Chapter Five Brody normally found these gatherings unremarkable and unpleasant—an aristocratic menagerie peddled and worn like loose change. Like most of these affairs, people paraded around masquerading in their pretense outwardly dim and stunted. Some even overtly flaunting it like an adjudication. This circle was an overwrought node; everyone infected. He learned long ago to view them as a novel or film he was required to review; its actual production process so entirely degraded that the eventual product stood empty […]

Categories: The Female of the Species • Tags: Romance, Serial Fiction, Serial Novella, She-Bear Thus Accosted, The Female of the Species

Chapter Four High ceilings and chandeliers baroque with light lackluster and forlorn; glitter and gowns and suits gaudy and grotesquely fitted around egos and bank accounts swollen and foul; the tinkling of glasses; a din of voices fixed and base; the droll of conversations overheard, none interesting or clever; money, old and white, loomed and festered; legacies lived in infamy; sadly, none virtuous. All swam about her like piranha. Except Lucretia. Lucretia was a shark, elegant and sleek devouring with […]

Categories: The Female of the Species • Tags: Romance, Serial Fiction, Serial Novella, She-Bear Thus Accosted, The Female of the Species

Chapter Three He realized early on he was giving away the game when he approached her as he did, but he needed to. She was…a diversion. And, an assignment. Wasn’t she? The case—assigned to him as an afterthought, forgotten in the mix of all things tempestuous—was another in a collection of oddities happening presently. It captivated and consumed him. All the evidence fragmentary and muddled purposely to obscure a larger mystery. He spent too many days, months…was it a year […]

Categories: The Female of the Species • Tags: Romance, Serial Fiction, Serial Novella, She-Bear Thus Accosted, The Female of the Species

Chapter Two “I know who you are. I know what you do.” Her eyes—hidden behind mirrored sunglasses—featured him prominently. He removed his hoping she would do the same. She did not. He wanted to see those eyes. An emotion tickled her lips taunting him. She sat there, saying nothing, staring at him. After a lengthy minute, she spoke. “Catherine the Great told her advisers that she needed energetic young men in the imperial bed for the good of her health […]

Categories: The Female of the Species • Tags: Romance, Serial Fiction, Serial Novella, She-Bear Thus Accosted, The Female of the Species

Chapter One She tasted him falling in love with her—felt it on her lips like blood. It was hot in the air—like coffee at a coffee shop, sea-salt on the wind, cotton candy at a carnival. She smelled his want and tasted his need in her bones. Through every nerve ending, shattered and uninterrupted, shards marched like soldiers towards her heart, like butterflies fluttering on the flurry of all those feelings—of a sense—of all senses. Layne could feel it in […]

Categories: The Female of the Species • Tags: Romance, Serial Fiction, Serial Novella, She-Bear Thus Accosted, The Female of the Species