Orfeo (28 page)

Most terrible god, most pleasant to man,

ecstasy’s gift within each mortal span.

Song

True love lives beloved’s pleasure,

lasts through winter and through summer;

false love sees itself the measure,

wearily dies in a single night.

True love is gentle, simple, faithful,

false love demanding, vainful, slight.

That night I came into your room

I left the sky and came to you,

falling stars dispelling gloom

and your green eyes my soul’s true doom.

Your hand glanced up! You spied desire

upon a shooting star,

and in your arms beneath that fire

I understood just who you are,

and in my heart the love I knew

was fixed that moment, forever true.

Morning Hymn

Outside this room in peeks the world,

ashamed of its envy,

to stare at our two bodies curled,

embraced in sleep, our minds entwirled

in drowsy dreams of ecstasy.

Have you ever the air heard sigh

when we awake and kiss?

It is the world as it goes by,

disconsolate, and jealously

pretending it sees not our bliss.

In our two minds exists a throne

which freely love exalts,

to which she rises, rules as one

who has the power, she alone,

to serve forever without fault.

The Crystal Fragments Trilogy

When the heart is stronger than stone.

This brings together all three Crystal Fragments books into one volume. When Kris Avelar runs away from another failed love affair to an isolated cottage in Scotland, her desire to be alone is nothing compared to that of the stranger she meets: Daniel Logan. Tall, handsome, but also scarred by more than the marks which line his face, his attempts to push her away only inspire her to greater curiosity about him - a curiosity that will lead to dark and forbidden desires as she enters his private world.

As she discovers that this mysterious stranger is actually Daniel Stone, the charming and urbane founder of Stone Enterprises, she seeks to find out more about him - just as he becomes increasingly obsessed with her. Yet if Kris is the most perfect lover that Daniel has known since the death of his wife, she is not the first, and others will seek to come between the two of them and their happiness.

When Daniel is caught up by his own dangerous past, Kris sets out to save him and to show that while everyone else will turn against him, she is determined never to let him down - or let him go. It is at that time that she discovers that her own submission, what she has thought of as a weakness inside her, is actually the source of her greatest strength.

This volume includes the following books:

Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission

Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries

Refracted Crystal: Diamonds and Desire

Available from Black Orion Press

The Long Last Summer

For even the longest summer must come to an end.

At the beginning of the long, hot summer of 1976, two young boys—Jake and Mark—are riding out into the fields that lie beyond the small mining town which is all they have known for their brief lives. The eldest of the two, Jake, wishes to show his brother something of the innocent pleasure that he has begun to discover in the wider world.

For their young mother, Kitty, such pleasures are tinged with the bitterest experience that for one of them this may be the last summer that he will ever know. As doctors struggle to combat the disease that also took Jake and Mark’s father, so Kitty struggles as a single woman to raise her children in a provincial town where the close embrace of a community also represses all her desires to better herself.

For Doctor Reuben Heppner, the struggle to cure a young boy is a means to leave behind the messy chaos of his own divorce and redeem himself, but with Kitty Donahue he also starts to believe that her happiness will be the key to both their salvation. And yet as the summer burns on so tempers and desires begin to blaze with a heat that threatens to destroy everything.

To be published Spring 2013.