the ask@AAR: What makes an erotic love story work?
Every few years, I reread Anne Calhoun’s Uncommon Passion. I read it for the hero’s powerful redemptive arc, for the way Calhoun shows us her characters’ interior lives–she is a master of the show don’t tell–and for the hard fought and wonderfully believable HEA Ben and Rachel create for themselves. I also read it for the sex. It is the erotic romance I find the most erotic–every sex scene is beyond hot and described in way that makes my senses sizzle.
Take this scene–it’s from the second time the two have sex. And it’s worth noting that all they’re doing is having sex–this is not, yet, for them, about intimacy or emotion. It’s just about pleasure.