La Petite Mortification

She has spent her whole life flirting with things that should have killed her.

Some women are born lucky.

She was born difficult to kill.

From the first time death brushed past her and inexplicably kept moving, something has lingered at the edges of her life. A presence. A shadow. A man she remembers in fragments but could never prove was there.

And always, somehow, the same message:

Not yet.

Years later, she has built a life in New Orleans from everything polite society prefers not to examine too closely. Desire. Violence. Power. Men willing to pay for the privilege of surrendering all three.

She knows what people want in the dark.

She also knows how easily wanting can become dying.

Then he finds her.

Or perhaps he finally allows himself to be found.

He is beautiful in the way dangerous things often are. Impossible to place. Impossible to resist. He seems to know every secret she's buried, every narrow escape she's survived, every wicked little thing her body wants before she admits wanting it.

Most troubling of all, she has the impossible feeling that she has known him all her life.

Their attraction becomes an obsession. Their encounters blur pleasure with fear, surrender with possession, ecstasy with something far more ancient and hungry.

She should run.

Instead, for the first time in her life, she wants to know what happens if she doesn't.

Because some lovers make you feel alive.

Others make you wonder why you still are.

La Petite Mortification is a dark erotic Southern Gothic about obsession, mortality, violence, and the dangerous intimacy of finally meeting something that knows exactly what you are.

Some things have been waiting for you longer than you have been alive.