, including short
erotica, see her website at
http://erikamasten.com
.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m
the girl next door with an unexpectedly wicked mind (and an addiction to sexy
high heels). There’s nothing quite like the thrill of turning forbidden desires
and secret fantasies into erotic romances with literary flare and a dirty
mouth. Let me tell you a very naughty love story…

Erika
Masten

Email:
[email protected]

Web
Site:
http://erikamasten.com

Blog:
http://erikamasten.blogspot.com

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