Here is a second excerpt from the very first full-length novel I finished, called GREENER GRASS.  Since it just sits aorund collecting dust, I’d thought I’d share one of my favorite scenes from it.  (Click here to read the first excerpt posted.)

     Vanessa turned over on her pillow and looked at the clock on her nightstand.  It was six thirty in the morning.  She didn’t need to be awake for another hour, but she was wide awake right now.  Kevin, the early riser, usually left the house for work at about six twenty and so she knew that he was already gone.  She tried closing her eyes and forcing herself to go back to sleep, but was unsuccessful.  After lying there for another ten minutes, she decided to go along with her body and start the day off early.

      She went into their bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth.  The master bedroom only had a private half bath, and there was now a guest staying in the house, so she grabbed her bathrobe off the hook on the back of the bathroom door before she went out into the hall to go to the main bathroom to shower.

      As she got closer to the bathroom she was startled to hear the sounds of an electric razor, and wondered if Kevin was running late that morning.  The bathroom door was open, and instead of her husband she found his brother there leaned over the sink and close to the mirror shaving his face, with a bath towel wrapped around his waist.

      “Hey.”  Andrew greeted her, briefly glancing at her reflection in the mirror. 

      “Good morning, Andrew.  Sorry, I didn’t realize that you got up at this time of the morning.”  Vanessa glanced back at his reflected face, trying hard not to let her eyes even scrape past his shoulders, back, or tightly wrapped towel.

      “Yeah, always get up ‘round five and work out before I shower and head out.”  

      “Oh, good idea!  I need to start working out myself and loose a few pounds,”  Vanessa said, slapping at her own bottom.

      “You don’t need to loose no weight.”  Andrew disagreed, eyeing her through the mirror. 

      “No really, I have a few extra pounds that I need to shed.”

      “Don’t look like it.”

      “Well, that’s because I hide it well.”

      “How much you weight?”

      “That’s none of your business!”  Vanessa cried out.  Andrew put his razor down and walked over and stood in front of Vanessa.  He studied her up and down for a long moment.  She returned his gaze with a puzzled look, when suddenly with one swoop he lifted her up and off of her feet.  He held her in the air for a few seconds as she stared down at him in bewilderment.  Then he gently put her down on the floor and turned back toward the sink.

      “Five feet, five inches, a hundred and thirty pounds.  Like I said, you don’t need to loose no weight,” He said nonchalantly as he picked his razor up again.  She blinked in bewilderment at his accuracy as he continued to shave his chin as if lifting people and accurately guessing their weight was a normal part of his morning routine.

      “What are you, a human scale or something?”  Vanessa muttered under her breath loud enough for him to hear.

      “Maybe.  Or maybe I just already knew how much you weight.”  Andrew replied, trying to refrain from grinning as much as possible while removing his facial hair.

      Vanessa put her hands on her hips as she glowered at him, but with a playful smirk on her face. “But if you already knew how much I weight, why would you bother to pick me up?”

      “Maybe I just needed an excuse.” 

      “An excuse for what?  For snooping and finding out how much I weight or for making fun of me first thing in the morning?”

      “To touch you,”  he said.  Vanessa opened her mouth to reply, but she found herself stiff and blushing, and very uncertain just how to respond. But a second later Andrew laughed.

      “Just really good at guessing stuff like that, that’s all.”   

     Vanessa growled at him and shook her head, still blushing.  “How much longer are you going to be?”

      “Be done in a minute,”  he said after a brief pause as she was already on her way out of the bathroom.  She went downstairs and started the coffee maker up and she was on her way back upstairs to the bathroom when she heard the door to the guest bedroom close shut.

      Vanessa went into the bathroom and made certain to close the door behind her.  She took off her robe and nightgown, folded them neatly and placed them in a tidy pile on the counter top.  She studied her bare body in the mirror for a few moments, wishing her breasts were just a little larger and fuller, and that her hips were just a little wider.  She shivered a little in the morning chilliness of the bathroom and aborted her self-study to put a shower cap on her head to keep her hair from getting wet, and started up a warm shower.

      The water felt good and relaxing, and she closed her eyes in comfort.  She wet her face and then tilted her head back so that she could feel the shower trickle down her neck, fall onto her breast and then between them, and roll down onto her stomach.  Vanessa stepped directly underneath the nozzle and felt the water slip over her shoulders, now also warming and soothing her chilled back and bottom.  She felt heavenly.

      When she stepped back a bit to rub the water out of her eyes, a strange feeling overcame her.  She turned her head and peered through the frosted glass of the shower door and saw that the door to the bathroom was slightly ajar.  Upon focusing her eyes again, she saw a figure standing in the door – half in and half out of the bathroom.  Watching her. 

      She froze for a second in panic because the figure was not her husband’s, but then calmed a little bit because she knew that the perpetrator was not there to harm her.  She stared directly in his direction letting him know that she knew he was there, but he just kept gazing right back and didn’t budge.

      Vanessa stood there in the shower for a brief moment, watching him watch her, nothing breaking the silence but the pattering of the shower water hitting the tiled floor.  And it was the sound of the water falling that eventually and totally relaxed her, and she turned to continue her bathing even though there was an intruder. 

      He just wants to watch me, she concluded to herself.  And I think I want him to watch me.  She slowly picked up the flower-scented soap from the dish and rubbed it in her hands under the water.  Then in long, slow motions she worked her soapy hands over her neck, caressed her breasts and hardened nipples, and then glided down and over her belly.  She put one leg at a time up on the small ledge to lean over and wash them, periodically checking her peripheral vision to make sure the peeper was still there.  She let her fingers run up the back of her legs and thighs and then to her butt – her most prized asset – and drew sexy, soapy circles on them. 

      Then she turned around and slowly backed into the falling water, relishing both the shower of the water and the shower of Andrew’s eyes on her bare body.  She bathed in the attention, splashed in the appreciation, and almost drowned in the eroticism of it all.

      When she turned off the water and slowly slid open the shower door, there was no one there.  She began to contemplate the idea that she imagined it all, but then she saw that the door was still cracked slightly open.  She slowly walked over to it and this time locked it shut. 

      She grabbed her towel off the rack and began to dry herself off, her entire body still trembling a little from the jolt of excitement.  She looked at herself in the mirror as she dried off, and this time her breasts seemed a little bit fuller, and her hips just a little more shapely. 

I’d like to share an excerpt from chapter 2 of THE BEAUTY OF DEATH. Since the entire scene is a bit too long to post here, I just included a few pages from it. It is not a complete scene and you may be kind of left hanging, but I think it may be a good way to at least introduce the two lead characters.

      Dominion did not like the sewers.  Dirty, damp, dingy, dismal – definitely what he deemed utterly disgusting and undeserving of his presence.  He had hoped to bypass the human city by traversing the system underneath it.  The fewer volatile humans he had to encounter, the better.  However, the sewers were quite a confusing labyrinth for Dominion, and he found himself wandering like a dumb and blind rat in a maze.

      Why did these human creatures spend so much time to construct such a complex underground system, only to have it transport waste?  Dominion wondered to himself.  The sewers below the town of Galvendale had nine-foot tall walls of crumbling stone, various passageways and doorways and numerous recesses.  It was immense enough to be a separate city under the city – a dark, enclosed metropolis, complete with a man-made river of smelly, cruddy water sledging down the canals in its center. 

      The penniless and the decrepit of the town’s population staked claim in alcoves of the vast and complicated shelter.  Though the walkways were sparsely lit with lanterns and torches and most areas were dim enough that Dominion could pass by the civilians and be mistaken for human, he kept his eyes toward the ground and the hood of his cloak pulled over his head.

      A bright beam of sunlight shining through a porthole above illuminated a couple of copper coins that lay on the path ahead of him.  Whenever luck allowed it, he found that he was able to buy food, drink and clothing from human vendors who were too distracted with customers and the exchange of coins to pay him much attention.  So after he glanced around and saw no one nearby, he approached the abandoned commerce to claim it for himself.

      He squinted his eyes as he knelt down under the white light and gathered the coins into his hand.  The hood of his cloak slid backwards off of his head and briefly exposed skin an unusual shade of violet and remarkably long ears that ended in hooks.  He stood up with the intention to recover his hood, when he was suddenly aware of a presence beside him.  The loud intake of breath alerted him that it was too late – he had already been seen … again.

      He turned to face the witness and found a startled, young human female with ice-blue eyes and hair as red and wild as field flowers.  She gasped for a second time in shock as she stared into the shimmer of his extraordinarily silver irises, an eye color that was not even common amongst his own species. 

      The woman opened her mouth as if she were going to scream, and Dominion reacted by putting a finger to his lips and shaking his head at her. He grabbed her by the wrist and quickly led her against the wall, away from the middle of the walkway and the beam of light.

      “Trust that I mean you no harm, contessa,” Dominion spoke soft and slow in an attempt to properly enunciate his words in the human’s common tongue and to keep his deep voice sounding as non-intimidating as possible. 

      His closeness to the female exposed him to her excited energy, and he could not prevent himself from eyeing her up.  The fiery hair against the pale skin was an exotic combination to him, her plump flesh appearing soft to the touch.  When he met her eyes again, he found that the fear behind them was slowly being replaced by intrigue, and perhaps even some odd, raw attraction.  She ogled him just as he had done her.

      Dominion struggled to prevent a devious smirk from forming upon his face as he reached into his cloak and, almost like magic, pulled out a single rose.  He twirled it in his fingers quickly a few times like a baton before he moved his other hand to take hers.

      “A lovely flower … for a lovely flower.  Please take this rose my dear, as a gift for allowing me to gaze so closely upon your countenance.  All I ask is that you walk away quietly, forgetting that you ever saw me,” he said. Then he kissed the back of her hand before slipping the rose into it.

      “Forget that I ever saw ya,” the woman repeated slyly.  She looked at him now with devouring eyes.  “A handsome creature like you, how do ya expect me to do that?”

      Dominion hesitated before he replied.  As a virile, young elf of twenty-three years of age, he was tempted to respond to the demands of his libido.  But almost every single one of his previous encounters with humans had resulted in a violent confrontation.  Though this woman was not hostile towards him, he knew that the longer he remained in contact with her, the higher the chance he would encounter someone who would be.  And not only was he a solitary elf amongst a population which despised him, he was being hunted by something even more sinister.  He had neither the time nor the luxury to risk jeopardizing his mission by dallying, no matter how enticing the woman or willing his loins may be.

      “Then welcome me in your dreams, for you will most definitely be welcome in mine.  Just please, contessa – allow me to continue upon my journey without drawing further attention.  I doubt other citizens here will be either as hospitable or as lovely as you,” he answered.  Her cheeks turned crimson and she lowered her eyes at his response. 

      She took a brief glance at the rose in her hand and then looked up at him, smiling coyly.  “Have a safe journey, sir elf man.  If we ever run into each other again – remember that you are invited into more than just my dreams,” she said before she turned to walk off into the shadows.  He could not help but give himself a chuckle and smug grin in celebration of obtaining yet another invitation from a woman he had encountered for all of mere seconds.

      Dominion ceased his gloating when he realized that the parting redhead could point him in the direction that would lead to an exit outside of the town.  He dashed out of the shadows in a hurried attempt to catch her.  In his haste, not only had he failed to recover his hood, but he also had not noticed two more pedestrians approaching from the opposite direction.

      “Papa, look at that man!”  The boy alerted his father, much to Dominion’s dismay.  With just a single glance at Dominion, the man held his son back and withdrew a rusty blade.

      “Daemon!  Leave the premises of us good people at once!”

      “Listen, I mean you no – “

      “William, go and get some help!”  The man instructed his child and shook his weapon threateningly at Dominion, slowly forcing the elf’s back against the wall.

      Dominion sighed and lifted his hands with the intent to freeze them both in place with a couple of bolts of his frost spell before he made a run for it.  But to his surprise, a shrouded form which seemed to appear from the shadows stepped in between the man and him.  This person, though barely over five feet and thus much shorter than him, put a firm grip on his wrist and moved it downward, deterring him from casting his spell. 

      Both the boy and his father stopped in their tracks.  They stared at the face of this shrouded person, unblinking, their eyes wide and their mouths gaping open as if they were paralyzed with fear.  With a single wave of the instigator’s hand, the two humans simply blinked twice, then turned on their heels and speed away in the opposite direction.

      An eloquent, raspy feminine voice came from the figure which spoke, unexpectedly, in Dominion’s native tongue.  “It is ironic that they are so quick to yell devil or daemon, yet it is they who are pulling out their weapons upon unarmed souls.” 

      Dominion too, froze.  Who is this person?

      “Silly elf,” she said.  With her hand still locked on his wrist she guided him into an alcove behind them, the dark colored cloth which covered its entrance made it almost completely hidden by the shadows from the human eye.  ”Did you think that you were going to be able to just ease the fears of every human who spotted you, with charm and the bat of your lashes?”

      “Well, my charm and good looks do tend to often allow me to escape without harm or challenge.  Forgive me for not being gifted with an appearance so horrifying that humans simply run away in fright when they look upon me,” Dominion replied with a sneer, just as his hostess removed her heavy hooded shawl and turned around to face him at last.

      The smirk slid off his face as his jaw dropped and his eyebrows rose.  He had never before spoken words that he so very badly wanted to take back.

      Like him she was a moon elf, appearing close to his age at perhaps no more than a couple of years over twenty.  Her almond-shaped eyes were as bright and violet as polished amethyst gemstones, trimmed with long dark lashes streaked with a few silvery ones as well.  Her hair, white as cotton, laid slick against her head, with a swish of bangs that brushed across her forehead and curled against one of her long ears.  Her skin was the color of lilac, and appeared as smooth as the petals of that flower. 

       She was the most beautiful creature that Dominion had ever seen.

      “That was due to a fear spell I cast upon them,” she explained with an even tone.  “And as far my appearance being horrifying – if that is your opinion, you are quite entitled to it.  I suppose you prefer your females red-headed and human?”

      “That is not my opinion, now that I have had a look at you.  You are perfect.” Dominion was surprised at how warm his face grew as he paid this female the highest praise he had to offer. 

      She paused at his words for a moment and studied him, her head cocked to the side.  “Do you attempt to flatter every woman you meet?”

      “Yes.  But not always do I mean it.”

      “But you do now?”

      “Yes.”

      “How do I know that what you are saying is not just more of your false flattery?”

      He shrugged.  “Do I appear false to you?”

      “No less than you did earlier with the human,” she pointed out.

      “But I did not also give you a rose.”

      “Oh, is that supposed to make me feel more flattered?  That she won a flower from you when I have not?” she retorted. 

      Dominion chuckled then bowed politely.  “I am Kylek Dominion Sinchyld.  I go by Dominion.  And what is your name, contessa?”

            “Halayna Troii.”  She gave a slight bow.

This is from the first novel I wrote called GREENER GRASS. It doesn’t fall in the fantasy, science fiction, or even the romance genre, really. I look back at it now and giggle a little at how much my writing has grown since this. Perhaps some day when I have become bored with unusual romances I will return to this book and treat it to an edit.  Click here to see another excerpt from this book.

     She was not having nearly as much fun as he was. The feel of the rough cotton sheets underneath her bare skin, the constant high-pitched squeaking of the metal bed frame, and even the smell of the sweat forming on his skin was giving her far more irritation than he was giving her pleasure.

     She stared up at the blank ceiling in frustration as he leaned down closer to her and began pumping harder and grunting louder as his climax approached, his breath hot and moist against her ear. From her perspective, he seemed to be just mindlessly pounding at her, not even trying to hit her spot. But she was too frustrated to try to ask him to change positions, too shy to beg him not to cum yet, too aroused to tell him to stop, and too bored to even pretend to be getting off. She only focused on the ceiling fan that hovered above the bed. She imagined that she could make the blades spin with just her thinking about it. But both she and the fan remained motionless.

     Just as he released himself into her, Vanessa glanced over at the alarm clock on the bedside table to catch tonight’s finish time. The red digital numbers informed her that it was ten thirty-eight pm. The clock had read only ten thirty-three when he first climbed into bed and on top on her, making this love-making session an even shorter one than the last one about a week ago. She hadn’t thought that would be possible.

     Kevin shuddered one last time and kissed her on top of her lips before rolling off of her to the right side of the bed. Vanessa tried really hard to refrain from screaming aloud as she heard him pull up his boxers and begin to snore just a few seconds later, which was more than a just an indicator that he was completely finished for the evening.

     Instead of screaming at him however, she turned to look at him, his thin frame appearing even smaller in the shadows of the dark room. She studied him for a moment, looking at his well-barbered, neatly-trimmed black hair and long neck, trying to decide if she wanted to hug him or smack him. Ultimately she opted for neither, and sighed softly as she pulled the blue cotton sheets up over his lean and lanky, cocoa-brown bare body and slipped out of the bed.

     As soon as she stood up and began to step away from the bed she stubbed her foot on the leg of the oak nightstand hard enough to topple the items that rested on it. She swiftly reached over to catch the lamp and the clock before they went crashing to the floor. She quietly put them back on the table and hobbled backwards to the bed to sit down and rub her sore foot. She looked over her shoulder at her husband to see if he had been disturbed by the commotion. Kevin simply turned over to his side and started snoring even louder. Vanessa sighed heavily and rolled her eyes. He’s not concerned about my well-being in this bed at all. Neither when he is awake or asleep! She thought to herself with disdain.

     Vanessa turned back around and switched on the small table lamp that she’d just knocked over to brighten the room a little before getting up from the bed this time. After quietly searching through the covers for a moment, she finally located the white cotton panties that Kevin had pulled off of her and tossed over onto the floor. She stepped into them tentatively – hating to put on soiled underwear but hating even more to soil her bare thighs with her husband’s blissful residue.

     Vanessa treaded softly across the plush carpeting of the large bedroom over to the dresser and examined her reflection in the mirror. Her thick, chemically relaxed dark brown hair was still pretty much in a neat bun – Kevin had generated only enough friction to barely cause a single strand to come loose.

     Looking back over her shoulder at her sleeping husband, she contemplated waking him up and demanding that he complete the job that he had started. But she concluded that an attempt like that would only be a waste of time, since lately Kevin seemed to think that the deed was done just as soon as he was.