Retro Wendy: Let’s Talk About Sex, or Not: Sexual Tension For the Win!

This post originally ran at Heroes & Heartbreakers on August 5, 2015

As long as the romance genre has existed, it has had unimaginative critics. Sometimes even before the word “trash” is uttered, we get “Mommy porn.” Women should know their place. If it’s something you enjoy, if it’s something you take pleasure in, it must be wrong, and nothing screams wrong quite like dismissing readers and suggesting they are “dirty” for liking something. What these critics are really reinforcing is the old adage that women shouldn’t like sex, talk about sex, and heaven help them, they shouldn’t want sex. The truth is that if these critics asked a large sample of romance readers why they enjoy the genre, “I read it for the smokin’ hot sex!” is pretty far down on the list, if it’s on the list at all. Oh dear, silly, hopeless naïve critics. We don’t read romance for the sex. We’re looking for all the delicious things that lead up to sex. The tension, the chemistry, the foreplay, two characters who are beginning to realize that taking on the world together is ever so much better than taking it on by themselves.

To illustrate this point, all three of these recent releases, of wildly varying heat levels, illustrate that it’s not the actual falling into bed we love – it’s the journey the characters take to get there.

Charlotte Stein writes erotic romance, a sub-genre that one would think would be “all about sex.” Except, of course, that it isn’t. Good erotic romance knows that it takes more than pages of kink and fetishes to make a story “hot” – to make the romance work. In Sweet Agony, Stein takes anticipation to a boiling point featuring a young woman looking to escape poverty and despair and a young man with a mountain of entitlements emotionally stunted by a past he’s unable to break free of. So haunted by a traumatic past, our hero is emotionally crippled at the mere thought of basic human touch. Which makes navigating a sexual attraction particularly tricky, but leads to a story filled with tension. That old saying about the brain being the biggest erogenous zone? Yeah, that.

He just did the equivalent of throwing everything in on a pair of jacks, so sure I would back down that he barely saw the straight flush lurking in the river. He was too explicit, too rude, too eager to say that word: spanked. He should never have said spanked. Maybe he could have to someone else, someone who cares only a little, someone less like him. But I am not nearly so closed off, nor so silly. And when he pushes, I push back.

...

I glance over my shoulder. I meet his gaze. His face is so pale it could pass for a fainting lady’s. And I say with the most relish I can muster: “Would you like me to leave my dress down, or do you prefer a bare work surface?” followed by the longest silence the world has ever known. It goes on and on and on, and the longer it does, the worse it gets. If nothing happens in the next thirty seconds I am almost definitely going to die. 

In The Fighter and the Fallen Woman, Pamela Cayne is working within a sensuality landscape that is fairly typical for the historical romance sub-genre. It’s in that middle ground between just-kisses and erotic romance. What this story features is a forbidden sexual attraction between a boxer/hired thug hero and a prostitute/mistress heroine who both happen to work for the same dangerous crime lord. The tension between the two hits a boiling point even before the reader is out of the first chapter, when our villain suggests his mistress kiss his fighter for “good luck,” something the hero, King, is reluctant to do.

“Come, King, it’s only a kiss,” Lady said, deliberately pitching her voice low. She would give the kiss and pray her trembling barriers would hold, keep her safe against the desire to close her eyes, breathe in his scent, and feel for one moment that a fighter and a fallen woman had a future together. 

…

“Lady, you should know when it comes to you, it’s never only anything,” he whispered so that only she could hear. “It’s everything.” 

…

He grabbed her hand only for an instant, but it was long enough to brand his touch on her skin before he let go. Lady pulled back and her eyes drifted open, her held breath slipping from her mouth and into his. King was right. This would never be only a kiss. 

Deeanne Gist started her career writing inspirational historical romances, but her most recent books have moved towards secular Americana. This has been a move that has not been met with enthusiasm by all of her fans, and there is criticism, in some circles, that Tiffany Girl is “pornographic.” This is laughable for the most part since the only love scene fades to black while the hero is helping the heroine out of her wedding ensemble….on their wedding night. But upon closer inspection, these critics have somewhat of a point. Gist does more with sexual tension in a “just kisses” historical romance than some erotic romance authors do with an encyclopedia of fetishes and a chest full of sex toys. Things heat up for our hero and heroine when they agree to help a photographer take a series of photographs of them dancing so he can make a phenakistascope.

Now they were cheek to cheek. Flossie’s face, nearest the camera, shielded his. Her ear lobe peeked out from beneath her coif and was within an inch of his mouth. He resisted, resisted, then could resist no more. He took a gentle tug with his lips. 

…

She closed her eyes, her lips there for the taking. He didn’t so much as breathe. “Okay. Ready?” Holliday settled himself beneath his shroud. “Just a few more shots.” Holliday took them through the rest of the dance, one step at a time. When she had her face shielded by Reeve’s, she blew across his ear.

...

The stairwell was silent. The hallway was silent. The rooms were silent. He didn’t know where everyone else was on this sunny Sunday afternoon, but he was thankful they weren’t around.  

He followed her back down to the first floor, narrowing his eyes. Were her hips swaying just a touch more than usual? Or maybe he was simply too attuned to her every move. When she began to enter her room, he grabbed her hand, hauled her to his room, shoved his door closed, pulled her against him, and took her mouth with his. 

All of these authors employ the use of tension to increase the personal stakes for their characters. Cayne introduces it to the reader from the very first chapter, in a first kiss scene the simmers and boils through the remaining early portions of the book and carry the reader to the eventual consummation. Stein and Gist both go a different route, keeping their characters apart by circumstance. Stein, with a hero who abhors anyone touching him and Gist with the social restrictions and mores of the time period. However, in the case of all of these books, something has to give. All of these characters are mere mortals, after all, and tension can only go on for so long until someone eventually snaps. It’s those delicious moments that lead up to the snapping that keep romance readers coming back for more.

The Fighter and the Fallen Woman

When digital publishing started to become a "thing," a lot of promises were made to me as the reader.  Digital publishing will be great!  We'll take risks!  We'll give you the variety that those snooty-toots in New York dismiss because we don't have the overhead!  We can take chances on "different" in a way they cannot!  And what did I, the historical romance fan get?

Yeah.  More of the same.  Oh sure, there have been the odd titles here and there from the digital pubs, but by and large?  Harlequin Historical is still my go-to source for "different."

The Fighter and the Fallen Woman is Pamela Cayne's debut and this is what digital publishing promised me all those years ago and finally, finally!, it's here.  Ladies and gents what we've got here is a gritty Victorian.  And by gritty?  I mean, East End, not a titled dandy in sight, and enough dirt under the fingernails that not even bleach is going to make a dent.  I foresee a lot of "reviews" that will claim it's too "depressing" or too "dark" - in which case I'm going to call you dumber than a sack of hair because the back cover blurb (duh, and the title!) pretty much tells you this is a romance between a prostitute heroine and a street fighter hero born in a gutter.

She was a rich man's mistress and he was a rich man's thug, and the two did not mix

My Fair Lady this ain't.

Lady is a high-priced whore, a kept woman of crime lord Hannibal Adams.  She's got the kind of beauty that stops men dead in their tracks and even though she has one client, that doesn't mean she's much safer than a girl working the streets.  Mr. Adams' moods are like the wind, and Lady walks a very fine line on how to play him.  If she plays him wrong?  If he's not in a good mood?  Let's just say Lady has the bruises to prove that he's not a nice guy.

Trigger Alert: There is a sexual assault in the book.  The reader doesn't read about it as it happens - it's spoken about, in detail, after the fact.  

Adams is organizing a boxer tournament and has put two of his bodyguards/muscle into the fight.  King is the best of the two and Adams is convinced he will take the grand prize.  What Adams doesn't know?  Lady and King are drawn to each other and when Adams suggests Lady kiss King for "good luck" before the first fight - a chain of events is set into motion.  Lady, who feels something for a man she's never felt before and King, a man who knows he's not good enough for Lady but wants to rescue her all the same.

This is part romance and part crime novel.  Everyone is playing an angle in this story, sometimes more than one.  Cayne keeps the plot moving forward by introducing two villains, another disreputable businessman in the vein of Adams and his particular boxer, an Australian convict.  Then of course there is Adams, who is obsessed with Lady even as he alternately beats her and drapes her in finery and jewels.  That a man like that would just let his whore run away, taking one of his other employees with her?  Yeah, let's just say that wouldn't end well for either Lady or King.

There was so much I liked about this story.  I liked that King was a brute, tough-as-nails, but was tender with Lady.  This guy is macho but not a jerk - just making the best life for himself with the hand he was dealt.  In turn Lady is smart, she's calculating, she's looking to play the angles to get what she wants - and that is freedom.  An attraction to King is one that could, literally, prove deadly.

"I have to watch all sides, be prepared for anything, and that means keeping everybody close and making them think they're special."

But the real selling point of these two characters?  Why they worked so well for me as a romantic couple?  The simple fact that there is no judgement between them.  King doesn't judge Lady for being a prostitute and Lady doesn't judge King for making his living with his fists.  When these two have disagreements, are at odds with each other, they do not resort to resentment and name-calling.  Lady does what she has to do, King understands that, and vice versa.  Also there's very little of what I call Tortured Trope Angst.  King and Lady both have had less than charmed lives but they don't spend this story wringing their hands over it, playing the poor woe-is-me-sad-sack funeral dirge.  They're too busy working angles, looking for a way to 1) escape and 2) be together.

"Just because I've done what I've had to do to survive doesn't mean I don't get the same chance at love as every other person in the world."

Can I get an amen?

So yes, it's dark, it's gritty, it's not a story for everybody.  It's also very twisty and the plot turns on a dime.  Like I said, everybody (and I do mean everybody) in this story is working at least one angle, if not half a dozen.  I've read crime novels that have taken me on fewer spins.  For that reason the romance does have a tendency to run towards Insta-Love, but given that Lady and King are attracted to each other even before that ill-fated good luck kiss, and given their circumstances, I could roll with some Insta-Love.

Desire started to flare between them, but instead of stirring Lady, it terrified her.  She'd been a whore for so long, did she even truly know what desire was?  Even without Mr. Adams in the picture, could she and King be something?  The fantasy of him was one matter, but the reality of it was quite another.

I darn near loved everything about this book.

Well.....

Until the ending.  Which seemed a little much to me.  It spins a little out of control at the end.  I suspect the author wanted to wrap it up more neatly and to me it just felt tacked on.  This will be very Inside Romance, but I would have preferred an ending much more in the vein of All Through the Night by Connie Brockway (the most memorable part of that particular book for me), where the characters sort of.....drift off into the night together.  The author ties it all up, we get our happy ending, but it did drag on a bit for me in the final chapters.

Where does that leave me?  This is very good, but not great.  I would say it was a strong B+ for me, but the ending took a little shine off at the finish line.  Still?  One of the more memorable historicals I've read in - well, in a long while.  Even though it faltered a bit at the end, for me at any rate, I'll more than likely be including this on my Best of 2015 list.  Because really - how could I not?

Final Grade = B