Synopsis:
He seethes with raw power the first time I see him—pure menace and rippling muscles in shackles. He’s dangerous. He’s wild. He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
So I hide behind my prim glasses and my book like I always do, because I have secrets too. Then he shows up in the prison writing class I have to teach, and he blows me away with his honesty. He tells me secrets in his stories, and it’s getting harder to hide mine. I shiver when he gets too close, with only the cuffs and the bars and the guards holding him back. At night I can’t stop thinking about him in his cell.
But that’s the thing about an animal in a cage—you never know when he’ll bite. He might use you to escape. He might even pull you into a forest and hold a hand over your mouth so you can’t call for the cops. He might make you come so hard, you can’t think.
And you might crave him more than your next breath.
"Sexy, dark and thrilling. I loved every second of it!" – New York Times bestselling author Katie Reus
Prisoner by Annika
Martin & Skye Warren
Publication date: October 23rd 2014
Genres: New Adult, Romance
Purchase:
Will
be found here come release day: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=prisoner+sky+annika&rh=n%3A283155%2Ck%3Aprisoner+sky+annika
Excerpt:
Heavy bars close behind me with a clang. I feel
the sound in my bones. A series of mechanical clicks hint at an elaborate
security mechanism beneath the black iron plating. I knew this would happen—had
anticipated and dreaded it—but my breathing quickens with the knowledge that I
am well and truly trapped.
“Can I help you?”
I whirl to face the administrative window where
a heavyset woman in a security guard uniform stares at her screen.
“Hi,” I say, pasting on a smile. “My name is Abigail
Winslow, and I’m here to—”
“Two forms of identification.”
“Oh, well, I already filled out the paperwork at
the front desk. And showed them my IDs.”
“This isn’t the front desk, Ms. Winslow. This is
the east-wing desk, and I need to see two forms of identification.”
“Right.” I dig through my bag for my driver’s
license and passport.
She accepts them without looking up, then hands
me a clipboard with a stack of papers just like the ones I’d already filled
out.
I’ve been dreading this day for weeks, wishing
I’d been assigned any other project but this one. You’d think I was being sent
here for a crime. My professor—the one who’d forced me into this—warned me that
prisoners were not always receptive to outsiders. Apparently nobody here is.
I complete each form, arrange the pages neatly
on the clipboard, and bring them back up to the window. The guard accepts them
and gives back my IDs…still without looking at me.
My hands clench and unclench, clench and
unclench while the guard eyes my paperwork.
Seconds pass. Or are they minutes? The damp
chill of the place seeps in through my cardigan and leaves me shivering.
Leaning forward, I read the name tag of the
guard. “Ms. Breck. Do you know what the next steps are?”
“You can have a seat. I have work to do now, and
then I’ll escort you back.”
“Oh, okay.” I glance at the bars I just came
through, then the open hallway opposite. “Actually, if you just point me in the
direction of the library, I’m sure I can—”
Thunk. The woman’s hand hits the desk. I jump. Her dark eyes are
faintly accusing, and I wish we could go back to no eye contact. How did I
manage to make an enemy in two minutes?
“Ms. Winslow,” she says, her voice patronizing.
“You can call me Abby,” I whisper.
A slight smile. Not a nice one. “Ms. Winslow,
what do you think we do here?”
The question is clearly rhetorical. I press my
lips together to keep from making things worse.
“The Kingman Correctional Facility houses over
five thousand convicted criminals. My job is to keep it that way. Do we
understand each other?”
Heat floods my cheeks. The last thing I want to
do is make her job harder. “Right. Of course.” I shamble back, landing hard on
the metal folding chair. It wobbles a little before the rubber feet stop my
slide.
I understand the woman’s point. She has to keep
the prisoners in and everyone else out, and keep people like me safe.
I reach down and pull a book from my bag. I
never leave home without one, even when I go to classes or run errands. Even
when I was young and my mother used to take me on her rounds.
Especially then.
I would hide in the backseat with my nose in the
book, pretending I didn’t see the shady people who came to her window when we
stopped.
A little green light above the barred doors
flashes on and there’s an ominous buzz. Somebody’s coming through, and I doubt
it will be a library volunteer. I slide down.
Pretend to be invisible.
It’s no use. I peer over the top edge as a
prisoner saunters through the door, and my pulse slams in my throat double
time.
He’s flanked by two guards—escorted by them, I
guess you’d say. But they seem more like an entourage than anything. Power
vibrates around him like a threat.
Read, read, read. Don’t look.
The prisoner is half a foot taller than the
guards, but he seems to tower over them by more than that. Maybe it’s his broad
shoulders or just something about the way he stands, or his imperiously high
cheekbones. The dark stubble across his cheeks looks so rough and unforgiving I
can feel it against my palm; it contrasts wildly with the plushness of his
lips. His short brown hair is mussed. There’s one scar through his eyebrow that
somehow adds to his perfection.
The little group approaches the window. I can
barely breathe.
“ID number 85359,” one of the guards says, and I
understand that he’s referring to the prisoner. That’s who he is. Not John
Smith or William Brown or whatever his name is. He’s been reduced to a number.
The woman at the desk runs through a series of questions. It’s a procedure for
checking him out of solitary.
The prisoner faces sideways, spine straight, the
corner of his mouth tilted up as if he’s slightly amused. Then it clicks, what
else is so different about him: no visible tattoos. Tough guys like this,
they’re always inked up—it’s a kind of armor, a kind of fuck you. This
guy has none of it, though he’s far from pristine; white scars mar the rough
skin of his hands and especially his forearms, a latticework of pain and
violence, a flag proclaiming the kind of underworld he came from.
The feel of brutality that hangs about him is
compelling and…somehow beautiful.
I drink him in from behind my book—it’s my mask,
my protective shield. But then the strangest thing happens: he cocks his head.
It’s just a slight shift, but I feel his attention on me deep in my belly. I’ve
been discovered. Caught by searchlights. Exposed.
My heart beats frantically.
I want him to look away. He fills up too much
space. It’s as if he breathes enough oxygen for twelve men, leaving no air for
me at all. Maybe if we were in the library and he needed help finding a book or
looking something up, then I wouldn’t mind the weight of his gaze.
No. Not even there. He’s too much.
Two sets of bars on the gate. Handcuffs. Two
guards.
What do they think he would do if there were
only one set of bars, one guard?
My blood races as the guards draw him away from
the window and toward the inner door, toward where I sit. His heat pierces the
chill around me as he nears. His deep brown eyes never once meet mine, but I
have the sense of him looming over me as he passes, like a tree with a massive
canopy. He continues on, two hundred pounds of masculine danger wrapped in all
that beauty.
Even in chains, he seems vibrant, wild and free,
a force of nature—it makes me feel like I’m the one in prison. Safe. Small.
Carefully locked down.
How would it feel to be that free?
“Ms. Winslow. Ms. Winslow.”
I jump, surprised to hear that the woman has
been calling my name. “I’m sorry,” I say as a strange sensation tickles the
back of my neck.
The woman stands and begins pulling on her
jacket. “I’ll take you to the library now.”
“Oh, that’s great.”
That shivery sensation gets stronger. Against my
better judgment, I look down the hallway where the guards and the prisoner are
walking off as one—a column of orange flanked by two thinner, shorter posts.
The prisoner glances over his shoulder. His
mocking brown gaze searches me out, pins me with a subtle threat. Though it
isn’t his eyes that scare me. It’s his lips—those beautiful, generous lips
forming words that make my blood race.
Ms. Winslow.
No sound comes out, but I feel as though he’s
whispered my name right into my ear. Then he turns and strolls off.
Annika Martin Guest Post:
Four reasons why I will never stop sending my
characters to hotels.
I just had this crazy realization today:
almost all of my heroes and heroines in books by both my pen names have really
intense scenes in hotels or motels. (Except my urban fantasy, but hey, the hero
is trapped in a Mongolian Restaurant a lot of the time.)
Sometimes when I realize I’m doing
something a ton (like…er using the term “ragged breath”) I try to stop it. I
don’t want to be a repetitive writer. But I don’t want to stop setting scenes
in hotels and motels. I Love Them!!
Why are hotel/motel scenes awesome in
books?
Hotels
and motels rooms are blank slates.
Think about it—when you take a date to your
home, all your stuff is there: books, chairs, pets. That picture of Aunt
Mildred. The cookies you baked last week. A home is full of baggage, but a
hotel is blank, and in a way, the whole world is shut out. The mood can be
anything, and the focus is totally on the characters and how they are with each
other.
A
hotel room: characters confined with each other and a bed.
I love a hotel scene because it’s usually
just the hero, heroine kind of trapped together with a bed. It creates instant
tension and excitement. Even when one goes off to take a shower, the other
hears it (and is usually thinking about them naked in there—did you ever notice
that?)
A hotel room bed is almost like another
character that you can’t ignore. In a car, there’s never the issue of sex in
the air like there is in a hotel room. Because…hero, heroine, bed. (Unless
you’re reading my kinky bank robbers books, then it’s three heroes and the
heroine drinking champagne closed up in a luxury suite with a hot tub and a
bed, but…same idea.)
Hotels:
a time out where the characters have to face each other.
My characters are usually in danger or up
to something, but when they get to a hotel or motel, it’s downtime, and the
attention goes off everything in the world but each other. I think PRISONER has
the most intense motel scene; Skye and I really got into it—it’s where Grayson,
our dark and troubled escaped convict, takes Abby, his college girl hostage, to
this motel after a long, tense day of being on the run. It's the first time
they’ve been alone and not on the move. Grayson has these dark plans for Abby,
but there is this powerful psychological back and forth between them, and they
each give something up and get closer in a sort of twisted way.
Hotels
and motels: the edge of the forbidden.
Of course, hotels and especially motels
have a kind of seedy, dirty edge. There’s the fact that people go to them to
have sex a lot, but it’s not just about sex, but it is where people go to be
anonymous or escape something. Also, the sort of everyday demands of life
aren’t there—there are no dishes or bills or anything. Dirty no demands of usual life.
Its where people go to not be known, or to
be somebody else.
How about you? Do you like seeing
characters wind up in hotels? Or would you rather see them sent home?
Skye Warren Guest Post:
Why I Write Dark Romance
Thanks
so much for having me! I’m Skye Warren, New York Times bestselling author of
dark romance. I’m excited to share my new release, Prisoner, which is a book I
co-wrote with my friend and bestselling author Annika Martin.
I
think one of the joys of reading, thinking back even to childhood, was the
sense that anything could happen. Wardrobes opened to new lands and golden
tickets opened the gate to magical chocolate factories.
When
I got a little older (but probably not old enough) I started reading Anne Rice.
Ooo boy, let me tell you. The Witching Hour is as dark and as taboo as it gets.
There’s ménage and incest and all kinds of wild times. And these were books
sitting on a nice, bright shelf in the bookstore that my parents bought for
me—totally not knowing what was inside!
So
I really didn’t have a sense that there were boundaries in books. That was
something I learned later, as an adult.
And
it’s something I try to unlearn, in a way.
I
try to push my own boundaries with each new book. I try to stretch myself.
Because that’s a huge part of the fun of writing. And even though this is my
career, I want to have fun. Plus, it produces better books. The books I wrote
with my hands flying over the keyboard, the ones I questioned before I
published them if they were even acceptable for public viewing, are
consistently my bestsellers. My readers want me to push the envelope.
When
Annika and I first discussed co-writing we both knew it would be dark and sexy.
Well, that’s what we both already wrote, but we came up with a new style
working together. There’s something seriously sexy about prison… strong men,
powerful men, cunning men contained by something as primitive as metal bars.
Something sexy about defying the laws of society and getting caught, but
maintaining an air of danger.
Some
days, I don’t even see how this stuff is considered that dark—or dangerous.
After all, there are demons and werewolves in books and no one bats an eye. Is
it that strange to read about a person finding love? Even if that person does
happen to be a prison inmate… Real criminals find love (and hot sex) every day.
But then I remember that that’s what makes these stories scary. They hit close
to home. They make us squirm. And that’s why I love them.
AUTHOR
BIOS:
Annika
I’m
a NYT bestselling author living a stone’s throw away from the Mississippi
with my awesome husband and two cats in a home full of
plants, sunshine and books. I'm heavy into writing love stories about
criminals--some of them are dirty and fun (my Kinky bank robbers!) others
are dark and intense (Prisoner!)
I also write gritty romantic suspense as the RITA-award winning author Carolyn Crane.
I also write gritty romantic suspense as the RITA-award winning author Carolyn Crane.
Author links:
Skye
Skye
Warren is the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of dark
romantic fiction. Her books are raw, sexual and perversely tender.
For those new to her work, consider the bestseller Wanderlust
or Don't Let Go.
Author links:
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