Velvet Glove by Emma Holly
Audrey realizes she's in over her head when she gets embroiled with icy-cool banker, Sterling. His ideas of adult fun are more than she can handle, so she packs her bags and walks out of his luxury Florida apartment, heading back to Washington DC in search of a regular life with a regular guy. But for a girl like Audrey, this is not as easy as it sounds.
When Patrick Dugan, the charismatic owner of an old-world bar, fixes Audrey in his sights, some strange alliances are about to be formed. Within a week Audrey talks her way into a job at Patrick's bar and a room in the apartment he shares with a drag queen jazz singer called Basil. The highly sexed roommates are soon getting intimate with each other, even experimenting with games of kinky SM sex. But Audrey soon suspects that Patrick is not all that he seems. Why is he pretending to be gay? And what is he covering up for his father, a pillar of the local community? Audrey is so affected by the enigmatic, dominant barman that she doesn't realise they are connected by a mutual adversary - a cold-hearted man who will take them all down if he doesn't get what he wants.
When fellow airline pilots Jack Grayson and Kira Allen barrel down the runway into white-hot lust, Kira proposes a frisky flight plan. They'll fulfill each other's sexual fantasies during layovers and revert back to friendship at home.
Lisa--the perfectionist--is a stunning, mysterious, and fearless sexual adventurer. She is founder and supreme mistress of The Club--an exclusive island resort where forbidden fantasy meets willing flesh. Elliott is a thrill-seeking photographer who has risked his life in war zones around the world and now seeks the ultimate rush--exploring his darkest sexual self. Join them on a journey to the limits of erotic pleasure and beyond.
The cover of Susan Lyons’ debut novel Champagne Rules depicts a nude couple, face to face, embracing. The man is dread-locked, goateed, and well muscled; the woman is soft, slender and at ease. It’s lovely; sexy but not gratuitous, erotic but not graphic. It’s also overlaid with an aborigine tint that mutes the contrast of the models’ skin colors and washes out the sharp lines of their bodies. This might be a random artistic decision—perhaps covers that appear to be a solid shade of eggplant are the new thing—or it might be that the color purple plays heavily into the plot—but this does not turn out to be the case—or perhaps rendering the cover models colorless is the publisher’s attempt to suggest social commentary on interracial couples: the skin color doesn’t matter; all that matters is the coming together of man and woman. Or perhaps the cover is shrouded in ambiguity because the interracial couple at the heart of Champagne Rules: Jaxon Navarre, a Jamaican immigrant to the U.S., and Suzanne Brennan, an Anglo-Canadian, are a couple in conflict over priorities rather than one whose story hinges on the difference in their skin colors. 
I was suckered. There they were, two grown women, giggling like twelve-year old girls who’d seen their first half-naked man on a book cover, and still I walked up to them. I should have been wary – they were holding matching books and offered me one. Instead I picked up Jaid Black’s Deep, Dark, & Dangerous. It was like they’d planned for me to do that all along; the hers-and-hers books were a diversion. I said, sure, I’ll read it for review. And I did, all because they looked so sweet and innocent.
Emma Holly doesn’t write your mother’s romances. Nor does she write the sort of erotica your bookstore doesn’t carry. Sex and heat aside, what she does write is divergent enough to preclude many expectations about what an Emma Holly novel is. Her backlist jumps subgenres from Regency vampire, to contemporary werewolf, to Scottish shape-shifter, to steampunk (yes, once and for all that is what The Demon’s Daughter was), to contemporaries that are too erotic for traditional romance and too sweet for hardcore erotica. It is the mixture of envelope pushing sexuality with tenderness and a happily ever after that unites Holly’s work. To her latest contemporary, All U Can Eat, Holly brings her trademark heat to the fictional Pacific Coast town of Six Palms and in the process adds another subgenre to her collection: murder mystery.
Harlequin’s new imprint Spice, is the stalwart publisher’s entry into the hot, and increasingly bloated, erotic fiction marketplace. If erotic fiction and Harlequin—the publishing home of countless 30 year old, virginal heroines and conflict that can always be resolved in a precise number of pages with a ring and a pregnancy—seem an unlikely and uneasy partnership, that’s because they are. Spice’s aim is to offer the women clamoring for super hot, non-traditional reads, erotic fiction that isn’t bogged down with all that sex. The result is a line of books that shines bright lights into shadowed corners, smoothes out the rough edges, and generally feels like a favorite strip club that is now run by Disneyland.
Once upon a time, a young woman stood at the edge of the library stacks, wondering where, oh where, she’d find her perfect story. Years went by, and she continued to seek the perfect story. One was too hot, one was too cold, very few were just right.
The debate over what constitutes "erotica" versus "erotic romance" versus...well, versus whatever descriptive the book-buying public is using at that moment to define these sexy works, is one guaranteed to drive even the most level-headed reader to hunt down the nearest bottle of pain relievers. The definitions are murky. The marketing purposely misleading. The availability of titles growing, perhaps too much. The authors traveling from publisher to publisher making any distinction between publishers even harder to ascertain. 
Shayla Black’s Wicked Ties is the most baffling of books, the kind that manages to be greater than the sum of its parts. It isn’t alone in that. There are plenty of books that should be tossed aside and disliked for whatever reason. And yet they aren’t. They can’t be, because somehow they rise above plot issues, or character issues or any number of craft foibles to be compelling and compulsively readable. Likeable…in spite of themselves. Wicked Ties does all that: gives the reader a plot that begs to have its Swiss cheese holes exposed; characters that are archetypes; and a general feeling that the only way to improve the situation is to throw the book against the nearest wall. Any yet throwing the book isn’t an option because valuable reading time would be lost. And for whatever else Wicked Ties is, it’s a book that, once started, demands to be read.
Even though I often find them implausible and rife with Big Misunderstandings, I am a sucker for marriage of convenience stories. Amazon knows this about me, and has a way of suggesting new titles that make them seem enticing. Time and again I fall for the sales pitch, the clever cover copy. It’s just one of my many character flaws.
Several years after its emergence, erotic romance continues to be one of the least clearly defined subgenres of romance. The strong sexual content of erotic romance is intended to be “hotter” than traditional romance yet not as sexually envelope-pushing as erotica. What lies between those two divergent points is an ocean of heat levels that can range from temperate to on-fire and there is little to indicate to readers how explicit erotic romance will be until they read a particular piece. Add to this the invariability of one reader’s kink being another’s reader’s vanilla and the parameters of erotic romance become rather nebulous: Know-it-when-you-read-it. Into these vague definitions comes Sasha White’s latest Aphrodisia release, Lush, cutting a clear and easily defined swath through the haze. The three novellas are sex driven fantasies made accessible and familiar by romantic undertones. White finds a middle ground that is slightly more daring than a “hot” romance yet never strays into make-readers-squirm territory. 
Pick up any literary journal and you’ll find short fiction, anywhere from ten to forty pages at the most, that defines settings, develops character, and showcases a journey that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Pick up any romance anthology (subgenre is unimportant), and you’ll most likely find fiction that is basically flawed, missing some vital portion of storytelling, such as an arc, or motivation, or a rise in drama. How is it possible that literary short fiction manages, in such a limited space, to hit the highest of points, and tell the best of stories, when romance novellas—stories told in five or six times the word count—have all the structure and soundness of a three-legged chair? How is it possible that romance novellas fail not only to be great, but largely fail to be passable as well?
Credibility is often treated as a plastic medium in genre fiction; something that can be twisted and molded to conform to larger-than-life or fantastic storylines. The byproduct of this is that the very things that should inspire belief in the reader are the very things that destroy a work’s hope of ever ringing with truth. Such is the case with Decadent, the second book from Shayla Black, a work built on the conceit that a virgin would seek out a man she hasn’t seen in five years to guide her into a world of ménage à trois so that she will be prepared for life with another man, the rock star she is in love with. The catch to this, naturally, is that said virgin wants a sexual education that will leave her virginity in tact. Plausible? Not in the least. But, there is no need for the reader to even try to grab on to threads of plausibility, what follows is a symphony of stupidity.