My friends at Mile High Muses have started Scintillating Sundays, a blog hop designed to entertain readers as they chill at home on a lazy Sunday. It’s a simple premise: each participating author posts 8 paragraphs we feel embody the word “scintillating” and you get to hop from blog to blog, reading them all. Since we tend to be the sort of writers who put the “sin” in “scintillating”, you’re likely to find screen-melting sexy moments, as well as clever flirting full of innuendo and double-entendre.

As I did last week, I’m offering you a snippet of my September 22 science fiction romance release Bad Kitty. Just to set the scene, both Xia and Rahal are felinoids, aliens who look very much like humanoid cats–and act a bit like it too.

Rahal took a deep breath, drinking in Xia’s personal perfume, the flavor of her skin and blood. The young woman, probably ten years his junior, was an aphrodisiac. If he could bottle her scent, the nuances of her blood, he could make enough credits to repair all the damage to Siantana and get started on the rest of this poor, beat-up planet, while treating himself to a first-class vacation somewhere that didn’t smell like burning.

No, just the scent of her skin, delectable as that was, wouldn’t be enough. He’d need to capture the grace of her tail, the charm of her posture—meltingly sensual, yet alert to the danger around her and ready for action—the blooded velvet power of her hands, the exact cock of her ears and especially the left ear’s one adorable white tip.

If they’d been alone, he’d be halfway to seducing her by now. Maybe farther along than that because she smelled of heat, of need, as well as all the other delicious things that were permanent parts of who she was. She might already be as wet under her short skirt as he was hard in his pants. She might be willing to hit the ground on hands and knees and cock her pretty tail for him right now, then talk later.

And there would be talk, once the first urgency passed, because everything about her screamed there was far more to Xia Suarez than her undeniable tawny beauty. Intelligence, passion, danger.

If he believed the old granny-and-grandpa tales of knowing your mate at first sight, he’d think she was fated to be his. Stars, he half believed it anyway, or at least wanted to believe it.

Then something processed in a brain so drunk on hormones he was thinking about as clearly as an adolescent. Suarez. She shared a last name with the dark, very human captain and his huge, humorless (but handsome, in a big, beefy, heavily decorated Furagi style) husband. She pronounced her name like a human would.

She’d obviously been adopted off-planet as a kitten. Even if she was his mate, she might not know about mating, how it overcame all rationality and better judgment—not that their species had a lot of either on an ordinary day.

He’d just have to make sure she fell for him fast and hard, and explain the rest later.

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