Product Description

This is what happened . . .

I met him at the candy store. He turned around and smiled at me and I was surprised enough to smile back. This was not a children's candy store, mind you -- this was the kind of place you went to buy expensive imported chocolate truffles for your boss's wife because you felt guilty for having sex with him when you were both at a conference in Milwaukee. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

I've been hit on plenty of times, mostly by men with little finesse who thought what was between their legs made up for what they lacked between their ears. Sometimes I went home with them anyway, just because it felt good to want and be wanted, even if it was mostly fake.

The problem with wanting is that it's like pouring water into a vase full of stones. It fills you up before you know it, leaving no room for anything else. I don't apologize for who I am or what I've done in -- or out -- of bed. I have my job, my house and my life, and for a long time I haven't wanted anything else.

Until Dan. Until now.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65694 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780373605132
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Definitely a five-star read . . ." -- Romance at Heart on An Exaltation of Larks

"Ms. Hart is a master of all genres. Her stories grip you from the onset." -- Romance Junkies

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This is what happened.

I met him at the candy store. He turned around and smiled at me. I was surprised enough to smile back.

This was not a children's candy store. This was Sweet Heaven, an upscale, gourmet candy store. No cheap lolli-pops or chalky chocolate kisses, but the kind of place you went to buy expensive, imported truffles for your boss's wife because you felt guilty for fucking him when you were both at a conference in Milwaukee.

He was buying jellybeans, black only. He looked at the bag in my hand, candy-coated chocolate. Also in one color.

"You know what they say about the green ones." The rakish tilt of his lips tried to charm me, and I resisted.

"St. Patrick's Day?" Which was why I was buying them. He shook his head. "No. The green ones make you horny."

I'd been hit on plenty of times, mostly by men with little finesse who thought what was between their legs made up for what they lacked between their ears. Sometimes I went home with one of them anyway, just because it felt good to want and be wanted, even if it was mostly fake and they usually disappointed.

"That's an urban legend made up by adolescent boys with wish-fulfillment issues."

His lips tilted further. His smile was his best asset, brilliant and shining in a face made up of otherwise regular features. He had hair the color of wet sand and cloudy blue-green eyes; both attractive, but when paired with the smile...breathtaking.

"Very good answer," he said.

He held out his hand. When I took it, he pulled me closer, step by hesitant step, until he could lean close and whisper in my ear. His hot breath gusted along my skin, and I shivered. "Do you like licorice?"

I did, and I do, and he tugged me around the corner to reach inside a bin filled with small black rectangles. It had a label with a picture of a kangaroo on the front.

"Try this." He lifted a piece to my lips and I opened for him although the sign clearly said No Samples. "It's from Australia."

The licorice smoothed on my tongue. Soft, fragrant, sticky in a way that made me run my tongue along my teeth. I tasted his fingers from where they'd brushed my lips. He smiled.

"I know a little place," he said, and I let him take me there.

The Slaughtered Lamb. A gruesome name for a nice little faux-British pub tucked down an alley in the center of downtown Harrisburg. Compared to the trendy dance clubs and upscale restaurants that had revitalized the area, the Lamb seemed out of place and all the more delightful for it.

He sat us at the bar, away from the college students singing karaoke in the corner. The stools wobbled, and I had to hold tight to the bar. I ordered a margarita.

"No." The shake of his head had me raising a brow. "You want whiskey."

"I've never had whiskey."

"A virgin." On another man the comment would have come off smarmy, earned a roll of the eyes and an automatic addition to the "not with James Dean's prick" file.

On him, it worked. "A virgin," I agreed, the word tasting unfamiliar on my tongue as though I hadn't used it in a very long time.

He ordered us both shots of Jameson Irish Whiskey, and he drank his back as one should do with shots, in one gulp. I am no stranger to drinking, even if I'd never had whiskey, and I matched him without a grimace. There's a reason it's also known as firewater, but after the initial burn the taste of it spread across my tongue and reminded me of the smell of burning leaves. Cozy. Warm. A little romantic, even.

His gaze brightened. "I like the way you put that down the back of your throat."

I was instantly, immediately, insanely aroused. "Another?" said the 'tender. "Another," my companion agreed. To me he said, "Very good."

The compliment pleased me, and I wasn't sure why impressing him had become so important.

We drank there for a while, and the whiskey hit me harder than I thought it would. Or perhaps the company made me giddy enough to giggle at his subtle but charming observations about the people around us.

The woman in the business suit in the corner was an off-duty call girl. The man in the leather jacket, a mortician. My companion wove stories about everyone around us including our good-natured bartender, whom he said had the look of a retired gumdrop farmer.

"Gumdrops don't come from farms." I leaned forward to touch his tie, which featured a pattern that upon first glance appeared to be the normal sort of dots and crosses many men wore. I, however, had noticed the dots and crosses were tiny skulls and crossbones.

"No?" He seemed disappointed I wouldn't play along.

"No." I tugged his tie and looked up into the blue-green eyes that had begun vying with his smile for best feature.

"They're harvested in the wild."

He guffawed, tilting his head back with the force of it. I envied him the free and easy way he gave in to the impulse to laugh. I'd have been afraid people would stare.

"And you," he said at last. His gaze pinned me, held me in place. "What are you?"

"Gumdrop poacher," I whispered through whiskey-numb lips.

He reached to twirl a strand of hair that had fallen free from my long French braid. "You don't look that dangerous, to me."

We looked at each other, two strangers, and shared a smile, and I thought how long it had been since I'd done that. "Want to walk me home?"

He did.

He didn't attempt to make love to me that night, which didn't surprise me. He didn't try to fuck me, either, which did. He didn't even kiss me, though I hesitated before putting my keys in the door and smiled and chatted with him before saying good-night.

He hadn't asked for my name. Not even my number. Just left me buzzing from whiskey on my doorstep. I watched him walk down the street, jingling the change in his pocket. He faded into the darkness between the streetlamps, and then I went inside.

I thought about him the next morning in the shower while I washed the scent of smoke from my hair. I thought about him while I shaved my legs, my pits, the curling dark hair between my legs. When I brushed my teeth I caught sight of my face in the mirror and tried to imagine seeing my eyes as he had.

Blue with flecks of white and gold visible upon closer observation. A feature many men praised, perhaps because telling a woman she has pretty eyes is a safe way of judging whether they can next move on to putting a hand on her thigh. He hadn't mentioned them. He hadn't, actually, complimented me on anything other than the way I'd drunk the whiskey.

I thought about him as I dressed for work. Plain white panties, comfortable in cut and fabric. Matching bra, a hint of lace, enough to make it pretty but designed to support my breasts rather than flaunt them. A black skirt cut just above the knee. A white blouse with buttons. Black and white, as always, to make the choices easier and because something about the pure simplicity of black and white soothes me.

I thought about him on the ride to work, my headphones tucked inside my ears to discourage random conversation from strangers. The shield of modern times. The ride was no longer than it ever had been, nor shorter, and I counted the stops the way I always did and gave the bus driver the same smile.

"Have a good day, Miss Kavanagh."

"Thanks, Bill."

I thought of him, too, as I climbed the cement steps to my office and pushed through the doors precisely five minutes before I was due in my office.

"You're late today," said Harvey Willard, the security guard. "An entire minute."

"Blame the bus," I told him with a grin I knew would make him blush, though the blame was not upon the bus but upon my distracted gait that had made me slow.

Up the elevator, down the hall, through my door, to my desk. Not one thing was different, but everything had changed. Not even the columns of numbers in front of me could wrest my mind from the puzzle he'd presented.

I didn't know his name. Hadn't given him mine. I'd thought it would be easy, two strangers looking to fill a mutual need. A standard seduction. One that didn't need names to complicate it.

I didn't like men knowing my name, anyway. It gave them a sense of power over me they didn't deserve, as if by gasping out my name when they jerked and spasmed they could cement the moment in place and time. If I had to give a name, I gave them a false one, and when they shouted it out in come-hoarse voices it never failed to make me smile.

I wasn't smiling today. I was distracted, disgruntled, discombobulated...I'd have been disenchanted if I'd ever been enchanted to begin with.

I worked the problem in my mind like I'd figure a calculation. Separate the equations, decipher the individual components, add the pieces that made sense and divide them by the parts that didn't. By lunchtime I still hadn't been able to relegate him to a memory.

"Hot date last night?" Marcy Peters, she of the big hair and tiny skirts, asked. Marcy is the sort of woman who will always refer to herself as a girl, who wears white pumps with too-tight jeans, whose blouses always show a little too much cleavage.

She poured herself another cup of coffee. I had tea. We sat at the small lunchroom table and peeled open sandwiches delivered from the deli, hers tuna and mine, as usual, turkey on wheat.

"As always" came my reply, and we laughed, two women bound in friendship not from qualities in common or mutual interests but because our alliance forms the cage that protects us from the sharks with whom we work.

Marcy fends off the sharks with a blunt and unassuming, forthright presentation of her femininity. Of herself as woman all-powerful, all-intriguing, all-encompassing. She is blond and buxom and not above using her attributes to get what she wants.

I prefer a more discreet approach.

Marcy laughed at my response because the Elle Kavanagh she knows does not go on dates, hot or otherwise. The Elle Kavanagh of her acquaintance, junior vice president of corpo...

Customer Reviews

Erotica with a plot - what a concept
Accountant Elle prefers to engage in anonymous sex and one night stands. It's been over three years since she has slept with a man, and finds herself intrigued with lawyer Dan Stewart, whom she met at a candy store and thought would accompany her home, but merely received a chaste kiss. But when they meet again, she doesn't leave anything to chance. She gets more than he bargained for with Dan, as he agrees to her no dating policy (they have "appointments" instead) and claims that he won't get serious. But soon the relationship is appearing to be pretty exclusive.

But Elle is scarred from a childhood rife with guilt, pain and grief, and a family that doesn't know how to connect anymore. With a mother who could apparently not love more than one child, and an openly gay brother who is shunned from the family, it is no wonder Elle harbors resentment at her mother's constant requests to meet. Can a woman so damaged open her very closed off heart to a man who appears to have staying power?

Hart has done an incredible job of crafting an erotic story with an actual storyline, rather than lots of "wham, bam, thank you man" sex. There is plenty of sex, including a threesome, and most of it graphically realistic (no flowery euphemisms here). A recommended read for those looking for something sensual yet deeper.

Well written novel with a dark edge ...
I know that Hart's second book is titled Broken. To be honest, it would be an equally apropos title for this one as Elle, the protag, was just that- a broken woman.

Written in first person, Dirty follows a short section of Elle's life starting with an encounter with a man she met at an upscale chocolate store. She's instantly attracted to Dan and, though she's just met him, she agrees to go with him to a local bar.

Elle has no qualms about one night stands- she's had plenty. The sexual tension with Dan leads her to allow him to follow her home. But he leaves her at the door with a brief kiss and no promises for more. Of course she can't get him off her mind and when she chances upon him again, they pick up where they left off. But this time he leaves her with a bit more- a very public, but well hidden, sexual encounter ... and a business card.

Elle wants to keep her distance emotionally, after all- sex is just sex in the end. But Dan won't have it. He's no steam rolling Alpha and though he comes off as dominant in the bedroom- it's only because he knows she wants it. Still, he gently leads her down the path of getting exactly what he wants and, in the meantime, leads her to wellness.

Dirty is not a light read. It has depth to it and it retains a very erotic edge. (Imagine that!)

Elle is seriously screwed up from a gravely dysfunctional childhood and some of her choices really bugged me. I honestly didn't like her ... in the beginning. Oh, I knew early on she had some issues and why she had them, though it wasn't truly revealed until the end, and normally I can empathize. But for some reason she really got under my skin. I think it's because Hart did such a good job of making her seem- cold. Broken people who hate what they do to numb the pain and can't seem to stop, melt my heart. Broken people who show no sign of wanting to change make me want to scream in frustration.

However, later in the story I found an edge of compassion for her because she found hers.

This book won't be for everyone. And honestly, if I was in the mood for a darker read I might have liked it more.

Still, I'm giving it a 4.5 because it truly is a well written novel.

Indulge yourself by getting a little bit DIRTY!
Elle Kavanagh lives a successful, primarily solitary life in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She's cordial enough with her neighbors and co-workers but has very few real bonds of friendship with any of them. Even her sexual relationships are just encounters here and there with very few of the men who know her real name. Elle isn't ashamed of who she is or what she's done in or out of bed. She's been perfectly content with life as it is - until now. No one could have guessed that she'd meet a man in a candy store who would change her life.

From the moment Dan Stewart meets Elle he knows there's something special about her. He's got nothing against getting down and DIRTY but he isn't interested in a one night stand either. Dan understands that Elle is uncomfortable with dating. Rather than push to put a label on their relationship he agrees not to date . . . instead they'll do whatever Elle wants. Surely she'll see how good they are together and want more than a sexual relationship with him.

Megan Hart exceeded my expectations when I picked up DIRTY, her newest release. I knew there would be smoldering sex scenes, after all this is an erotic novel, but I didn't expect to become emotionally involved with the characters' lives and want to befriend each of them. Ms. Hart treats us to Elle's personal journey as she struggles with the events of her past and how they've affected her beliefs and attitude in her adult life. I loved Dan's easygoing attitude and the way he's able to accept all of Elle's quirks while making her comfortable just being herself. While the central focus of this book is on Dan and Elle there are a couple of awesome subplots which kept me on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what would happen next. Wonderfully written Ms. Hart.

Chrissy Dionne (courtesy of Romance Junkies)