My guest is erotic romance author, Olivia Cunning. She's here, today, to talk about bad boys and making them hero material. We all love them, or at least, we love to read about them. Olivia is also introducing her new series, One Night With Sole Regret.
As an author
(and a woman), I never really questioned the appeal of dating a bad boy.
Romance with a bad boy is never dull. It’s fun. Dramatic. Hard on the heart. At
first, the excitement fuels the romance—what
is he going to do today?—but usually that excitement wears off and you
realize he’s not a bad boy, he’s just a jerk. That’s a fine line to toe when
you’re writing a romance novel. Readers love the bad boy hero—it’s fun to
fantasize dating one—but no one likes a jerk.
So how do I take a man who has thoughts like this
Gabe caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and he turned his gaze on the sweet piece of ass beside him at the bar. Long, brown curls fell to the middle of her back, and her jeans clung to her curvy backside in a most distracting fashion. High-heeled sandals accentuated her long legs, which would look perfect wrapped around his hips. If the front of her looked half as spectacular as the back, he was definitely interested in hanging around a while longer. He wasn’t that exhausted.
and turn him into someone the heroine and the reader can fall in love with?
Easy.
Introduce him
to the right woman and turn his world upside down.
The ultimate
bad boy fantasy is not to turn him into a good boy, but for him to show his
hidden good side to one very special woman. He won’t change for her (that never
works), but he will find all that’s good in himself because of her. At least,
that’s my bad boy fantasy, so that’s what tends to happen in my rock star
erotic romances.
It’s even more
interesting when you start with a heroine who is not attracted to the bad boy
type and he has to win her over. In my most recent novella, Try Me,
that’s what happens when Melanie meets Gabe. She doesn’t realize that she’s
talking to the drummer of a famous rock band.
Melanie relaxed into the sofa cushions, glad she’d found a
normal person to talk to. She’d thought she’d have to spend the entire night
pretending to be invisible. “Melanie Anderson.
Yours?”
He laughed. “You really aren’t enamored with the band, are
you, Melanie?”
What did that have to do with telling her his name? “I like
their music, but they’re not my favorite band or anything. A bit too heavy for
my tastes. Nikki is the one obsessed with them. She dragged me here against my
will.”
“ I’m Gabriel Banner.” He grinned at her and suddenly
overwarm, she wondered if someone had switched off the AC. “Call me Gabe.”
A totally normal name for a totally normal guy. She would
have felt uncomfortable talking to any of the other men in the room—tattooed,
pierced, strange haircuts, chains and leather—but Gabe looked as normal as she
did. She smiled and offered her free hand in greeting. His hand slid into hers.
Though he clasped her hand with a gentle grip, she could feel the strength in
those long fingers. Her heart fluttered when his fingers brushed the back of
her hand. “Nice to meet you, Gabe. How did a normal-looking guy like you end up
backstage with all these, erm, interesting folks?”
He hesitated and then laughed as if he thought she was
joking. “They’re great, aren’t they? Are you from Tulsa?”
She shook her head. “Kansas. Nikki wanted to meet Shade so
badly that she made me drive here with her. She couldn’t get backstage last
night. I guess she got what she wanted tonight though. Where are you from?”
“Austin.”
She did
recognize a hint of a drawl in his speech, but she wouldn’t have pegged him as
a Texan—his jeans weren't tight enough to cut off the circulation to his balls.
She supposed the Rangers ball cap should have given her a clue. “Did you drive
all the way from Austin just to see Sole Regret?”
He laughed again and tugged on one earlobe. He was
certainly easy to amuse. And the deep, rich sound of his amusement had her
considering clown school to keep him laughing regularly.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” he said.
Gabe took the final draw of his beer, extended the empty
bottle, and gave it a little shake. Within twenty seconds it had been replaced
with a fresh brew.
Sipping her water, she wondered why the bartender was so
eager to do Gabe’s bidding.
“So, do you know the band?”
He smiled again and Melanie feared she’d melt. She was very
interested in putting a permanent smile on his handsome face.
“We’ve met…
When she does figure it out, that’s not what attracts her
to him. What attracts her is all of those parts of him that he hides from the
world because they don’t fit his bad boy image.
“Tell me something else that makes you less cool,” Melanie
said.
“Gee, Mel, do you have all night? Don’t you know that most
rock stars began life as outcasts who didn’t want to be weird but found a bunch
of kindred outcasts to make music with? A few of us somehow manage to make a
living off it. Most of us have to supplement our music habit by delivering
pizzas.”
"But being an outcast makes you normal."
He shook his head in confusion. “If you say so.”
“What were you like in high school?”
He groaned inwardly and considered making shit up. He’d
been a walking disaster. “Braces.”
“That explains your perfect smile.”
She thought his smile was perfect? Maybe all those painful
visits to the orthodontist had been worth it.
“What else?” she pressed.
“Tall and skinny.” Was she trying to talk herself out of
sleeping with him or what?
She lifted the hem of his shirt to flash his belly. “Not an
ounce of fat on those abs, but not skinny. Fit. And you are tall. I suppose
that’s a benefit for a drummer.”
“I was so not attractive, Mel, I didn’t touch my first boob
until I was twenty.”
“And how many boobs have you touched since?”
He grinned. “I don’t grope and tell.”
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TRY ME by Olivia Cunning
For
the five sexy rock gods of Sole Regret, finding love is easy, keeping it is
hard.
Melanie
has no desire to meet the members of the rock band, Sole Regret, but her
groupie of a best friend gets them both backstage and then rushes off with the
band’s lead singer. Left alone at an after party with a bunch of scary tattooed
and pierced metal-heads, sheltered Melanie is relieved when the only
normal-looking guy in the room insists on keeping her company.
By
the time Melanie discovers that Gabe is the band’s drummer and not as normal as
she assumed, she has already made a complete fool of herself. She can’t help
but be interested in him, not as a rock star, but as the sexiest man she’s ever
encountered. Strangely attracted to his hidden tattoos and body piercing, she
wonders what it would be like to spend a night with a bad boy.
Gabe
is more than willing to show sweet Melanie there’s more to him than meets the
eye. All she has to do is try him. Will they only share a single night of
passion? Or will their hearts entangle as quickly as their bodies?
Try Me is the
first erotic novella in Olivia Cunning’s One Night with Sole Regret series.
Contains
explicit sex, graphic language, and a hot rock star with a naughty and
inventive mind.
Available in ebook format only
Combining her love for romantic fiction and rock 'n roll, Olivia Cunning writes erotic romance centered around rock musicians. She also writes romantic fantasy under the pen name Olivia Downing.
Raised on hard rock music
from the cradle, she attended her first Styx concert at age six and fell
instantly in love with live music. She's been known to travel over a thousand
miles just to see a favorite band in concert. As a teen, she discovered her
second love, romantic fiction—first, voraciously reading steamy romance novels
and then penning her own. For more information visit http://www.oliviacunning.com.
