5 Ways IT STINGS SO SWEET is like DOWNTON ABBEYBy Stephanie Draven
I love that Cherry Mischievous reviews television series. What I don’t love is that there’s yet to be a review of the fabulous BBC drama Downton Abbey.
If you haven’t seen it yet, rush out and do so now. If you’re already a fan, then I think you’re going to love my new book, a series of three intertwined naughty novellas.
- Setting. This season of Downton Abbey is set in the 1920s. My new historical erotic romance, It Stings So Sweet, is also set in the 1920s and is just as soapy.
- Beautiful Fashions. Fess up, most of us watch Downton Abbey for the elegant clothes and period hairstyles. I had a great time researching beaded flapper dresses and closely tailored men’s suits for It Stings So Sweet.
- Upstairs Downstairs Romance. In Downton Abbey Lady Sibyl runs off and marries her father’s chauffeur, causing a great scandal. In It Stings So Sweet my heroine, Nora Richardson, gets pregnant by her father’s driver and the social stigma of it nearly destroys their marriage.
- Social Upheaval. The way of life enjoyed by the nobility in Downton Abbey is under assault from a changing world. In It Stings So Sweet, my heroine Sophie O’Brien is a social activist trying to organize a strike against her boss . . . who she happens to be sleeping with. There’s not a cause of social reform she doesn’t subscribe to and it’s very alarming to our hero, Robert Aster, the heir to a great deal of old money.
- Dashing Heroes. Downton Abbey is set in a time when “men were men” and they followed a code. In It Stings So Sweet, all my heroes have their own codes of honor--sometimes those codes even get in the way of happiness. Some of them have to learn that they can still be dashing heroes even if they tell society to go to hell.
About It Stings So Sweet:
They vibrated with incendiary Jazz. They teemed with sexual abandon. The Twenties were roaring and the women–young, open, rebellious, and willing–set the pace and pushed the limits with every man they met…Source: Info in the About It Stings So Sweet was from press kit from the publicity team.
In the aftermath of a wild, liquor-soaked party, three women from very different social classes are about to live out their forbidden desires.
Society girl, Nora Richardson’s passionate nature has always been a challenge to her ever-patient husband. Now he wants out of the marriage and she has just this one night to win him back. The catch? He wants to punish her for her bad behavior. Nora is offended by her husband’s increasingly depraved demands, but as the night unfolds, she discovers her own true nature and that the line between pain and pleasure is very thin indeed.
Meanwhile, Clara Cartwright, sultry siren of the silent screen, is introduced to a mysterious WWI Flying Ace. If Clara, darling of the scandal sheets, knows anything, it’s men. And she’s known plenty. But none of them push her boundaries like the aviator, who lures her into a ménage with a stranger in a darkened cinema then steals her jaded heart.
Working class girl Sophie O’Brien has more important things on her mind than pleasures of the flesh. But when her playboy boss, the wealthy heir to the Aster family fortune, confronts her with her diary of secret sex fantasies, she could die of shame. To her surprise, he doesn’t fire her; instead, he dares her to re-enact her boldest fantasies and Sophie is utterly seduced.
One party serves as a catalyst of sexual awakening. And in an age when anything goes, three women discover that anything is possible…
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Stephanie Draven is currently a denizen of Baltimore, that city of ravens and purple night skies. She lives there with her favorite nocturnal creatures–three scheming cats and a deliciously wicked husband. And when she is not busy with dark domestic rituals, she writes her books.Stephanie's Link(s):
Stephanie has always been a storyteller. In elementary school, she channeled Scheherazade, weaving a series of stories to charm children into sitting with her each day at the lunch table. When she was a little older, Stephanie scared all the girls at her sleepovers with ghost stories.
She should have known she was born to hold an audience in her thrall, but Stephanie resisted her writerly urges and graduated from college with a B.A. in Government. Then she went to Law School, where she learned how to convincingly tell the tallest tales of all!
A longtime lover of ancient lore, Stephanie enjoys re-imagining myths for the modern age. She doesn’t believe that true love is ever simple or without struggle so her work tends to explore the sacred within the profane, the light under the loss and the virtue hidden in vice. She counts it amongst her greatest pleasures when, from her books, her readers learn something new about the world or about themselves.
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You may have heard of his twin sons, the charioteers, Phobos and Deimos. Then there were the Amazons, all his famous butt-kicking daughters. But you may not have heard of Kyra, the nymph of the underworld, who is Ares’ most rebellious daughter, and the heroine of my debut novel, 
