I first met Maryn in the Erotica subforum at Absolute Write. She is a lovely lady, with a wicked sense of humour, and rock solid common sense. She is also, now, a fellow Loose Id author. 😀 Here’s her stuff!
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Thanks for having me, Kate. (My mom would be so pleased I remembered my manners.) I’m Maryn Blackburn, author of Brick by Brick, a ménage à trois novel published by Loose Id. Here’s what it’s about:

Natalie and her husband James, who runs a Tucson masonry firm, are happy enough despite business being in a continued slump. After nearly a decade, their sex life has less spark than it once did. They’ve idly talked about a threesome, although they cannot imagine who (or how) they could ask. It’s a spicy fantasy until the night they attend a party where handsome actor Gage Strickland needs another guy to rescue him from his adoring fans, all of them women.

After two bottles of first-rate wine, their fantasy becomes a reality, but not the one Natalie imagined. She is not the object of two adoring men, one of them faceless and conveniently disappearing when the loving’s done. Instead, the other man is the gorgeous Gage, he’s the one in the middle–and what does that make James?

Because she loves her husband, she accepts his new reality. Their intimacy is refreshed, their needs like newlyweds’ as the days pass waiting for Gage’s call, until they can only conclude he never will. They were a one-night stand.

Gage does return, seeking not just sex but a relationship, although he has no idea how they work. He has his reasons for choosing sex with strangers in the past, since they’ve been eager to do what Gage wants for the bragging rights. Now he’s inclined to leave at the first sign of trouble rather than working through it.

Tripped up by Gage, the ménage stumbles often but continues. Natalie soon fears her James prefers Gage over her. There’s one thing Gage won’t do in the bedroom, but is her willingness enough to hold onto her husband? Or will Gage sabotage the whole thing before they reach that point?

I hope I haven’t told too much, but it’s probably like telling you Dorothy makes it back from Oz. You know how it’s going to play out, just not the details. Like Mom said, the adventure is in the journey, not the destination.

Oh, and the one question which will come up? Yes, Gage is based on a real actor, although it doesn’t matter who. But know this: A book that starts out as the worst sort of fan fiction, imagining your life intersecting with an actor’s and what might happen next, can become something richly complete and entirely free of him and yourself. I actually prefer Gage to the man he’s based on, since I got to mold him. The actor refuses to let me do the same for him, as if he had the right to control his own life. Imagine that!

Excerpt:

“You’re an actor too?” Gage sat straighter, his expression freshly attentive.

I rarely saw James flush with pride, not even when customers gushed about his artistic masonry. “Just TV ads.” He drank. “None lately.” He lifted himself from the recliner with a little groan, then added another log to the fire and prodded it to life.

“They still show his cotton ads,” I said. “Putting on a T-shirt. Taking a pair of jeans off the clothesline and smelling them, and the camera goes back and you can see there must be hundreds of pairs. Flopping onto this big bed and the sheets puff up around him. My sister thought that one was dirty, the expression on his face.”

Gage was a good audience, listening more than talking, laughing a lot when I blurted whatever was in my head without thinking first. Time glided past rapidly. Gage moved to refill my glass; I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea. I asked James with my eyes if I was doing all right.

“Go ahead, Nat,” he said. I knew that lazy smile. He wasn’t drunk, just uninhibited, loose to the nth degree. Some of our best sex included that look—and some of James’s best TV ads did too. “It’s a party, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Gage filled my glass halfway before the bottle emptied. “A good party.”

“With only three, I think we have to call it an intimate gathering,” James said.

Gage’s smile dazzled. “Do I open the next one?”

What the hell. “If you like your gatherings really intimate,” I said.

“I think she wants you to stay,” James said, laughing. “Open it, already.”

The cork squeaked out. “See if you taste layers of fruit.” Gage sounded a little buzzed too.

James sipped, rolling the wine in his mouth with a frown of concentration.

“Taste it? Blackberries and raspberries? Kind of voluptuous and round. God, listen to me, one bottle and I turn into a pompous wine asshole. Anyway, it’s really ripe and full-bodied. Like Natalie.” He held his glass up, admiring the color.

Or toasting me? No. Ridiculous.

James raised his glass as well. “She’s something in that dress, isn’t she?” At Gage’s nod, he added, “You ought to see her out of it.”

Like the teaser? You can buy it here today!